June 30, 2005. Congress aims to blunt court's eminent domain ruling, reports USA Today. In a 5-4 ruling last week, the Supreme Court said municipalities have broad power to bulldoze people's homes and put up shopping malls or other private development to generate tax revenue. The decision drew a scathing dissent from Justice Sandra Day O'Connor as favoring rich corporations. .TBN notes that U S Representatives Cardin, Hoyer, Van Hollen, and Wynn all turned their backs on Maryland homeowners and small businesses when they voted against the Garrett Amendment.

June 29, 2005. Kelo backlash could lead to restoration of property rights lost to smart growth and eminent domain abuses, writes Ron Utt in a Heritage Foundation analysis. "To your side, Mr. President, summon some of the hundreds and thousands of Americans from around the country who have been dispossessed of their homes and businesses by the powerful businesses in search of a better location to sell their soap and socks.. Tell these people that you share and embrace their hopes and aspirations to fulfill the American Dream, and promise that you will stand by them and guarantee them equal protection under the law."

June 28, 2005. Pat Toomey posts analysis of DeMint Social Security plan at Club for Growth. "Announced last week by Sen. Jim DeMint, along with several influential House Republicans, the plan is based on the radical idea that our Social Security surplus should actually be set aside for Social Security."

June 28, 2005. Social Security reform, with interest; doing Jim DeMint’s proposal one better, writes Phil Kerpen in the National Review Online. "Yet as great as the DeMint plan is, it could be better. The most significant step that could be taken to improve the bill would be to dedicate interest from the Social Security trust fund, along with the cash surplus, to personal accounts, as DeMint himself would prefer to do. Including the interest would not, as some have alleged, increase the deficit or the national debt."

June 28, 2005. Board reaches pact on sex education, writes Jon Ward in the WashingtonTimes. TBN is appalled that the Maryland "education" establishment at both the Annapolis level (with its unexamined mandates) and in Montgomery County would spend so much public time and public treasure to proselyte, or appear to proselyte, for or against particular ways of life under the transparent subterfuge of "decreas[ing] harassment and bullying experienced by homosexual students." The family, and the church or synagogue are the proper forums for developing personal character on which are built both appropriate sexual conduct and civil behavior (meaning, among many other things, that one does not bully or harass). To begin removing character-building from the family, and church or synagogue, and start placing such a vital role in the hands of government employees is a revolutionary assault on our Judaeo-Christian culture. Doing so can pit children against already beseiged parents trying to protect their younger family members from the seemingly inexorable demands of popular culture and peer-group pressure. John Fund's "The American Story, Why failing to teach history is bad for democracy" should be a vastly more pressing concern for Montgomery County school managers as well as for Maryland school superintendent Nancy Grasmick than designing sex-education curricula.

June 27, 2005. Your castle no more, writes MTA board member Edward Hudgins in the Washington Times. "The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution allows governments to take property by eminent domain, as long as just compensation is paid, but only for public uses. These uses have always been understood to be necessary government-provided infrastructure such as courthouses or roads. Otherwise, property should be sacrosanct.

June 26, 2005. Does Maryland need certificate of need (CON) asks Thomas Fiery of MPPI? "State leaders justify CON as essential to hold down health care prices. New facilities and services come with considerable fixed costs, after all, and those costs must be discharged through prices no matter how many (or few) consumers are served. Hence, by limiting Maryland health care facilities and services to those deemed necessary, CON supposedly holds down costs. But this reasoning seems odd. If it is correct, health care must be different from other goods and services, which typically experience higher prices and/or poorer quality when supply is constrained."

June 24, 2005. Maryland State Senator and Taxpayer Protection Pledge signer Roy Dyson decries "disastrous" Kelo ruling. "The court foolishly ruled that anybody's property can be taken for eminent domain by big business or developers. That means yours and my property are never safe. That's unless the Congress does the right thing and passes legislation to overturn this by a constitutional amendment. We're not talking about for roads, bridges or military bases. We're talking about strip malls, shopping centers, major subdivisions -- development out of control."

June 27, 2005.THIS LAND WAS YOUR LAND: Property battle heads to states, reports WorldNetDaily. "Currently, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Montana, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington already forbid the use of eminent domain for economic development unless it is to eliminate blight. Other states either expressly allow private property to be taken for private economic purposes or have not spoken clearly to the question.In addition, several other state supreme courts have ruled differently than the U.S. Supreme Court, providing additional safeguards against land grabs by private developers using their influence with city and county officials."

June 24, 2005. Eminent domain ruling cheers officials, reports C. Benjamin Ford in the Gazette. "Suellen Ferguson, the municipal attorney for College Park and Glenarden, said the Supreme Court decision would help municipalities put together land that it wants to develop. 'It's really important to allow us to do this,' she said. 'For example, near a Metro [station] there could be single-story, low-level use buildings ... limiting development around the area. This is limiting goals like encouraging us to take mass transit. This decision will allow local government to fulfill goals even if government doesn't do the development.'"

June 23, 2005. Supreme Court expands government's right to seize homes, reports William Branigin in the Washington Post. "The Supreme Court today effectively expanded the right of local governments to seize private property under eminent domain, ruling that people's homes and businesses -- even those not considered blighted -- can be taken against their will for private development if the seizure serves a broadly defined 'public use.'" TBN recommends exploring a Maryland constitutional amendment protecting the Free State's homeowners and business proprietors against this blight on traditional American rights.

June 24, 2005. Duncan rejects Bush's 'invading' his turf, report Jon Ward and Arlo Wagner in the Washington Times. "Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan rejected an invitation by President Bush yesterday to attend a discussion on reforming Social Security, instead choosing to protest the president's plan." SPECIAL TO TBN: Tom Reinheimer, Montgomery County GOP chair, comments: ONCE again Duncan and Van Hollen fail citizens of Montgomery County because they choose to play partisan politics. Neither of these Democrat officials recognize the inherent demographic flaws in the current system. So it makes it impossible for them to contribute to rational dialogue to find solutions to a not too distant system failure. Instead they remain ignorant and foment political demagoguery, not even willing to learn. Had they accepted the invitation to the event from the President, they would have learned a few things about the problems and potential solutions. First they would have learned that current Social Security recipients would not be affected by any changes. Second, the proposals provide choice between changes or the current system. They may have learned that ownership of investments frees people from the burdent of government dependency. They would have learned that current citizens entering the work force have a higher confidence they will be visited by UFOs than receive anything out of the system when they retire. They would have heard from people entering the work force that they expect government solve these problems instead of playing blatant liberal partisan politics. It is important that every person who has recently entered or will be entering the work force understand there is a problem that is difficult to solve with Social Security. They need to pay attention to the facts and demand their officials work on solving the problem. And they need to remove those who offer no solution and rather play games with their future from office!

June 22, 2005. The Wall Street Journal reports on jayhawk judgement. "The Kansas media are describing the hullabaloo in Topeka this week as a state constitutional crisis. And they are right. The legislature is sworn to abide by the Kansas Constitution, but that doesn't mean abandoning its own powers of the purse to an unelected judiciary. This is a showdown between the branches of government, and the legislature has every right to protect its own constitutional prerogatives from judicial intrusion. In this case that means protecting Kansans from a judicially ordered, and thus unconstitutional, tax increase."

Special to MTA: "It's Ba-a-a-ck:" Single-Payer Proposal Comes Before MedChi--Again, by Christopher Unger, M.D. "Like the baleful face of Freddie Keuger in one of those Friday the Thirteenth film sequels, proposals for a single-payer health insurance are again appearing before Maryland physicians. After having been turned back in several forums and over several years, the single-payer idea resurfaced at the June 11 meeting of the House of Delegates of the Maryland State Medical Society (MedChi), in Baltimore. This time, the vehicle was the preliminary report of Med Chi's Council on Medical Policy, presented before Reference Committee B, chaired by Albert Blumberg, M.D." [more...]

June 22, 2005. Pete Du Pont evaluates Schwartznegger's governorship in the Wall Street Journal. "And then there is California's Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose 19-month career is easily the most visionary and strongest gubernatorial leadership performance in modern American history."

June 17, 2005. Weyrich fears 'cordial' ties between GOP and the Right, reports Ralph Z. Hallow in the Washington Times. "'Right now the conservative movement has an all-too-cordial relationship with the Republican Party that has prevented many conservatives from speaking out, for example, about the absolutely out-of-control spending that occurred in the last Congress,' he said. Mr. Weyrich has exercised considerable influence over the years. He helped build support for President Reagan's sweeping tax cuts by bringing religious conservative leaders together with Jack Kemp, a New York congressman at the time and the prime exponent of those proposed cuts." (TBN's emphasis)

June 16, 2005. Annapolis rejects property tax break, reports Ray Rivera in the Washington Post. "For the second time in three years, the Annapolis City Council this week struck down a measure intended to provide tax relief to homeowners facing skyrocketing property assessments."

June 16, 2005. The Ehrlich administration acted to shut down the offices that enforce minimum wage and prevailing wage laws, ignoring legislation passed by the General Assembly this year directing the governor to keep them open, reports Andrew A Green in the Baltimore Sun. "Administration officials confirmed yesterday that the Prevailing Wage Office, which upholds wage laws for state-funded public works projects, also will cease to exist July 1."
TBN recalls Comptroller William Donald Schaefer's letter of February 17, 2000 to a state senator on this topic: "However, a Maryland State Department of Legislative Services study done in 1995 shows that the Maryland state prevailing wage law's administrative application of the union wage-and-benefits scale to state construction projects (other than school facilities) adds between 5% and 15% to the cost of these projects. There also is information reflecting that prevailing wage laws may add as much as 20% to 30%. Because the amount of tax dollars to be spent on school construction in any given year is defined by budget allocations, if the cost of school construction is arbitrarily increased by 15% or more, the only result can be a reduction in the number of classrooms to be built or rehabilitation work to be performed by that same percentage."

NOTE: Too bad for public school children and their taxpaying parents. On June 19, 2005, the Washington Times reported that Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. has decided to maintain a prevailing wage office he once wanted to close. The decision follows a discovery Friday by a General Assembly attorney of a 1997 law requiring the Prevailing Wage Office to employ at least five inspectors.

June 14, 2005. City OKs tax cut, funds police, fire, Doug Donovan reports in the Baltimore Sun. "'This is a budget that puts our children first,'" said Council Vice President Stephanie C. Rawlings Blake. The surplus was partially due to a real estate boom last year unanticipated by budget officials, and also because the council approved O'Malley's package of new and increased taxes on cell phones, energy and real estate transfers. A year ago, administration officials had warned the taxes were needed to avoid layoffs and reduced services. Those rising home values and the new taxes are largely the reasons why locally generated taxes are increasing by $67 million in fiscal 2006. The entire increase in the city's $1.1 billion operating budget is $70.9 million."

June 13, 2004. Jack Kemp tells "A Tale of Two Tax Cuts," in townhall.com. "While most members of Congress have been wringing their hands over how to pay the so-called 'transition costs' for personal retirement accounts, they have completely overlooked the fact that Bush's 2003 tax-rate reductions created a prosperity dividend that can be used to make a down payment on permanent solvency. If Congress would take the next step and reform the federal tax code - by reducing tax rates even further and simplifying the code, completing the job it began of defining taxable income properly so as to completely eliminate double, triple and quadruple taxation of income - the prosperity dividend would increase and solve the problem of financing personal retirement accounts."

June 8, 2005. Political questions surface in Maryland Chesapeake poll, reports Matthew Mosk in the Washington Post. "The $20,000 opinion survey was not paid for by the state, but by an Annapolis-based group working closely with Maryland officials on Chesapeake Bay restoration efforts. The phone surveyor's confusion is easily understood, because Department of Natural Resources officials selected the polling firm and worked closely with the nonprofit group -- the Oyster Recovery Partnership -- to prepare the 150 questions."

June 8, 2005. The Wall Street Journal writes on the unfortunate implications of the medical marijuana ruling. "As Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his dissent: 'If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything, and the federal government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.' By 'numerated powers, ' Justice Thomas means the idea that the federal government can undertake only such activities as the Constitution explicitly permits."

June 7, 2005. Beilenson resigning post to run for House; City health official to announce he'll quit next week to start campaign; High-profile commissioner seeks Cardin's seat, report Eric Siegel, David Nitkin, Dennis O'Brien, Jill Rosen, and William Wan in the Baltimore Sun. "Beilenson also helped found the Health Care for All Coalition, whose agenda to get universal health coverage in the state included a push for the so-called Wal-Mart bill requiring large employers to designate a certain percentage of their payrolls for health care. The measure was recently vetoed by Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr."

June 2, 2005. The Swamps of Jersey: Can Garden State Republicans convince voters they can clean up the corruption, asks John Fund in the Wall Street Journal. "Mr. Schundler plans to counter the Forrester bankroll with an e-mail list of 35,000 names he is mobilizing using new 'grass-roots software' that enables every activist to operate a mini-campaign headquarters from home. In 2002, other Northeast states such as Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont elected GOP businessmen as their new governors in response to corruption and tax concerns. If anything, New Jersey may be even more ripe for a bold message of principled reform. The danger for Republicans may be if they mute that message and play it safe. Mr. Corzine will obviously have the money to get his vote out, his GOP opponent can only win if he convinces voters that his election would really matter."