Commentary

For perhaps the first time, activists who have spent years advocating for special elections to fill General Assembly seats are getting a serious hearing. For the first time, the legislature is considering a bill that would have aligned Maryland with the 50% of states that use special elections to fill most or all open seats in state legislatures.

Growing up on the Eastern Shore, my middle school classmates and I went to the chicken plant in Salisbury. It’s still there on Route 50, at the Wicomico River. Flatbed trailers were stacked high with crates pulled into the loading docks, the birds inside stunned into stillness by their open-air ride from some long, low chicken house where they’d spent their whole 59-day lives.

As a survivor of substance use disorder, I’ve seen firsthand the devastating consequences of drug use — lives lost, families destroyed, and communities devastated. However, after taking a hard look at the data, it is clear that the harms traditionally associated with drug use (e.g., overdose, crime, poverty) are caused and/or exacerbated by long standing drug prohibition policies.

House Bill 516, the Climate Crisis and Environmental Justice Act (CCEJ), introduced by Del. Diana Fennell (D-Prince George’s), provides funding to reach Maryland’s climate targets. The CCEJ fulfills the Moore administration’s pollution reduction plan recommendation for a funding mechanism to help provide $1 billion annually to achieve the state’s climate pollution reduction goals and invest in our state’s communities and local economy.

Recent media coverage of juvenile crime issues in Maryland should have us all worried. We lived through the “super-predator” era of the 1990s, when America’s young people were vilified as “godless, fatherless, and without conscience” and in need of being “brought to heel.” We have run two juvenile justice agencies between us and have worked a combined 65 years in the field of youth justice.

For decades, Prince George’s County taxpayers have prioritized children by setting aside revenues to supplement state and county contributions to Prince George’s County Public Schools, including overwhelming support for a casino revenue lockbox for education. Now, two last-minute bills — HB 396 and HB 398 — would ignore the will of Prince Georgians and redirect other revenue currently locked for education, putting more than $60 million in critical funding for PGCPS at risk. Instead of unlocking our students’ potential, politicians want to unlock the funding they need to succeed.

One measure currently before the Maryland General would close a gap in the state’s criminal record expungement eligibility. The bill, HB0073, would change the definition of terms in the Maryland code, clarifying that the timeline for expunging an eligible state criminal record begins at the completion of the sentence — meaning the “time when a sentence has expired, including any period of probation, parole or mandatory supervision.”

Marylanders’ progressive political instincts often make the Land of Pleasant Living not just more pleasant but more equitable and prosperous. Sometimes, however, progressives embrace policies that are destined to do the opposite. So it is with the “Fair Share for Maryland Act of 2024.” Senate Bill 766 proposes to do a couple of laudable things but would, in fact, do several others that would damage Maryland’s economy and quality of life. As Comptroller Brooke Lierman has recently pointed out, there are “flashing yellow lights for the state’s fiscal health”; we shouldn’t turn them to red.

Since 1936, legislative vacancies in Maryland have been filled by a Byzantine appointment process where the state central committee of the vacating senator’s or delegate’s party submits a name to the governor for an appointment to fill the vacancy. When vacancies occur early in a term, the appointee is able to serve for up to four years without voters having a say in who represents them. From 1776 to 1936, vacancies in the House of Delegates were filled by special elections, and from 1837, when state senators were first popularly elected, to 1936, vacancies in the state Senate also were filled by special elections.