New York Times – Sandy Rosenberg

I have been accused of making too many bill requests after reading the New York Times.

Today I plead guilty.

The Trump Administration has crippled the environmental review of construction projects funded with federal dollars.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/climate/trump-nepa-environment.html

I asked that a bill be drafted to create such a review process in Maryland.

Earlier this year, I read that the New York legislature had passed legislation requiring that hundreds of millions of dollars be spent in disadvantaged communities harmed by pollution and other industrial byproducts.

I also asked that a bill be drafted to do the same here.

The Times logo is “All The News Fit To Print.”

I hope that my two bills are considered fit to pass.

I have been accused of introducing bills after reading an article in the New York Times.

“Don’t Look to States for New Ideas” is the headline for an op-ed in today’s paper.

Justice Brandeis called the states the laboratories of democracy. The minimum wage and welfare reform are prominent examples.

Ideas grown in the petri dish of a state legislature will no longer survive in the partisan hot house of Capitol Hill, contends the op-ed’s author, an economist with the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2010 to 2011.

I must confess, however. I’m already working on a bill prompted by a Times op-ed.

When welfare reform was enacted by the Congress in 1996, Ron Haskins was the Republican staff expert in the House Ways and Means Committee.

I met him then, when I served on a task force on welfare reform. He’s now at the Brookings Institution.

I read his Times op-ed, “Social Programs That Work,” two weeks ago. It discusses how several evidence-based policy initiatives were created and implemented by the Obama administration.

I’m working with Ron on legislation that would do the same for a pilot program in Maryland.

We will seek bipartisan support.