Category: Sandy’s Legislative Diary

Moral delay

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The moral of this story is don’t keep your friends in the dark.

The crossfile (identical Senate version) of one of my bills was amended in that house.

I didn’t learn about it until after the committee adopted the changes.

I then checked with two advocates.  They had no problems.

I didn’t contact another supporter, who expressed concern about the change at a House subcommittee voting session today.  No heads up to me beforehand.

Action on my bill will be delayed until the Senate version gets to the House.

That should not be fatal, but it could have been avoided.

December 9-11 A love of the place and of the game

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Today, I am a tourist.

I want to get an idea of what the divided city of Jerusalem was like before the Six Day War.

We drive beside the newly operational light rail system, which parallels the old seam line that divided the modern parts of the City.

My first stop is Ammunition Hill, where a crucial battle was fought. The video ends with incredibly moving footage of soldiers at the Western Wall, singing the Shehecheyanu prayer.

The Jewish people had returned to this holiest of places.

I also wanted to enter the Old City as the soldiers did that historic day – through the Lions gate. But the gate is under repair; scaffolding and plastic sheeting render it impenetrable.

So we retreat and walk around the City’s outer wall – from Lions Gate to Dung Gate, passing closer to the Golden Gate than I ever have and providing views and photos I’ve never seen before.

For the long flight home, two books that bear upon what I’ve seen in Israel and what awaits me at home:

Shimon Peres’ biography of David Ben Gurion quotes the first Prime Minister and founder of the state on its uniqueness:

“Eretz Yisrael must be a process of repairing and purifying our lives, changing our values in the loftiest sense of the term. If we merely bring the life of the ghetto into Eretz Yisrael, then what’s the difference if we live that life here or live it there?”

Chris Matthews’ Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero reminded me why I eagerly await the start of my 30th year as a member of the House of Delegates:

“Tip O’Neill was rich in stories, each shining with a love of the game that bonded him with Kennedy.”

And I might add, with future generations.

December 8 – Sacred Ground

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There is something unique about being part of a meeting just inside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem and introducing yourself to ten religious leaders, including the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, as someone who has worked with the Maryland Catholic Conference for the last five years on repeal of Maryland’s death penalty.

Especially when my sleep was delayed the night before when a Washington Post reporter called out of the blue to ask about a meeting I had with Governor O’Malley on the issue this summer.

“How minority communities are treated by faiths with more adherents is the litmus test,” commented a rabbi present.

“When every piece of ground is sacred,” I thought to myself, “every piece of ground is fought over.”

—

We observed the demonstrable progress in the Palestinian economy and police system as we traveled through Ramallah to meet with Salaam Fayad, Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority.

“There is a much better awareness among Israelis of what we are doing,” Fayad declared. “However, more people subscribe to a two-state solution than believe it will actually happen.”

One of the things impressed upon us by many of the leaders and thinkers we’ve met with these past four days: the unwillingness of politcal figures on both sides to come to the “damn table,” as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently said.

As an Israeli academic put it at the end of the day, “You can’t prematurely create a Palestinian state under the wrong conditions.”

Israel must demonstrate the merits of that argument to the Jewish Diaspora and the rest of the world.

December 7 – Mamilla Street and 30,000 votes per seat

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We are on Mamilla Street, where high end shops predominate, and more than one cornerstone bears the name of the developer and the architect. (The latter is Moshe Safdie, whose body of work includes 2218 and 2220 Angelica Terrace, where I live.)

Lunch is at a restaurant named Herzl because on his only trip to what was then Palestine, he stayed in the house on this site, which was dismantled and now restored. (That’s why each exterior stone is numbered.)

Standing outside Herzl, our guide shows us a photo of the street before the Six Day War in 1967, when Jerusalenm was divided in two.

Mailla was on the border line, home only to the poor since Israel’s birth in 1948 because the upper class had fled. Jordanian soldiers were firing at Israeli civilians.

We are joined at Herzl by an American expert on the Middle East. Like others this week, he notes the progress that has been made in establishing a civil society in the West Bank. (He also acknowledges the anti-Semitic materials still being used in the schools .

But, he notes, that progress has its limits for a Palestinian if there are still Israeli checkpoints during his daily travels.

Far from Mamilla Street.

—

I didn’t get a chance yesterday to ask the student protesters what they planned to do next.

A Labor Party member of the Knesset gave us an answer today.

30,000 votes are needed to elect someone. An increase in turnout of 250,000 among those under 30, who normally don’t vote in great numbers, translates to eight members of the next Knesset.

December 6 – Old Values, Young Science

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What do I learn tomorrow?

Our speaker was referring to a necessity of the 21st Century economy, but I think it’s fair to say that 88-year old Shimon Pres seeks to answer that question every day.

“Ïsrael must be based on values that are old spiritually but young scientifically,” the Israeli President told our group.

I asked about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent speech that was seen as a laying the groundwork for a military attack on Iran’s nuclear facility. The speech was given at ceremony marking the 38th anniversary of the death of David Ben Gurion, the country’s first Prime Minister and Peres’ mentor.

“We didn’t initiate attacks,” responded Peres. “No war plans take into account failures. They’re ultimately assessed on the actual confrontation and the judgment of history.”

Three generations separate Peres and the three students we met with this afternoon. They

They were involved in this past summer’s protests about economic disparities and echoed Peres’ remark that “the greatest contribution of Jews to history is dissatisfaction.”

“The Israeli myth is failing. Work will not save us from poverty,” declared one student.

“I did everyting right. I served in the army, am going to Tel Aviv University, but how will I pay for my kids and my mortgage,” asserted another.

An economics professor provided the hard numbers: Israel needs to give more of its people the ability to work in a modern economy.

—

A note about events back home. Dan Rodricks’ Sun column about the Schurick conviction for authorizing robo calls designed to suppress the vote in last year’s election prompted me to send him this mesage:

Sen. Lisa Gladden and I introduced the law making it illegal to use fraud to “willfully and knowingly … influence or attempt to influence a voter’s decision whether to go to the polls to cast a vote.” What prompted our legislation was the flyer distributed in African-American and Hispanic communities urging people to vote on the Thursday after Election Day in 2004 and erroneously implying that they could not vote if they owed rent or child support. Such tactics are part of a national pattern and practice of trying to suppress the vote among minorities. To our knowledge, Maryland was the first, and still only, state to take action against such dirty tricks. As to the First Amendment concern raised by defense counsel, fraudulent speech is not protected political speech.

December 5 – In the Minority

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“The Jewish people have some experience being treated as a minority. When in the majority, we should not mistreat a minority.”

I wish I had said or written that. Our guest at lunch, from the Israel Democracy Institute, did instead.

Some of the Knesset bills he opposes have been enacted; others are still pending.

Many are comparable to laws enacted in the U.S. during the Red Scare after World War II or recently proposed by the far right to limit judicial review.

Among them are a loyalty oath directed at Israeli Arabs and a libel law that requires a newspaper to publish a response from the individual claiming defamation.

The U.S. Supreme Court has declared similar laws to be unconstitutional.

So I was taken aback when a prominent Israeli we met with later today proclaimed, “The threat to civil liberties would be dire in America if it faced the same threat Israel does.”

He cited the loyalty oath required of naturalized citizens.

“But Israel Arabs are citizens from birth,” I told him afterwards. “That’s a significant difference.”

An encouraging note: two of our more conservative speakers today made the same point, “Israel and its friends must make the liberal progressive case for support in America. Our support there is not as strong as it should be.”

Our dinner guest put it best:

“You don’t take the Chosen People and put them in the Holy Land and expect them to be only normal – to just get a passing grade on treatment of minorities.”

December 4 – Next Year and What Next

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L’an prochain a Jerusalem.

For millenia, every Passover seder has ended with the words, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

I read that phrase in French for the first time today in the haggadah used by Jews in 1941 who were sent to to a French internment camp.

That hagaddah is among the archives at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum.

The museum has few records of the role of the French national railroad during the Nazi period.

However, one memorandum summarizes a meeting attended by railroad officials on July 15, 1942, the day before the mass arerest and deportation to Auschwitz of 13,000 Jews.

“It will be very important to get all these details – the whole picture of what the railroad did,” commented Shaul Ferrero, a senior archivist for documentation from France.

—

“To have a city where 40% of the people are new immigrants, that is the Zionist ideal,” Mayor Benny Vaknin of Ashkelon told me at lunch.

“How does this compare to running Jerusalem?” I asked.

“There you have eight deputies. It keeps your coalition together,” the Mayor replied.

“Lincoln used that theory when creating a Cabinet of his band of rivals,” I responded.

—

Over the years, I’ve explained my bills in many settings – before committees in Annapolis, at neighborhood meetings, and in my Legislation classes.

Never, until today, before nine people whose parents were transported to their death by the French national railroad.

They asked some questions more than once.

Most urgently, “What do we have to do next?”

I simply replied, “No other state will have to pass such a bill, if the company complies with the Maryland law. All you will need to do is turn on your computer. The records will be there.”

I was emotionally drained when our hour together ended.

December 3 – At the Wall

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One does not travel to Jerusalem. One returns.

I first heard those words last year, as part of the Shehecheyanu ceremony when we first saw Jerusalem on the Family Mission, with Stewart, Bonnie, Rachel, and Elliot.

They were the first words I read when I neared the Western Wall this afternoon.

I had dropped my bags in the hotel room and walked towards the Old City, hoping to get there before sundown.

Once there, I was told, “No camera until 5:20 when Shabbat ends.”

So 30 minutes to read from my Bible, Genesis 22 and Psalm 118, and observe with my naked eye.

December 2 – In the Courtrrom

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Telford Taylor was the Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials.

He never talked about it in his Constitutional Law class.

For most of the semester, he discussed Marbury v. Madison, where the Supreme Court first exercised judicial review to declare unconstitutional a law passed by Congress.

So I told my guide that I wanted to begin my tour of Nuremberg in the courtroom where the trials were held.

The room has been open to the public for many years, but there was no exhibit about the trials until last year.

This trial is the “significant tribute power pays to reason,” declared Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the first Chief Prosecutor, in his opening statement at the trial of Herman Goering and other high ranking Nazis and military officials.

In his remarks at the outset of the trial for German judges and lawyers, Taylor asserted, “The murderer’s dagger was hidden under legal robes.”

Our afternoon begins at the Nazi rally grounds, where Hitler would speak to 150,000 SS and SA members and 50,000 spectators. All that remains is trhe World War I memorial, which predates the Nazi regime.

Only one structure built for Hitler still stands, the partially completed Reich Congress. Modeled on the Roman Colosseum, it was to hold 50,000. There was no exhibit here about the Nazis until the World Cup was played in Nuremberg in 2006.

A stadium designed for 400,000 was never built. (They knew they’d have to hand out binoculars to spectators, notes my guide.)

At the end of the day, my guide says, “I guess you’ve been thinking about coming to Nuremberg for quite some time.”

” Freud would say, ‘Yes, since that constitutional Law class,'” I responded, “but I didn’t think about seeing the courtroom here until this past winter while working on the French railroad bill.”

December 1 – Dachau and the Rule of Law

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Dachau had nothing to do with Hitler’s Final Solution for the Jewish Problem.

It began as a camp for political prisoners shortly after Hitler gained power in the wake of the Reichstag fire.

It housed people in protective custody until the investigation of their case was complete. They never were.

Some for violating the Treachery Act, a decree against spreading untrue claims about the government.

Jehovah’s Witnesses who refused to give the Hitler salute or serve in the military.

Those who ran afoul of the Reich office that fought homosexuality and abortion.

Eventually, Dachau had everything to do with Hitler’s Final Solution for the Jewish Problem. Jews.

Arbitrary treatment, humiliation, and torture of prisoners was the norm at Dachau.

The “Dachau Academy” trained the SS for the concentration casmps.

“The records of many of the people imprisoned here are available to the publuic,” our guide told us.

“A way to honor and remember the dead that should soon be available for those on the trains transporting them like cattle from Vichy France to the German border,” I said to myself.

“Why are you here today?” our guide asked us at the start of our tour.

“Because tomorrow I will be in Nuremberg,” I replied, “where the Nazis were held accountable by the rule of law.”

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