LAWMAKERS IN 3 COUNTIES FLOAT PLAN TO SECEDE FROM MARYLAND

More than 150 years after Maryland stuck with the Union, the state is facing a peculiar request by its three westernmost counties to secede.

Lawmakers from the counties — Garrett, Allegany and Washington — say their rural, conservative constituents have long been fed up with their overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic fellow Marylanders. They say they have more in common with the folks on the other side of the country road in neighboring West Virginia.

The secession plan was floated by six Republican lawmakers from the counties who wrote a letter to Republican legislative leaders in West Virginia this month asking whether their counties could join that state.

“We believe this arrangement may be mutually beneficial for both states and for our local constituencies,” they wrote. “Please advise on next steps.”

The proposal, like similar ones in the past, seems destined to go nowhere. Maryland’s top Democrats scoffed at the idea, although West Virginia’s Republican governor, Jim Justice, and top lawmakers there seized the opportunity to brag about all the ways they think their state is better than Maryland.

The idea has tapped into deepseated feelings of alienation in western Maryland, a mountainous panhandle wedged against the Mason-dixon Line, where talk of secession has been brewing for years.

“We’re kind of ignored up here, and that’s why people are thinking West Virginia might be an option if they keep ignoring us,” said Michael Swauger, owner of a barber shop in Grantsville, a small town in Garrett County. “We see very little from the state of Maryland. We seem to be the last county to get anything to benefit us, moneywise or roads or anything to help us.”

But Swauger, 65, said he was not sure that life would be better in West Virginia than in western Maryland, which needs betterpaying jobs.

“I would have to see what West Virginia would offer,” he said. “They’re not better off financially than us here.”

The counties would need the approval of the Maryland Legislature, of West Virginia’s Legislature and of Congress.

“I find it hard to imagine that the Maryland Legislature would vote to allow them to leave and thus consent to divide the state,” legal historian Cynthia Nicoletti said.