Trial Lawyers will get their Christmas in April....but why did some Republicans tie on the bow?

It's Christmas in April for Trial Lawyers in Annapolis! One of their pet bills has passed out of the House of Delegates....with some Republican support, no less. And at the end of the day, taxpayers are going to be the ones left holding the bag.

House Bill 825 passed out of the House earlier this week. The bill increases the minimum amount of coverage for injury or death related to a car accident from $20,000 or $40,000 (for one or two cars) to $30,000 or $60,000 (for one or two cars).

And it's a that point that things patently fly off the handle. As part of the process, insurance companies are going to need to create a new classification of insurance policy. The standard slotting for insurance policies across the country have always been incremental. They current $20,000/$40,000 slot is standard across the country. The next slot is $25,000/$50,000, the standard in the District of Columbia. The slot after that jumps to $50,000/$100,000. Insurance companies are going to have to create a whole new classification of policy specifically to deal with Maryland if this passes....a policy which, incidentally the Sun points out will be among the highest liability coverage rates in the nation.

When you are increasing costs to the insurance companies, for having to create an entirely new classification of policy, while at the same time increasing the required coverage for policyholders, guess who is going to be left holding the bag. Consumers. But it won't impact most consumers....

No, the brunt of this impact will be felt by low-income Marylanders, the same middle and working class families that Democrats routinely go out of there way to stick it to. As a matter of fact, almost the entirety of the premium increase will be taken out of MAIF's policy holders., which of course lead to some drivers driving without misurance altogether. As House Minority Leader Tony O'Donnell so poignantly noted:

"This bill is going to hurt people at the bottom end of the socioeconomic ladder," said House Minority Leader Anthony J. O'Donnell. "It's a tax increase. Call it something else. It's a burden that's going to come out of their pockets."

This bill is, at its most basic level, a ten-percent increase in insurance premiums for those least able to afford a ten-percent increase in insurance premiums. It's why the Democrats don't blink a passing such an expense on to the taxpayers, because their raison d'etre is to hurt people at the bottom end of the socioeconomic ladder to enrich their special interest buddies.....

....which leads me to the Christmas in April title of this post. You see, this bill is being championed by two groups of people:

• The O'Malley Administration
• The Trial Lawyers that keep the O'Malley campaign awash in contributions.

Within the Administration, there has been a gag order on this bill. Leadership at the Maryland Insurance Administration is against this. Leadership at MAIF is against this. But they have been gagged on the orders from the Second Floor of the State House to stay out of the way and let this pass. Insurance companies are also opposing this as well, because it's an administrative burden on them and will increase their cost of doing business in the state of Maryland as well.

This friends is O'Malley's gift to the trial lawyers. Presumably, it's to make sure that his campaign stays funded this fall.....but it may also be a tacit admission that the O'Malley Campaign and his trial lawyer allies have no confidence whatsoever in O'Malley's ability to get himself re-elected.

Incidentally, this isn't the only O'Malley give away to the trial lawyers; SB 119 has passed out of the Senate, a constitutional amendment that would raise from $10,000 to $20,000 the minimum amount of damages that would be required to be sough in order to guarantee the right to a jury trial....

O'Malley's Christmas in April give-a-way to the trial lawyers is bad enough. But then nine Republicans broke with the caucus and decided to vote with O'Malley on this issue. If anybody would like to explain why the following Republican Delegates broke ranks with their party and decided that Marylanders need to pay more for insurance, I'm all ears:

• Bob Costa
• Donald Elliott
• Rick Impallaria
• James King
• Pat McDonough
• Tanya Shewell
• Mike Smigiel
• Donna Stifler
• Nancy Stocksdale

These are the kind of a votes where we need a cohesive Republican Caucus that stands up for taxapayers and not special interests...and it is VERY hard for us Republicans to make the argument that we are a better choice for Maryland's middle and working class families when we've got such a large percentage of the Republican caucus going off the reservation and siding with Governor O'Malley and the trial lawyers.

The people of Maryland, particular those Marylanders who are least able to pay, should not be subject to Martin O'Malley's giveaways to his trial lawyer special interest buddies. We owe it to ourselves and to the future of our state to make our opinion's about Governor O'Malley and his handouts at the ballot box this November.

Making it Up as He Goes

Allan Lichtman must be hard up for attention, or he must owe somebody in the Obama Administration a favor. Because Lichtman today boldly predicted that Barack Obama is a shoe-in for re-election.

No, really, he did.

The raconteur/professor/former Senate Candidate/space cadet uses his "13 keys to the Presidency" which he claims can accurately predict who will win the next Presidential Election. Using his "keys", he says Barack Obama will be re-elected.

Of course, Lichtman's interpretation of the keys leaves a bit to be desired:

KEY 1 (Party Mandate): After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than it did after the previous midterm elections. (FALSE)

Well, so far that seems to be going in the right direction. It seems like the Democrats are going to get clobbered at the ballot box, but let's not get too cocky. I'll agree and see False.

KEY 2 (Contest): There is no serious contest for the incumbent-party nomination. (TRUE)

I'm classifying this as to-be-determined. Anybody who seriously thinks that Indiana Senator Evan Bayh is going to walk away with a $13 million federal war chest and not seriously consider challenging the President from the center is sorely mistaken. And Bayh would, in all likelihood, do serious damage to Obama in the primaries.

KEY 3 (Incumbency): The incumbent-party candidate is the sitting president. (TRUE)

Can't argue with that.

KEY 4 (Third party): There is no significant third party or independent campaign. (TRUE)

Also to-be-determined. As much as Republicans hope that the Tea Party Movement doesn't spawn off a serious third party or independent campaign, that could be incredibly wishful thinking depending on who the Republican nominee is in 2012.

KEY 5 (Short-term economy): The economy is not in recession during the election campaign. (TRUE)

Only a moron would say that the economy in 2012 is going to not be in recession. I'm not saying it is, but given this President's economic policy it is wishful thinking to think things are going to be better. I would label this as to-be-determined.

KEY 6 (Long-term economy): Real per-capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms. (FALSE)

More than likely, Lichtman's got this right. I'll agree.

KEY 7 (Policy change): The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy. (TRUE)

Well, so far that's true insofar as health care reform has passed. However, Lichtman automatically assumes that this is a positive for Obama. Lichtman's model does not take into account the fact that such a change was railroaded through Congress against the will of the people. Nor does it assume the possibility that a change in party could radically change the makeup of the aforementioned change prior to its full implementation. I will agree that this is true....but it's an albatross around Obama's campaign neck.

KEY 8 (Social unrest): There is no sustained social unrest during the term. (TRUE)

Which is interesting, because if you believe MSNBC Tea Partiers are running amok. But be that as it may it is true.....for now.

KEY 9 (Scandal): The administration is untainted by major scandal. (TRUE)

I'm not sure what planet Lichtman is from. The entire administration has basically been one scandal right after another. If only somebody predicted two years ago that Barack Obama was a scandal in a box.....

So yeah....false.

KEY 10 (Foreign/military failure): The administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs. (TRUE)

Also to-be-determined. Because in case you didn't notice....America's approval ratings are in the dumps since Obama took over. If you want to get really technically, the collapse of the Copenhagen climate summit could be consider a "major failure" in foreign affairs, but that would imply that such a failure was a bad thing.

KEY 11 (Foreign/military success): The administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs. (FALSE)

Agreed.

KEY 12 (Incumbent charisma): The incumbent-party candidate is charismatic or a national hero. (FALSE)

Amen to that

KEY 13 (Challenger charisma): The challenging-party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero. (TRUE)

Also to be determined because neither Lichtman, nor me, or the Lord above knows who is going to be the Republican nominee in 2012. It could be virtually anybody. and until such a time as we know who the Republican nominee is, any speculation as to the answer to this is completely pointless.

So by my count, we've got three trues, five falses, and five to-be-determineds. What does that mean for Barack Obama's chances in 2012 as of right now? Absolutely nothing.

The problem with such speculative yarns as Allan Lichtman is trying to write is that he is trying to apply a historical formula to an event before it happens. When you combine his historical pre-analysis with his moonbeam liberal biases, you get a completely warped view of the political environment in an effort to prop up a failed administration. Lichtman, in his analysis, is just making it up as he goes. His analysis has no value.

Blue Pills for Bad People

In their never ending quest to ram health care down our throat, Maryland's two Senators decided that we should make sure that child molesters and sex offenders should still have access to Viagra and other sexually enhancing drugs.

No, really.

Apparently, passing a health care bill nobody wants is more important to Maryland's Democratic Senators than ensuring very bad people don't get federally funded prescriptions that help them be very bad people.

How sad. How pathetic.

They Just Don't Get It

Some people just don't get it. I refer you to the latest comments by Adam Pagnucco as it relates to budget and taxation here in Maryland.

On a post in which in he is discussing the shifting of teacher pensions from a state to a county responsibility, Pagnucco drops the following:

If Montgomery wants to preserve the quality of its schools, it must put up a tough fight and negotiate only when it has maximum leverage. That point is not now, but next year, when the next Governor – whoever it is – will have to pass a tax and spending package to deal with Maryland’s long-term budget deficits. Such a package cannot pass without MoCo’s votes.

Um.....what?

That point is not now, but next year, when the next Governor – whoever it is – will have to pass a tax and spending package to deal with Maryland’s long-term budget deficits.

There is only one problem with Pagnucco's broadbrushed statement.

It's not true.

What is the main reason why Pagnucco's statement bunk? It has nothing to do with the fact that Governor Ehrlich (who, by the way, will be Governor again next year) opposes the broad based tax and spending package that Pagnucco is suggesting. It has nothing to do with the fact that Governor O'Malley has presided over the least fiscally responsible administration in the history of the state, or the fact that O'Malley has engineered a series of immoral and irresponsiblie tax increases that has crippled our state financially.

It's the fact that, as many liberals continue to do, Pagnucco relies on the failed notion of taxes and spending being the solution to deal with our budget problems. People failed to realize that the time for Kenyes still passed.

What's more absurd is the fact that Pagnucco's premise continues to go with the theory that only through higher taxes and increased state spending. Hello? Isn't that the kind of policy on which Governor O'Malley's administration has be predicated upon? All O'Malley has done during his time as Governor is raise taxes, raise spending, and fail to take respoonsible steps to protect the fiscal health of this state.

Liberals like Pagnucco just don't get it. There is another way. Whomever is Governor in 2011 should take broad steps to reduce state spending and lower our taxes. Taxes at the very least should be returned to pre-O'Malley levels, in an effort to the middle and working class families that Maryland Democrats seem hellbent on destroying. Our spending plan should be rebuilt from the ground-up to ensure that only legitimate priorities and not Democratic special interests are receiving the bulk of our funding. And the Governor, whomever it is, should take broad steps to begin reducing the size of our state government. Maryland's government has for far too long been too big for its britches; we need a smaller, mor efficient government that only provides necessary services to the people of Maryland.

Maryland's middle and working class families, the ones who have been so hurt by Martin O'Malley's recklessness, knows that higher taxes are not the answer. If liberal opinion makers such as Pagnucco don't come to grips with the fact that there is an alternative to higher taxes and more spending....the people of Maryland will leave them in the dust.

Thoughts on Urban Public Schools

Reason.tv is doing a multi-part series on Saving Cleveland. And while the piece below may be about fixing education in Cleveland, it sounds like a lot of ideas that we could be using to save schools in Baltimore.



Governor O'Malley likes to tout the numbers that claim Maryland has "the best public schools in the nation." But if you take a look at the performance of students in Baltimore City Public Schools, the success rate isn't there; particularly when it comes to college attendance and providing legitimate opportunities for students to improve their socioeconomic situation. We owe more to our kids than that, and these are just some of the ideas and issues that we face in trying to provide legitimate opportunities for Maryland's public school students.

Starve the Beast

Well it looks like the poster-child for failed state agencies doesn't have enough money to keep things going into the next fiscal year:

The Maryland Transit Administration may not have enough money for personnel and operations in next year's budget, legislative analysts warn, but state transit officials insist that they’ll make do with the funding the governor gave them.

Transportation Secretary Beverly Swaim-Staley told the Senate budget committee Thursday that fiscal 2011 will be challenging under Gov. Martin O’Malley’s proposed budget, but she vowed to make it work.

"We have to move things around in the budget, or look at the capital program to meet our needs,” she said.

Now we know that the Transit Administration is possibly the worst-run aspect of Maryland State Government, with a spate of problems throughout the years; failed equipment, unsafe transit lines, services that don't make any money. I have been calling for the senor leadership to be replaced for a long time at the least, and at most to see the entire system privatized so that it can be better managed.

What better way to prove the fiscally reckless manner in which the MTA is being run than the fact that the in the budget submitted for the Governor's approval the agency doesn't have enough money to keep things going.

And what is one reason that the agency is running out of money. Labor unions:

The Department of Legislative Services raised concerns in its analysis of the MTA’s proposed $468 million budget that projected costs of labor contracts could outpace the agency’s funding next year. The document pointed specifically to ongoing negotiations with transit unions.

“There is concern that the fiscal 2011 allowance for MTA is insufficient to support all of the contract increases for services and union personnel expenses in addition to the ongoing expenses of operating a large transit system,” the analysis said.

Here's a memo to MTA leadership; when negotiating these contracts, why not be reasonable? Why not negotiate within your means and try not to spend more than the Governor has allocated for you? Why? Because that's how we operate in the real world. If you are already projecting $468 million in shortfalls because of the contract that is currently under negotiation, you better come up with a plan that will offset that $468 million projection.

Which then leads to the issue of farebox recovery rates, in that the MTA's stated goal is a recovery rate of 35 percent; that means that the goal of the state is to recover only 35 cents of every dollar that it takes to operate the entire transit system.....and MTA right now is only getting a 30 percent recovery rate.

If the MTA were a private business, they would be hemorrhaging money and close their doors within a year with such rates. ...but here in Maryland, such business practices seem to be perfectly acceptable.

If I were in charge of the MTA, I would take steps to make the Agency profitable. There are ways to make the system self-sufficient without making the system unsafe or transit fares unaffordable to average riders. I'm not saying that the MTA needs to have a 150% farebox recovery rate like they do in Hong Kong (on a privatized system, incidentally), but I would make sure that steps were taken in order to move closer to ending the subsidization of of the system.

But I'm not. Instead, MTA senior leadership needs to do the competent thing and spend within their means. With a budget shortfall, there is no room in the budget to throw more good money after bad toward a failing transit administration. General Assembly leadership needs to resist the urge and make the MTA work with less; we need to starve the beast to create efficiencies and costs savings that will finally make the MTA take common sense approaches to improve service.

Overreaching

There's no way around it: Delegate Don Dwyer is getting a raw deal from Legislative Leadership and the media on his threat to impeach Attorney General Doug Gansler.

What is getting lost in the hub-hub about the gay marriage issue is that Dwyer's call to impeach has nothing to do with the gay marriage issue. Nothing at all. Yes, Dwyer is one of the most vocal opponents of gay marriage in the entire state of Maryland. But even above all of that, Don values the Constitution and the Legal Process just as much. Gansler has, in fact, tried to obfuscate the roles of government by trying to circumvent the lawmaking process by trying to influence the courts and influencing changes in state law without the will of the General Assembly. In Dwyer's words, Gansler's actions "show a clear disregard for Maryland and the legislative process by which it is enacted."

Face it; Gansler's opinion on the matter is substantially overreaching of the authority of his office.

Gansler's reaction to Dwyer's attempts at impeachment were also curious in and of itself. The fact that Gansler's office put out an opinion saying Gansler cannot be impeached seems to be a bit of political jujitsu to defend the flank, a political maneuver whose technical term is "CYA." The fact that Gansler's office felt it necessary to put out an opinion you can deduce on your own, but when you consider the shaky precedent that Gansler's built his case upon (on top of all of the other constitutional issues) and the fact that Gansler is running his office based on the judicial activist tradition without actually being a judge and you realize that there is some there there where Gansler could legitimately face the music.

Doug Gansler is clearly in the wrong here. I may be a minority in supporting the idea of gay marriage, but Delegate Dwyer is right to pursue this as he sees fit. I certainly don't think that Gansler will be impeached or removed from office, but sometimes the point of accountability has to be made.....

....but it's a point that doesn't have to be made. If Legislative Leadership would just let the issue of gay marriage come to a vote once and for all, this issue would disappear. The General Assembly cannot duck this issue forever. We all know why Maryland's Democrats don't want this to come to a vote; because it is political inexpedient for them to do so. The basically have the Hobson's Choice of ticking off half of their base, no matter how the vote turns out. The moral we should really take away from the Gansler's marriage opinion is the fact tat Legislative Leadership needs to show the moral turpitude to bring the issue to a vote once and for all....

Driving the Point Home

My guest column regarding an elected school board in Saturday's Gazette was not necessarily based on this topic, but the story in today's Capital regarding the partisan composition of the Anne Arundel County School Board does reinforce the point:

Anne Arundel County may run red during elections, but its school board has turned almost completely blue.

Just one Republican remains on the Board of Education; the other seven adult members are all registered Democrats. Even the student board member, who's too young to register and hasn't picked a party, said she supported President Barack Obama in 2008.

Against the rest of the county, which generally votes conservatively, that Democratic majority is a mismatch. Voters have chosen a Republican county executive and Republicans for four out of seven seats on the County Council, and in 2008 they voted for Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

My support of an elected School Board has little to do with party affiliation and more to do with the fact that the current members of the Board are not held accountable for their actions. But as the story notes, the current make up of the Anne Arundel County School Board does not reflect the political culture or the will of the people of Anne Arundel County.

Surely, nobody in their right mind thinks that education is inherently partisan. However, when you consider the issues related to the teachers union and the fact that half of the county budget is spent on education you begin to realize that there is a serious problem with the way that we select our School Board. That's a point that State Senator Bryan Simonaire notes:

The change was supposed to make the process more democratic, but observers such as

Sen. Bryan Simonaire, R-Pasadena, note the governor gets to appoint five of the 11 commissioners, giving him more control than appears at first blush.

"There's a lot of smoke screens, but when you get down to the bottom and realize who's appointing these appointees, it's a political process," said Simonaire, who has advocated for the county to have an elected school board. "It's not fair when … one party dominates the board."

To that end Senator Simonaire, along with Delegates McConkey, Costa, Dwyer, George, King, Kipke, and Schuh, are sponsoring SB765/HB1083, a bill that would retain the current appointment process, but allow for other candidates to participate in a nonpartisan election much in the same way that Circuit Court nominees can be challenged. This would alleviate a lot of the qualms that people have with the School Board selection process as (finally) people would have the ability to have a real, legitimate choice in electing their School Board members.

In issues such as education, the will of the parents, teachers, and taxpayers need to be heard. And the current process is about as undemocratic as you can get. Hopefully, us folks here in Anne Arundel County will get a legitimate chance to elect our School Board members.