In miniature, May 29

• My law blog Overlawyered ceases publication this weekend after nearly 21 years, you can read its Maryland archives here;
• How about “no.” Does “no” work for you? “Baltimore Wants To Sue Gun Makers Over Gang Violence” [Cam Edwards, Bearing Arms]
• The environmental group fretted that suspending the bag tax will leave “the public with a false sense of security in encouraging single-use plastic shopping bags” which “are difficult to clean.” Yo, Sierra Club! That’s why they’re called “single-use” bags [Jim Bovard, American Conservative; Josh Kurtz, Maryland Matters]
• Precinct-level reporting, confidentiality, ballots returned without signatures: the details of vote-by-mail (VBM) Maryland still needs to work out [Cheryl Kagan, Howard Lee Gorrell]
• Some good ideas in here for your county or municipality, too: “D.C., Maryland Jurisdictions Start Deferring Taxes, Fees and Regulations” [Adam Pagnucco, The Seventh State]
• Montgomery County development politics analyzed along the lines of the classic Bootleggers and Baptists model [Arnold Kling]

Notes from the MACo summer conference

I was glad to attend the Maryland Association of Counties conference in Ocean City this past week, a grand opportunity to catch up with old friends and meet new ones. I attended sessions on topics from the 2020 census to affordable housing, and took some running notes in the form of the tweets below.

One of the most talked-of sessions was the town hall featuring Ben Cardin, Maryland’s senior U.S. senator. Cardin has a reputation as one of the more cautiously spoken and temperate members of the Democratic caucus, and some of his comments indeed struck a centrist tone:

“It starts with protecting our borders. We need to know every person who is entering our country.” – Sen. @BenCardinforMD (D-MD) at #MACo pic.twitter.com/DQKwSSbiDj

— Walter Olson (@WalterOlsonMd) August 16, 2019

On firearms, Cardin forthrightly sides with liberals, and mentioned that he and his wife were soon to attend what he called an “anti-gun rally” in Baltimore:

Sen. Ben Cardin identifies “amount of gun ownership” in U.S. as problem needing to be solved. That’s not guns in hands of wrongdoers he’s talking about – it’s guns in the hands of law-abiding owners. #MACo pic.twitter.com/0JfLVTZKQh

— Walter Olson (@WalterOlsonMd) August 16, 2019

What really lifted me out of my chair was when a questioner asked about redistricting and Cardin said “don’t blame the Maryland legislature” for gerrymandering. It would be “naive.” Yes, he stood right there before a bipartisan audience and said that.

Sen Ben Cardin: “don’t blame the Maryland legislature” for gerrymandering. That would be “naive.” Yes, he stood right there at #MACo just now and said that. #fairmaps #mdpolitics #tamethegerrymander

— Walter Olson (@WalterOlsonMd) August 16, 2019

I had a back-and-forth with Todd Eberly about it:

If only. Cardin voiced an all-out defense of the gerrymander, opposing fair districting as “unilateral disarmament.”

— Walter Olson (@WalterOlsonMd) August 16, 2019

Oh, so they were like the Office of Pre-Crime in Minority Report…

— Todd Eberly (@ToddEberly) August 16, 2019

On First Amendment issues, unfortunately, Cardin stuck to a theme that free speech should not be seen as unlimited. He sounded the alarm about foreign interference in elections and jumped directly to a scheme to outfit social media with legally mandated “guardrails”:

Sen. Cardin pushes federal bill to force disclosure of buyers of social media ads. Unmentioned: federal court struck down similar Maryland law as violating First Amendment. I wrote it up: https://t.co/gQ3QKuMJ8c #MACo

— Walter Olson (@WalterOlsonMd) August 16, 2019

MACo posts big signs saying that it’s a nonpartisan group and campaigning at the event is forbidden, but as Danielle Gaines noted afterward at Maryland Matters, audience members during Q&A ignored this, especially after one questioner referred to the present Senate majority leader as “Moscow Mitch”:

Audience questions are blatantly ignoring the @MDCounties no-campaign rule, trying to turn the Q&A into a Dem campaign rally. #MACo

— Walter Olson (@WalterOlsonMd) August 16, 2019

For most of the panels I attended, however, audience questions provided helpful focus. At the session on agritourism, for example, one audience member offered a cautionary tale from Anne Arundel County: well- meaning nonfarmers drew up rules laying out rules for many activities that farmers have been doing since time immemorial, such as hosting community picnics. Regulation got worse.

Agritourism regulation MACo panel with AgSec Joe Bartenfelder, Kevin Atticks, Del. Charles Otto, Lucille Walker of Southern Maryland Heritage Area. pic.twitter.com/m1R3aaRaEG

— Walter Olson (@WalterOlsonMd) August 15, 2019

Apparently the electrified third rail of agritourism politics is “the W word” — farmhouse weddings. Heaven forbid people should get married and be happy if it means more vehicle traffic!

The food safety and packaging regulation panel included a discussion of how the state’s modest new cottage-food law opens up room for home-kitchen providers of a relatively short list of super-safe products, including cookies, jams (but not pickles), and baked goods. There may be some connection here with MACo’s celebrated “Taste of Maryland” reception, in which cookies, along with locally made beer and wine, were the stars. (I liked Cynthia Ann Desserts’s Black-Eyed Susan shortbread cookies at the Charles County booth.) A long line snaked up to the booth of Talbot County, which more ambitiously than its sister counties offered oysters on the half shell.

The Q&A at the food safety panel also led to a back-and-forth on the regulation of kids’ lemonade stands. Jessica Speaker, an assistant commissioner with the Baltimore City Health Department, had some warnings:

Baltimore health official Speaker: kid’s lemonade stand “would need a license” if ice was scooped or lemons sliced. #MACoCon

— Walter Olson (@WalterOlsonMd) August 16, 2019

The discussion of the state’s Styrofoam ban seemed to take for granted that it would be the jumping-off point for many further restrictions in years to come:

Del. Lorig Charkoudian, on Maryland’s first-in-nation polystyrene container ban, says she would get asked: “‘Why don’t we get rid of all plastic?’ And I’m like, yes, let’s do that too.” #MACoCon pic.twitter.com/WJq5LTryzj

— Walter Olson (@WalterOlsonMd) August 16, 2019

State pre-emption of local legislative power is the sort of topic I really warm to (and talked back on):

Of course the same progressive coalition has next to no interest in expanding local control in many areas like schooling where uniform state laws put progressives in the driver’s seat.

— Walter Olson (@WalterOlsonMd) August 15, 2019

Audience Q: why not ask lawmakers to be explicit each time about whether they intend preemption? (Generally a good idea in my view to do this.) LSSC’s Haddow opposes: they’d pick preemption too often. Revealing!

— Walter Olson (@WalterOlsonMd) August 15, 2019

While I disagreed with some of the policy perspectives (as I expected to), the conference was an invaluable chance to learn about multiple and varied aspects of Maryland government up close.

Should the EPA fund the Chesapeake Bay Journal?

I like advocacy journalism as well as the next fellow — at least I consume a lot of it as a reader. That doesn’t mean the federal government should be funding it, thereby giving a boost to one side of environmental debates in the mid-Atlantic region. My new piece for the DC Examiner examines the Environmental Protection Agency’s longstanding subsidies for the influential Chesapeake Bay Journal. (cross-posted from Overlawyered)

Baltimore bans new crude oil terminals

In the latest win for activists, Baltimore mayor Catherine Pugh signed into law a new measure banning construction and expansion of crude oil terminals in the city. Previously Oakland, Calif. banned a terminal intended for coal exports, and Portland, Ore., and other West Coast cities have also moved to block fossil fuel infrastructure following environmentalist campaigns.

As individual controversies crop up in Maryland and elsewhere over particular natural gas terminals and pipelines, it’s worth remembering that for a well-organized body of activists, the goal is to block oil and gas infrastructure, period, and the individual complaints about one or another project (Baltimore activists claimed concern about safety) are makeweights to be invoked as needed.

In miniature, November 19

• General Assembly piles absurd new continuing education mandates on licensed cosmetologists [Anastasia Boden, Washington Post/PLF]
• “Maryland Universities’ Mixed Commitment to Free Speech” [David Lublin, The Seventh State]
• My WSJ piece on Maryland’s botched bail reform now available ungated at Cato;
• Anne Arundel councilman Michael Peroutka onstage with Roy Moore at Alabama primary win [Chase Cook, Capital Gazette, more, earlier]
• “Census Bureau enlists local governments to help prepare for 2020 census” [Nancy Lavin, Frederick News Post, I’m quoted]
• Let’s make life harder for take-out food places in Baltimore, why don’t we? City has too much business already [Luke Broadwater, Baltimore Sun on councilmembers’ renewed efforts to ban Styrofoam]

Judge zaps MoCo lawn pesticide ban

Overturning Montgomery County’s ban on many commonly used lawn pesticides [Washington Post], Montgomery Circuit Court Judge Terrence McGann

said that the law — the first of its kind for a major locality in the region — would conflict with federal and Maryland state regulations that allow the use of the pesticides. The case was just one example of Maryland counties’ “insatiable appetite to tamper with existing state laws,” McGann said.

Counties have also “tried to hijack a portion of the existing field of law” in areas including tobacco, guns and minimum wage, he said.

My Cato Institute piece on the county’s bald double standard — officials had sought to exempt playing fields and other county properties from the ban — is here.

“Why Maryland lawmakers should not ban fracking”

“In fact, fracking has massive environmental benefits. The rapid expansion of natural gas production has prompted power plants all over the country to switch from coal to gas, which is both cheaper and burns much cleaner. Last year, largely thanks to this mass migration, American carbon emissions hit a 25-year low. Given its own grand green ambitions, Maryland ought to be embracing fracking.” [Chris Summers, Maryland Public Policy Institute]

My letter in the FNP on illegal EPA lobbying

My local paper, the Frederick News-Post, ran an editorial on Monday that 1) saw nothing especially wrong in the Environmental Protection Agency’s illegally expending tax money to stir up pressure on Congress to support a wider interpretation of EPA power; 2) claimed that the fuss over tax-paid lobbying was for lack of any substantive critique of EPA’s “WOTUS” (Waters of the United States) rule, although a majority of states have challenged that rule, the farm and rural landowner communities have been up in arms against it all year, and a federal appeals court has agreed to stay it.

So I wrote this letter in response, which ran today. There wasn’t space for me to dispute the FNP’s peculiar notion that to oppose the water rule as exceeding the EPA’s statutory authority is to encourage the “anti-science, climate change denial crowd,” which tends to reinforce my sense that “anti-science” and “climate denial” are turning into all-purpose epithets increasingly unhooked from any particular relationship to science or climate. (cross-posted from Overlawyered)

For me but not for thee: Montgomery County lawn pesticide ban

I’ve got a new post at Cato at Liberty about a proposed countywide ban on common lawn and turf pesticides in Washington, D.C.’s suburban Montgomery County. The best part is that county officials are frantically maneuvering to get the county’s own playing fields exempted from the ban. The piece concludes:

Libertarians often note that the state freely bans private conduct in which it’s happy to indulge itself — federal investigators can lie to you but it’s a crime if you lie to them, adopting federal accounting practices in your own business is a good way to get sent to prison, and so forth. But the double standard asked for here could wind up being — well, to coin a phrase, as bald as a Rockville lawn.

More: From the Washington Post’s piece, quoting a retired minister who lives in Silver Spring: “My lawn is such a little fragment of American Freedom. Please respect it.” [cross-posted from Overlawyered]

More: Kojo Nnamdi Show, Euvoluntary Exchange (more on provisions of bill, including enumeration of “non-essential” pesticides to be restricted, a list that incorporates by reference lists in use in other jurisdictions like Ontario and the European Commission and grants the county executive authority to name others; links back to this county document); Gazette in October; Brad Matthews, Watchdog. And: George Leventhal gets a less-than-fully-polite reception defending the proposal on WMAL.

Environmental cronyism: not just an Oregon phenomenon

Green-barrel insiderism brought down Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber, but as close observers of Maryland policy know, Portlandia’s not the only place with these problems.