Len Lazarick
Republican delegates from Anne Arundel County are taking a lead role in the petition drive to overturn the new law granting in-state tuition to illegal immigrant children.
“We’ve turned in the most [signatures],” said Del. Nic Kipke of Pasadena, estimating that they’ve collected “upwards of 10,000” of the 40,000 signatures submitted to the State Board of Elections, “and we’re really just getting started.”
On May 31, the day the first round of petitions had to be submitted, Kipke said he had people knocking on his door as early as 7:50 a.m. to deliver filled out petitions. He and his fellow delegates in District 31, which includes working class neighborhoods and exclusive communities like Gibson Island, had been door knocking to collect signatures.
“This bill offends people because there’s fear that illegal immigrants might take the place of a U.S. citizen,” Kipke said. “It’s really kind of cool seeing how many people are getting people involved.”
“We all fully support legal immigration in our state,” said Del. Steve Schuh, who represents North County, but “we need to stop diverting taxpayer money” when the state continues to face deficits.
Del. Ron George, a Republican who represents Annapolis, said people have been coming into his jewelry stores on Main Street in the capital and in Severna Park, asking to sign petitions or get petitions to collect signatures.
Even though the Maryland high school graduates who would be covered by the bill have to attend community colleges first, George said, “the student tuition pays only a third of the cost” of the education, with the state and county picking up the rest. (The county council cut $5.2 million from the budget for Anne Arundel Community College last month, possibly forcing a tuition hike.)
“We’re in dire straits at the state level,” George said.
Dutch Basks in Role
Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger freely admits he’s not very fond of math, and as a freshman Democrat eight years ago, he didn’t particularly want the assignment on the House Select Committee on Intelligence and the subcommittee which oversees the National Security Agency, with its headquarters in his district.
Now, of course, he’s glad he got the assignment. And in January, he became the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, making him one of the eight members of Congress that get secret briefings about U.S. intelligence operations.
“I like action,” said Ruppersberger last month, shortly after a trip to Yemen. Last month he also was basking in the glow of the success of the U.S. operation that took out Osama bin Laden. He was one of the few people actually to see the photographs of the dead Al-Qaeda leader that President Obama decided not to release, and was happy to tell the media and constituents what he knew after the fact. (He had apparently known in February that the CIA had found bin Laden.)
As protector and defender of NSA and the burgeoning cybersecurity industry in the area, Ruppersberger is concerned about how the current budget-cutting frenzy in Congress will affect intelligence and defense operations.
“We as a country have to deal with the deficit,” Ruppersberger said in an interview after the recent TeleCommunications Systems ribbon-cutting in Hanover (see page 1). “My concern is with some of the cuts. You can’t just pick a number and cut all this.”
The congressman admitted that “there’s a lot of redundancy” in the intelligence agencies, but “I think we will clearly be better than most jurisdictions” when the dust settles.
“We’re trying to set a plan for the future” for cybersecurity, Ruppersberger said. “There are governments out there that are attacking us,” attempting to hack into and undermine the banking system, the electric grid and other key parts of our infrastructure that are managed electronically.
“I’m concerned that a cyberattack is going to affect the country,” he said. In other developments related to NSA, the Baltimore Sun reported last month on the number of fraud cases involving contractors and subcontractors to the agency, with some outside experts arguing that NSA is simply awash in too much dough.
The May 23 New Yorker magazine had a lengthy, 9,000-word piece on the background of this month’s trial in Baltimore of Thomas Drake, who stands accused of leaking classified documents to a Baltimore Sun reporter. As veteran journalist Jane Mayer reports it, the prosecution is another attempt to go after whistle-blowers about mismanagement at NSA and illegal domestic spying on U.S. citizens.
The article covers ground already heavily reported by author James Bamford in his 2008 book, The Shadow Factory.
Budget Clash
The battle over the Anne Arundel County budget this year was particularly fractious last month, especially given that the county has Republican County Executive John Leopold at the helm proposing the budget and a four-member GOP majority on the county council.
For two of the four freshmen members of the council, Republicans Derek Fink of Pasadena and John Grasso of Glen Burnie, the disputes were about who were the true fiscal conservatives. They wanted to cut Leopold’s budget even further to avoid a property tax increase, even though the executive’s budget already had cut pay for county workers and laid off some of them.
After a long day of delay May 27, the council finally approved a budget that included a slight property tax hike and budget cuts not quite as severe as originally proposed. Fink and Grasso voted against the budget and the tax hike, and Council Chairman Dick Ladd of Severna Park, also a freshmen Republican, joined them rejecting the tax hike.
Ladd was particularly miffed that the council rejected funding for reconstruction of Severna Park High School in his district, as Leopold had requested. Instead, the money was shifted to the building of six elementary schools.
Overall, the council cut about $19 million and raised the property tax to 91 cents per $100, about $78 a year for the average householder.
