You say taxation, and I say tenacity.

Amendments designed to put Democrats on record about the need for tax increases to maintain current spending levels were offered by House Republicans as we debated the state budget last week.

Announcing his candidacy for Governor yesterday, Bob Ehrlich one upped them. He pledged to undo the one cent increase in the sales tax that we adopted in 2007.

He did not say where he would cut $600 million from the budget to compensate for the lost revenue. He never put forward such reductions as Governor. In fact, the legislature consistently reduced his proposed expenditures over his four-year term.

Martin O’Malley, on the other hand, will talk about leadership in tough times and investing in the state’s future.

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The Finance Committee will have a workgroup on my arbitration bill. The members I’ve talked to understand why the bill is needed. Consumers are far too often stuck with arbitrators who are not impartial.

My educated guess: the bill will be amended and then delayed on the Senate floor by the banking industry. Then the House will have to concur in these changes the last night of the session.

My voter’s rights bill has been amended by the Election Laws subcommittee in the House. No delays likely, but Senate will have to agree to these changes as well.

The outcome was not in doubt, but my colleagues kept talking.

When the clerk calls the roll, our votes light up on a big electronic board. Any member can rise for up to two minutes to explain his or her vote.

If eyeballing of the green (yes) and red (no) lights indicates a close vote, members will stall for time and speak, allowing for some last-minute persuasion. (That can be rhetorical or face-to-face.)

When you know that the vote is going to be close, you assign people to stand up and explain their position to allow for your reluctant votes to be reminded of their commitment.

That was not the case today. The gang bill passed, 111-28. But a few people did get their sound bites in the newspaper.

We’re in the home stretch.

With one week left in the session, two of my bills require some legislating to become law.

We hope to amend the bill authorizing a court to issue a restraining order to prevent certain election law violations. If the House makes that change, then the Senate will have to do so as well.

A Senate hearing tomorrow for my legislation to aid credit card customers and other consumers by requiring organizations that perform arbitration activities to disclose the outcome of the decisions they have reached, the fees they are paid, and their ties to the businesses that select them. Word is that several lobbyists have been hired to defeat my proposal.

I met with the committee chair to outline what the bill would do and why it’s needed. He promised us a fair hearing.

After the session ends, serious campaigning will begin.

This weekend, I received my first candidate questionnaire from an interest group. I found it odd, if not inappropriate, to remind us that endorsements are coming while bills are still pending.

I’m an insider.

I’m also one of the more liberal members of the legislature.

My first year here, I learned that you can often get a lot more done if you’re willing to seek common ground and settle for incremental progress. And you’re more likely to achieve that end if you don’t harden another legislator’s viewpoint by drawing attention to your differences.

A case in point this week.

Students in a legal clinic at the University of Maryland Law School sued a chicken farm on the Eastern Shore for violating the Clean Water Act.

That prompted the State Senate to make $250,000 of the law school’s appropriation contingent upon a report being submitted about the cases brought by the Environmental Law Clinic.

I got a call early this week from a member of the faculty. My advice: draft alternative language that responds to the legislature’s legitimate concerns but doesn’t put any of your funding at risk. I also arranged a meeting with House leaders.

I also said: “I won’t vote for a floor amendment that would strike the committee’s language. A recorded vote would harden positions on both sides and make it more difficult to reach an acceptable compromise.”

Senator Harry McGuirk was known as Soft Shoes because he frequently got things done without leaving traces of his involvement.

I can’t claim that I’m filling his shoes, but sometimes I’m following in his footsteps.

The tea party movement came to Annapolis today.

A resolution to impeach the Attorney General was debated on the House floor and then considered by my committee.

There is absolutely no basis in law for impeaching the Attorney General because he wrote a legal opinion on same-sex marriage that some members disagree with. By no stretch of legal reasoning does it constitute “incompetency, willful neglect of duty or misdemeanor in office.”

Nonetheless, over the last two days, our attention has been diverted from the legislation properly before us to this attention getter.

In the meetings I participated in yesterday, we decided that the appropriate forum for acting on this matter was not the full House but the Judiciary Committee.

During today’s floor debate, I reminded my colleagues that both the Nixon and Clinton impeachment resolutions were referred to the Judiciary Committee. I also noted that a motion to expel a Maryland state senator twelve years ago was first sent to the Joint Committee on Legislative Ethics.

Explaining my vote in committee, I stated, “The appropriate forum to decide whether the Attorney General correctly reasoned that the state may recognize same-sex marriages performed in another state is not the floor of the House of Delegates. It is not the Judiciary Committee. It is a court of law.”

No opposition means there’s no opposition.

I hope.

No one signed up to testify against my two bills in the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee. The chairman took note of that after I finished testifying on the first.

That legislation deals with legal liability for architectural and design firms when their employees enter on a third party’s property during a construction or renovation project. The example I gave was setting foot on a railroad property to make an assessment of a bridge overhead.

Arcane for sure.

The second was my bill extending the reporter’s shield law to student journalists for college newspapers. The chairman repeated the first argument I made in my written testimony.

But unanimity is not busting out all over Annapolis.

I was in back-to-back meetings about two very controversial issues: impeachment of Attorney General Doug Gansler because of his legal opinion that the State can recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states and a budget bill amendment that would cut funds for the Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Maryland Law School because it sued Perdue Farms for allegedly violating the Clean Water Act.

What we decided will be known shortly.

Crossover and Passover coincide this year.

Crossover is the deadline for House bills to receive a constitutional majority, 71 votes, and cross over to a Senate committee, which will hold a public hearing on the legislation. Same for Senate bills coming to the House.

If you miss this deadline, your bill goes to the Rules Committee. It may still get a hearing but at a later date.

Time is not your friend in these last two weeks. So that delay can be fatal.

Because Passover begins tonight, the crossover deadline has been extended from today to tomorrow.

When we reconvene, I will offer this prayer:

Why is this Crossover different from all others?

At the seder table last night and tonight, the youngest child asks: “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

The first time that Jewish boys, and more recently girls, are able to read the Four Questions in Hebrew – in front of their extended family, is a proud moment indeed.

We call this holiday Passover because the Angel of Death, the malechamovitz, killed the first born sons of Egyptian families but passed over the houses of Pharaoh’s slaves, the Jews.

After this tenth and final plague, Pharaoh let my people go.

The exodus to freedom has inspired many generations and many peoples.

In the Palm Sunday gospel, Luke writes of the day of Unleavened Bread on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, “Go and make preparations for us to eat the Passover.”

In 1968, Dr. Maryin Luther King, Jr. was planning to join the seder of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who had stood beside him on the march from Selman to Birmingham. An assassin’s bullet prevented that celebration.

Last year, a seder was held in the White House for the first time. The search for the hidden piece of matzo, the afikomen, was conducted by the only two children present – Malia and Sasha.

Wherever the seder is held, it concludes with a declaration – in centuries past a dream, but now a reality:

Next year in Jerusalem.

Amen.

“The Chamber of Commerce opposed the bill then. They oppose this modest change now.”

I was speaking on the House floor, in response to another delegate’s point that the Chamber opposed the SLAPP bill I was defending.

Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation are brought to intimidate opponents, usually an individual or a neighborhood association, not to win in court.

I sponsored the SLAPP bill when we passed it six years ago. I drafted the amendments to it this week.

Four years ago, I introduced legislation that would authorize a court to act before fraud or voter suppression stains the electoral process. The court can intervene if there are reasonable grounds to believe someone is about to violate the law.

For the first time, this legislation will be debated on the Senate floor. By a 6-5 margin, a Senate committee gave it a favorable report last night.

Today, I spoke to one of the Democrats on that panel. I was amazed to learn that he had voted against my bill because he feared that it would be used to harass groups doing voter registration.

I told him the bill is modeled on a provision in the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965. He assured me he’d switch his vote.

A dead bill in another forum may smell as sweet – eventually.

Some of my legislation may not flower before we adjourn, but some of these proposals will be worked on after the session ends.

Consigning a bill to summer study often delays the inevitable, but it doesn’t have to.

I realized last fall that my bill to fund loan forgiveness for public service attorneys was not going to pass this session.

That came about when I learned that the Maryland Access to Justice Commission, an arm of the judicial branch, had crafted a bill to increase funding for the Maryland Legal Services Corporation.

That bill would be in the line ahead of mine this session, but that commission could work on my idea next. Its support would be a big boost for my idea in 2011.

A second summer study came about after the committee chairman said at the public hearing on another bill of mine that he wanted to examine in greater depth how the state allocates the money from the legal settlement with the cigarette industry.

He’s already told me I can be an active participant in that review.

So I won’t be spending the entire summer on the campaign trail or Camden Yards.

I became the lead sponsor of one bill and lost 25 votes on another during this morning’s floor session.

Mine is not the only bill that would require the Public Service Commission to make comparative information about electricity prices easily accessible to the public.

Last week, I was told that another delegate’s legislation would be the vehicle for this issue and I would be riding along as a co-sponsor.

“No problem,” I responded. “I can still tell my constituents that I played an important role. I don’t have to be the lead sponsor.”

I learned today that change has come to Annapolis. I’m now the lead sponsor.

Most consumers do not realize that when they sign a standard contract to lease or buy goods or services, they may be giving up their rights to take any contract disputes to court.

Some arbitration organizations almost invariably rule for the business, not the consumer. My House Bill 379 would require these companies to make data available on the outcome of their cases.

This legislation passed the House, 140-0, until one by one, 25 members, overwhelmingly Republicans, stood up to ask that their votes be changed from green to red.

I guess they had forgotten that the banks oppose my bill.