A little bit of everything
More than two-thirds of Maryland voters support redrawing legislative district lines using an independent commission, rather than by elected officials, according to a new poll.
Read moreBY BARRY RASCOVAR The mountain natives are restless in Maryland. They want to have it their way, though they represent just 10 percent of the state’s population. Indeed, were the five western counties to secede from Maryland, there would be no chance for that movement to succeed.
Read moreLots of people in Maryland, particularly Republicans and minorities, didn’t like Maryland’s congressional redistricting in 2012 that helped eliminate one of the last two GOP seats and did not create another potential minority district.
But during a talk Friday night, one of the major participants in the process, House of Delegates Speaker Michael Busch admitted, “I did not like the redistricting.”
Read moreTuesday was the first day candidates could file for the 2014 election, and 11 candidates took the plunge, including four Montgomery County legislators filing for reelection. Del. Shirley Nathan-Pulliam, a 20-year veteran Democrat currently representing Baltimore County District 10, filed to run for state Senate in the redrawn District 44 currently represented by Sen. Verna Jones-Rodwell.
Read moreSen. Paul Pinsky would like to see more liberals and progressives in Congress, but he’d also like to have congressional district lines drawn fairly and in a bipartisan way. He’s proposing a new bipartisan commission to draw the lines — if a matching Republican-controlled state will do the same thing.
Read moreIn a Maryland Court of Appeals hearing Wednesday, opponents of Maryland’s newly redrawn state legislative map claimed that the state is violating a provision of the state constitution by crossing county boundaries for unnecessary, partisan purposes when creating senatorial districts Sidebar: Voters retain three judges on the court.
Read moreIn a state already dominated by Democrats, Maryland voters further consolidated the party’s power Tuesday.
The voters defeated the longest serving Republican congressman, clobbered congressional challengers to six Democratic incumbents, and approved all the ballot measures the great majority of Republican legislators had opposed, including same-sex marriage and expanded gambling.
Read moreMaryland Democrats, particularly Democratic women, clobbered Republicans in early voting turnout. It’s hard to say what impact this huge Democratic turnout might have for the final results, since no Democratic incumbents in Maryland are considered vulnerable.
Read moreWhen Del. Neil Parrott was gathering petition signatures to put congressional redistricting on the ballot so voters could overturn it, he found that all he needed to do was show people the map itself and they were ready to sign on.
That’s the same appalled reaction I found last week when I made a presentation on Question 5 to students and staff at the University of Maryland Baltimore. All they had to do was look at the map, particularly the lines for the 3rd Congressional District, to realize there was something very wrong.
Read moreMontgomery County “good government” Democrats are organizing their opposition against the “atrocious gerrymandering” in the congressional redistricting that is on the ballot for voter approval as Question 5.
Read more