Sixth District Delegate Robin Grammer submitted the following article stating Governor Wes Moore’s new congressional map is to put all of Maryland’s districts in the hands of the Democratic Party.
Less than four years ago, Maryland was considered one of the most gerrymandered states in the county, with cities encircled to disenfranchise rural voters and sprawling corridors that at times narrowed down to single streets, all designed to keep as many congressional districts as possible in the hands of the Democratic Party.
In 2022, that map was thrown out by a court of law for violating the Maryland Constitution, and a judge ordered a new one to be made without partisan interference.
The map we eventually received was far from perfect, but it was a start, and now, Democratic partisans in Annapolis want to undo that start and send us back into the dark ages, using national events as a flimsy excuse to once again steal power from the voters.
The map that Wes Moore and Hakeem Jeffries want to impose on Marylanders bears striking resemblances to the infamous map of the 2010s.
Frederick County will be cut in half to make room for the urban, liberal areas of Montgomery County.
Conservative rural voters on the Pennsylvanian border in Carroll County will be forced to share a district with the suburbs of Washington, D.C., while the proposed boundaries for the first district jump across the Chesapeake Bay to include both the Eastern Shore and parts of Howard and Anne Arundel counties.
And, of course, Baltimore City is to be split across two districts, including one with a corridor only a few miles wide.
To this day, we have no idea who was involved in the creation of this map or if it included members of the governor’s staff or other partisan officials, either formally or informally.
Of the 532 who signed up to testify during the map’s hearing, over four hundred were against it.
To speak frankly, if the general assembly were to move forward with implementing this map, it would be a morally reprehensible betrayal of the citizens they are elected to represent.
Voters should choose their representatives, not the other way around.
Mid-decade redistricting has not only a moral cost but also a financial one of staggering proportions.
According to The Daily Record, state and local boards of elections will need to send out new voter IDs, purchase mapping software, reorganize and create new polling stations, hire new staff, including election judges, and embark on a public relations campaign to inform voters about the changes in order to meet the June 11th primary deadline.
This partisan proposal is so egregiously divisive that even some within the Democratic Party have spoken out against it, including State Senate President Bill Ferguson.
Of course, he does not oppose it for the evident moral reasons but, instead, because a change to the current map could open it up to legal challenges, possibly resulting in a truly fair delegation of three Republicans and five Democrats.
So, why, we must ask, is Wes Moore so insistent on resisting the will of the voters and rigging our upcoming election? The answer is an open secret.
He’s planning on running for president in 2028, so he wants to appeal to the Democratic Party’s partisan liberal base and build rapport with its national leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries.
During his testimony, the governor mentioned Vice President JD Vance, the likely Republican nominee for president in two years, just as often as he did Donald Trump.
Moore knows that he cannot possibly hope to run on his record as governor because it’s a record of failure, whether it be the state budget, the environment, or tax policy, so instead he’s skipping the real work and posturing directly on national issues with this clear authoritarian power grab.
I vehemently oppose this effort to disenfranchise millions of Marylanders because it is the people who should hold the power in government, not the politicians, and certainly not one politician who is so brazenly using our state’s citizens as mere stepping stones on his way to the White House.
