The budget mess that has led to plans for a special legislative session has further emboldened Republicans to seek fiscally conservative solutions to what they see as failed policies of the Democratic monopoly. Larry Hogan has 12,000 people in his Change Maryland group; Marty Madden has an exploratory committee for governor and would seek public financing; and David Craig seems the best organized. [...more]
AARP and MarylandReporter.com sponsored a 6th District debate for all congressional candidates on Sunday. Duane Keenan was there and produced a podcast featuring the Republican candidates. [...more]
Gov. Martin O’Malley’s state redistricting map will become law on Friday without a single hearing, and Marylanders have been denied a say, the state Republican Party and Fannie Lou Hamer, an African-American political action group, charged on Wednesday. [...more]
The Governor’s Redistricting Advisory Committee announced the dates, times and places for the first three of 12 public hearings around the state to hear from Maryland residents about the drawing of congressional and legislative district lines. [...more]
Mitch Daniels did not come to Baltimore on Tuesday to announce he was running for president, but the governor of Indiana also did not come to the Pikesville Hilton to say he wasn’t running for president. “I’m not a candidate for anything yet,” Daniels told a small audience as he accepted the Governor Reagan Award from the Harbour League, a four-year-old Baltimore-based organization of free-market conservatives, which some in the audience of about 60 had never heard of before the event. [...more]
Advocates for increased school funding and a key legislator overseeing education spending clashed at a long hearing on the bill that will reduce many formulas for state aid. The governor’s plan is “a sustained rollback” of education funding, said Robert Rankin, a lobbyist for the Maryland State Education Association. [...more]
Republican delegates Tuesday will be offering their annual dose of “tough medicine” in the form of perhaps $1 billion in budget cuts, but it is unlikely that Democrats are any more willing to swallow the bitter pills than they were in past years. Trotting out charts showing the steady uphill climb of state spending, House Minority Leader Tony O’Donnell said, “it’s always going up… it’s always growing … it never stops, it never gets cut.” [...more]
In an election where the Republican Party hopes to claim enough seats in the Maryland Senate to sustain a filibuster and force negotiations on bills requiring a two-thirds majority, not losing traditionally held seats is as important as gaining them. That makes the District 38 race on the lower Eastern Shore between Republican hotel executive Michael James and Democratic Del. Jim Mathias such a critical one to both parties. [...more]
Brian Murphy can’t win, can he? The conventional wisdom is that there is no way the underfunded, underdog, never-been-elected-to-anything Republican candidate for governor can whip ex-Gov. Bob Ehrlich in the GOP primary. And if by some miracle he did, the common wisdom predicts the genial Murph would get creamed by Democrat Martin O’Malley. [...more]
In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate have been exchanging letters – even though they see each other every day. The letters testify to the enduring nature of their mutual disaffection. [...more]
