While awaiting jury duty a few years ago, I was in the Well Being Cafe inside the county’s Executive Office Building. Perusing the news on my tablet, I overheard a conversation between a few people who apparently were high-ranking county or state Democrats. One of them concluded the conversation, “Great! We’ll have A run for Office B, and we’ll have C run for Office D.”
I’ve long forgotten the actual names and offices, but the impression is still fresh: I was listening in on a smoke-filled, back-room, power-brokering, deal-making group of people manipulating an already manipulated democratic process—all while sipping the house blend of shade-grown dark roast coffee.
Setting up automatic winners in Democratic primaries is bad enough; appointing them to a vacant elected office in the General Assembly is much worse. We have two very recent examples in our MoCo delegation:
- Delegate Sarah Love was elevated to a state senator.
- Elrich campaign manager Teresa Woorman was appointed a delegate, filling Love’s vacant seat.
Not only MoCo suffers from appointed elected officials. In a Baltimore Banner editorial, Liza Smith bemoans the appointment racket prevalent throughout Maryland.
Maryland is one of only two states with four-year legislative terms that use the appointment process to fill vacancies.
Yes, that’s a problem, but that’s not the real problem. Were these offices filled by special elections, the winners might be different than the appointees, but policy and legislative outcomes would be the same. (The outcomes may be worse, because winning a MoCo special election depends on endorsement by the ethically corrupt teachers’ union, something that an appointee can avoid.)
The real problem is Annapolis’s ever increasing reach into the minutiæ of our personal lives. In 2024 alone the state House passed over 1,500 laws, and the state senate 1,100 laws. These include ridiculous proposals such as Marc Korman’s bill to change the name of the northern snake head fish to Chesapeake Channa, or Chao Wu’s bill to establish a work force for investigating e-commerce monopolies, or Katie Hester’s withdrawn bill to design a vehicle registration plate honoring Maryland’s horse industry. A legislature that invents well over 1,000 new “laws” every year is a legislature that is not functioning and neither is the society that elects or appoints it.
Yes, I am jealous of the local superannuated teenagers who year after year appoint their own homecoming kings and queens to vacant elected offices. However, at the end of the day, these state offices are part time and are not a significant tax burden. What these state officials do is far more serious: they debase the foundations of a society based on impartial and equitable laws. That’s a real problem.
