Commentary

You can bet Democrats in the General Assembly are feeling pretty good about themselves today. Thanks to a few sentences in legislation they championed this past session, Gov. Larry Hogan’s effort to end enhanced federal unemployment benefits paid to out-of-work Marylanders got stopped in its tracks by two lawsuits. Baltimore City Circuit Judge Lawrence Fletcher-Hill’s ruling delivered Tuesday morning proved to be the coup de grâce. Siding with the plaintiffs, he issued a preliminary injunction that prevents Maryland’s labor secretary from taking action to deny expanded benefits to state residents.

As sure as night follows day, national pundits are reading way too much into a single primary result and are prematurely extrapolating trends that may or may not be developing in Democratic politics. And they are giving oxygen to weak-kneed party establishment folks, nationally and in Maryland, who are already convinced that Democrats are too far out in left field on a host of issues, especially police reform, and warn of dire political consequences in 2022.

Serving in the Civil Air Patrol’s National Capitol Wing, which encompasses the Washington, D.C. area, is a Courtney family affair. Dean Courtney II, a sophomore at Chesapeake Math and IT (CMIT) Academy South, joined the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) when he was 12 years old and is currently serving as the cadet deputy commander at the Tuskegee Composite Squadron in the National Capitol Wing. His father, Dean Courtney, is a resource manager for the 780th Military Intelligence Brigade (Cyber) at Fort Meade and is the squadron’s character development instructor.

Sixty years ago, urban renewal came to Harlem Park, and the West Baltimore neighborhood has never been the same. In the cause of “slum clearance,” the city demolished dozens of houses with no plan to replace them or relocate their residents. Officials carved away half of gorgeous Harlem Square Park for a school and athletic fields, removed streetcar lines that connected the neighborhood’s residents to jobs and downtown shopping, and demolished 12 blocks of houses and businesses to make way for a doomed interstate connector that became known as the Highway to Nowhere.

Just hours before the Baltimore County Council was set to go into session Tuesday, the county executive’s office sent out a news release indicating that it was postponing the introduction of proposed legislation that would have severely limited the authority and independence of the county’s recently created Office of the Inspector General. The reason for the delay, as reported by The Baltimore Sun, was that “details of the draft prompted backlash from groups that said it would hamstring the county’s corruption watchdog.”

The field of contenders seeking to become Maryland’s 63rd governor so far includes a dozen men and at least one woman who vary in age, race and life experience with some having served in elected office and some not. But there’s one thing that most of the Democrats and Republicans in the field have in common: The vast majority aren’t from the Baltimore region.

The new guidelines for school reopenings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are much better than expected. They balance the need for getting students back to full-time, in-person instruction with the reality that covid-19 remains a danger for unvaccinated children. In recent weeks, I’ve been concerned that the CDC had thrown caution to the wind with decisions that resulted in the precipitous removal of mask mandates.