End public life for those who abide trashing of Constitution
ANNAPOLIS, MD.>> America’s most improbably popular governor, a Republican beginning his second term in perhaps the bluest state, is stocky and blunt. Larry Hogan, whose approval rating is in the high 70s, has won twice in the state with the highest percentage of African-Americans of any state outside the Deep South. In 2016, Maryland voted more emphatically for Hillary Clinton — by 26 percentage points — than all but three other states. In 2018, Hogan was re-elected receiving a majority of women’s votes, and 28 percent of the African-American vote while running against a former head of the NAACP. Hogan won while almost 50 percent of Marylanders were saying they’d vote against all Republicans in order to express contempt for Donald Trump. So, he won against a huge blue wave in a deep blue state.
But, then, Hogan had ended the “rain tax” (officially a “storm water remediation fee”). It forced certain counties to tax everyone, sometimes based on the amount of “impervious surfaces” on their property. All in Maryland defended this as environmentally virtuous (supposedly helping the Chesapeake Bay). However, all but one member of the legislature, which had veto-proof Democratic majorities in both houses, voted not to terminate their political careers by continuing to tax rain.
Because in 2016 Hogan was early in saying he wouldn’t endorse Trump or attend the convention that nominated him or vote for him. And because Hogan is term limited and hence has little to lose. And because his father, a Maryland congressman on the House Judiciary Committee in 1974, set an example — he was the only Republican to vote for all three articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon. For all these reasons, he’s being importuned to challenge Trump in Republican primaries. He says he is “listening” and has “not said no.”
He does, however, have a day job he is reluctant to neglect. And he soon will become chair of the National Governors Association. So, he isn’t eager to mount a losing challenge just to unfurl the tattered flag of recognizable Republicanism. Opposing any incumbent president is difficult, and opposing this incumbent would be especially disagreeable.
Still, this town on the Chesapeake Bay will remain known as the incubator of something else germane to today’s discontents.
In 1786, in response to a dispute between Virginia and Maryland over rights of navigation and commerce on the bay, Virginia’s Legislature asked all the states to send delegates here to a convention to consider how conflicts about interstate commerce could be handled under the Articles of Confederation. Only 12 men from five states attended, but two of them were prodigiously talented, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. The meeting decided there should be (as Hamilton reported to Congress) a conclave “at Philadelphia” to consider measures to make the Articles “adequate to the exigencies of the Union.” The result was the Constitution.
Today, in the U.S. Capitol, just west of where the Annapolis meeting occurred, a majority of congressional Republicans seem poised to support Trump’s evisceration of the Constitution’s architecture of checks and balances. By opposing a binding resolution disapproving the president’s declaration of an emergency, they would approve Congress’ acquiescence in the loss of its core power, that of controlling spending. These Republicans raise two questions: Why is there a Congress? And why are such Republicans receiving salaries?
Every Republican who supports the president in this trashing of the Constitution whose creation began here thereby violates his or her sworn oath to defend it and to “bear true faith and allegiance” to it. Voters should expel all of them from public life.