Politics

The U.S. House took a broadly bipartisan vote Tuesday to fund the government into the new year, though the measure must pass the Senate by the end of the week if Congress is going to avoid a partial government shutdown. The 336-95 House vote was the first major legislative test for Speaker Mike Johnson, the Louisiana Republican who took on the role after the former speaker was ousted after passing a similar bipartisan short-term funding bill in late September.

At a long-anticipated hearing Tuesday evening, representatives from Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration urged members of the Baltimore City Council to pump the brakes on a package of bills designed to increase the city’s supply of affordable housing units. The administration, wary of the two bills’ possible cost to the city and the ways they could detract from other ongoing housing initiatives already underway, asked for more time to study the proposals and find middle ground.

Senate and House Republicans vowed Tuesday to redress what House Minority Leader Jason Buckel, R-Allegany, called Maryland’s “soft on crime policies” with a 2024 public safety agenda that would intensify punishment for adults accused of gun-related and violent crimes and reverse reforms to the youth legal system passed by the General Assembly in 2022. “The crime we’re seeing in our communities is not anecdotal, nor media manufactured,” said Senate Minority Leader Stephen Hershey, R-Kent, Queen Anne’s, Cecil and Caroline.

Members of a U.S. House committee on Tuesday grilled the head of the General Services Administration over the agency’s recent decision to place the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s new headquarters in Maryland instead of Virginia. “The process — or lack thereof — raises many questions that need to be answered,” the chair of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, James Comer of Kentucky, said in his opening remarks.

Flanked by members of President Joe Biden’s administration, Gov. Wes Moore on Monday announced Baltimore’s commitment to its designation as one of the nation’s five Workforce Hubs through investments in career and technical education and training for local workers. An initiative of the Biden administration, Workforce Hubs are cities focused on providing people who have historically had less economic opportunity, like women and people of color, with training and services to help them access well-paying union jobs.

As soon as U.S. Rep. John Sarbanes announced in late October that he won’t seek reelection, cellphones in the political world lit up with texts and calls: Who might run for his seat? Sarbanes is a Democrat serving his ninth term representing the state’s 3rd Congressional District. In its current form, it encompasses all of Howard County, a small bit of Carroll County and a large swath of northern and central Anne Arundel County.

Despite a state transportation trust fund that is currently stretched thin, Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson late last week was upbeat on prospects that the 2024 session of the state’s General Assembly would provide additional aid to help head off possibly sharp cuts in services by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA).

Over the last five months, Baltimore has held mayoral events and press conferences without a deaf interpreter, upsetting organizations representing the deaf and hard of hearing who say Mayor Brandon Scott is violating of provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The critics say the Scott administration’s use of interpreters has stopped completely, in recent weeks.