coward

The Democrats are Cowards, Part II

In Part I, I mentioned how the Maryland Democratic Party is nothing but a bunch of yellow-bellied cowards who are more than happy to oppose Governor Larry Hogan and oppose the will of the people who voted him into office at any cost. This example shows how the Democrats are more akin to the villains in “1984” than they are an effective governing party.

 MADALENO

I wrote on Monday about how the Democrats are full of it on the issue of transparency. I noted about Senator Rich Madaleno’s senseless bill regarding Board of Public Works agenda items and about how Madaleno was the ring leader of a conspiracy to deny the right of the people to comment on bills by ensuring his committee voted on House Bill 1013, the controversial transportation scoring plan, prior to holding a hearing. They then special ordered the bill to today in order to completely speed the process up and pass the bill before anybody gets to see what’s in it.

So today, the Democrats decided to go a step further. The Republicans in the Senate were rightly going to try and mount a bit of a filibuster to stop HB 1013. Instead, the Democrats decided that after circumventing the committee process that we really didn’t need to have open debate on the floor of the Senate, either:

For more than 90 minutes, Republicans tried to poke holes in a bill that would require the state to come up with a way to rank and score costly transportation projects. Democrats employed a seldom-used maneuver to put and end to the day’s debate and curtail future discussion on Thursday.

Trending: Thank You

The policy question — whether the proposal would create more transparency or would subsume local decision-making — has become overshadowed by the partisan political fight over power.

So the Democrats do what they always do when they are trying to ram something down the throats of Marylanders; change the rules! Instead of answering legitimate questions from Republican Senators about why the bill needs to exist in the first place, the Senate Democrats decided to limit debate on 3rd reader for the sole purpose of railroading the bill through the Senate to force a veto fight before the General Assembly goes home on April 11th.

So to recap, for the second time this week, Senate Democrats decided to try to circumvent the need for transparency in government so they could quickly pass a bill designed to……improve transparency in government.

Twitter encapsulating the circus atmosphere of the moment quite well.

So in an effort to improve transparency, the Senate Democrats are ignoring virtually every principal of government transparency because they are too afraid that the public will catch wind of what they are doing and realize that this is all a political shell game manifesting itself as a temper tantrum directed at Governor Hogan.

The Governor’s Spokesman, Doug Mayer, hit it on the head:

“Claiming this bill is about ‘transparency’ is total hogwash and today’s floor debate perfectly illustrates the lengths the majority leadership of the Senate will go to ram it through the chamber without a proper hearing or any meaningful consideration.

“Most supporters won’t admit it but this bill is designed to help the General Assembly radically change how the state funds transportation projects – moving away from the governor’s balanced approach in favor of something that concentrates funding on a small number of jurisdictions. Not a single element of this bill will result in any improvements to our transportation infrastructure, but it will insert Annapolis style politics and lobbying into what has traditionally been a partnership with county leaders.

“Ultimately, this is very poor public policy and the majority leadership in the Senate knows it, which probably explains why the bill has advanced without the appropriate hearings or due consideration.”

That the yellow-bellied Democrats are too cowardly to admit that, too cowardly to stand up for what they believe in, and are too afraid to have their political machinations exposed to the public says everything about their intentions with this bill and shows once and for all that the Democratic Party in Maryland has ceased to function as a political organization and has reformed solely as the “Beat Larry Hogan Social Club.” This is the kind of nonsense that will not be rewarded by the voters in 2018.

The Democratic Party used to have some set of core principles. Its decrepit shell has been replaced by a bunch of cowards who haven’t gotten over the fact that voters kicked them to the curb in 2014. Until the Democrats find some leaders with a spine, this is what we’re going to have to expect.



Send this to a friend