Politics

Baltimore County voters will not get a chance to decide whether to expand the County Council by four members. Linda Dorsey-Walker, the chair of the Grassroots organization Vote4More!, said they did not get enough valid signatures on petitions to get the question on the November ballot. It ends a more than two year effort that Dorsey-Walker said excited people countywide.

The abrupt termination of Baltimore Health Commissioner Ihuoma Emenuga, the city’s top health official amid a “pending investigation” into possible wage theft raised concerns about turnover in the office from some members of the Baltimore City Council, who said Tuesday that the separation comes at a critical time. Emenuga, who held the position for fewer than eight months, departed on Monday, according to a memo sent to the City Council by City Administrator Faith Leach and a subsequent news release from Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration.

The head of the U.S. Senate Republican campaign committee on Tuesday called former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan a “maverick” who has managed to distance himself from both political parties in his campaign for an open Senate seat in a Democratic-dominated state. “Larry, he’s a maverick — a self-described maverick,” Steve Daines, a Montana senator who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said Tuesday.

With the Democratic establishment — in Maryland and across the country — quickly coalescing around Vice President Kamala Harris to replace President Biden at the top of the White House ticket, it’s easy to forget that her first foray into presidential politics, in 2019, wasn’t nearly as triumphal. But she had a hardy band of supporters in Maryland then who are reveling in the moment now.

Mayor Brandon Scott fired Baltimore’s health commissioner Monday, seven months into her tenure, his office announced in a brief evening statement offering no additional information about the circumstances. Dr. Ihuoma Emenuga was sworn in as the commissioner for the Baltimore City Health Department in March and was serving in an interim capacity since Scott nominated her for the role in December.

The group seeking to block a nearly $1 billion plan to redevelop Harborplace and Baltimore’s waterfront failed to meet a Monday deadline to qualify their initiative for November’s ballot. Led by attorney and four-time candidate for citywide office Thiru Vignarajah, the petition drive got a late start in June and fell short of the 10,000 signatures it needed to qualify for the November ballot, according to Abigail Goldman, deputy director for the Baltimore City Board of Elections.

Like many D.C. dwellers, Jasmine Clemons never saw the need to venture north to visit the nation’s Capital Beltway neighbor, Baltimore. “The closest I ever got was going to BWI airport,” the 40-year-old said, laughing. A burgeoning senator named Kamala Harris changed all of that. Clemons dropped her life in the nation’s capital for a downtown apartment in Charm City filled with long workdays sprinkled in with visits to local haunts recommended by native-Baltimore staffers during her time working for the campaign.