A choice between common decency and Andy Harris
In November, voters in Maryland’s 1st District will decide whether to send to Congress a new representative who exhibits some integrity and decency or settle for Republican Andy Harris again.
As of now, that’s the choice — unless, of course, Democrats nominate a complete nincompoop to compete with Harris for the House seat. Even in that highly dubious scenario, however, it’s hard to imagine a Democrat being a worse representative of the 1st District than Harris has been.
I know: It’s a conservative district and Harris has won six terms. But there are plenty of people in the Big Red One who are decent and recognize decency in others. They need to take another look at their congressman’s record before giving him the seventh term he once pledged not seek.
Harris’ record has been chronicled in this space and in news articles, and it’s difficult to say which of his votes, actions or comments has been the worst.
After all, there are so many choices: Supporting false claims of presidential election fraud in 2020; refusing to honor the police officers who defended the Capitol during the violent insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021; playing cozy with Viktor Orban, the authoritarian who rules Hungary with inspiration from Russia’s war criminal president, Vladimir Putin; touting a federally funded project for the Chesapeake Bay that Harris voted against; being a doctor (an anesthesiologist) and prescribing a livestock medication for a COVID-19 patient while criticizing some vaccine mandates.
Now we can add to the list two votes that keep Harris on the wrong side of simple decency.
On March 16, he was one of only 16 members of the House, all of them Republicans, to vote against a bill directing the National Park Service to include in its educational materials the history of the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. (The final vote was 406-16.)
In a video that Democrats have been circulating since then, Harris bragged about voting against the bill, telling a gathering of Eastern Shore Republicans that he was “done apologizing for America.”
Done? I don’t recall Andy Harris apologizing for anything — not even when he tried to bring a gun into the House chamber just a couple of weeks after the attack on Congress, prompting an investigation by the already strained Capitol police force.
Of course, acknowledging our history
— in this case, the order of a Democratic president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, to confine nearly 120,000 people, most of them American citizens, during the war — is not the “apology” Harris apparently thinks the nation has already rendered. But there’s no interest in such distinctions when you’re trying to score points with what you perceive to be your red meat base.
Harris’s second vote on March 16 was worse, in the sense that it shows the man’s unwillingness to put aside his strange obstinance and simply do the right thing.
In El Paso, Texas, in August 2019, 23 people were killed and 23 others wounded in a racially motivated attack by a gunman who targeted Hispanic people in a Walmart. It was one of the country’s deadliest mass shootings.
There is now in El Paso a memorial to the victims of the Walmart massacre. It’s called the Healing Garden Memorial at Ascarate Park. Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Texas Democrat, asked the House to designate it a national memorial — an acknowledgment by Congress of the tragedy and the need for a community to heal. No federal funds were required.
Representatives of both parties — 220 Democrats and 183 Republicans — voted overwhelmingly to rename the site the El Paso Community Healing Garden National Memorial. But Harris was among the 25 Republicans who voted against the bill.
In the video, recorded and uploaded to YouTube on the “Maryland Patriot” channel, Harris mocks the idea that Congress should support a “healing garden,” and he makes no effort to explain its purpose, or the tragic reason for its existence, to his
audience.
Heartless is a pretty good word — actually, on the polite side — to describe a member of Congress who won’t even support a symbolic gesture in the aftermath of a searing tragedy.
Harris refuses to honor victims of violence — both the Walmart shoppers in El Paso and the cops who defended the Capitol.
It’s hard to make sense of it, to say definitively what motivates him to be on the wrong side of almost everything. But one thing is certain: Such votes show a lack of decency.
Some people look for hardnose zealotry in the people they send to Congress. Some voters prefer loudmouths; it doesn’t matter if they accomplish anything, as long as they make noise and, if they’re Republicans, “own the libs” now and then to maintain their right-wing bona fides. We all get that.
But, at the baseline, there needs to be common decency. Voters need to recognize that, despite the country’s political divisions, some things — like staying away from dictators and fighting for democracy, honoring our heroes, acknowledging the pain caused to others — should be required of the men and women we send to Congress.
Nothing wrong with the troublemakers, as long as they make “good trouble” and actually act and speak as true representatives of their constituents.
Andy Harris is not my congressman. But I say to Marylanders who reside in the 1st District: Your choice should not be seen solely between Republican and Democrat but between decency and what you’ve been getting from Andy Harris.