Politics & Opinion

Local Politics Being Eliminated in Maryland

By Scott Davis

Local governance ”of the people, by the people, and for the people” is being slowly eliminated in the state of Maryland. The paltry amount of political competition over the past fifty years has opened the door to mass centralization of power in Annapolis under the authority of a single political party.

Redistricting has robbed Anne Arundel County of congressional representation in Washington, DC and it threatens to remake the composition of the Anne Arundel County delegation. From delegate Cathy Vitale’s District 33A in Severna Park to delegate Don Dwyer’s District 31 in Pasadena, Republicans are being targeted by Governor O’Malley and his political machine with new gerrymandered maps that make re-election more difficult for local politicians, just as it disenfranchises hundreds of thousands of conservative voters who have shaped Anne Arundel Counties destiny for generations. Democrat politicians cannot compete against conservative politicians with their ideas so they are redrawing the playing field.

An even more devastating blow to small, local, limited government is Governor O’Malley’s Plan Maryland initiative. Under the mantle of ‘sustainable growth,’ unelected bureaucrats at the state level will be making decisions about local land use in rural areas like Carroll County and others. Plan Maryland was not ratified by the legislature in Annapolis; rather it was an executive action by the Governor that thumbs its nose at the traditional ‘separation of powers’ built into our state constitution. Furthermore, say goodbye to the traditional authority of county councils and other local bodies that were designed in the American style of governance to allow citizens closest to the issues to decide outcomes.

Rural residents of Maryland have already traced the political blueprint in Plan Maryland to an initiative unveiled at the United Nations in the 1990’s known as Agenda 21. Besides designating millions of acres as wilderness refuge, Agenda 21 and the International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) proposes moving populations into government-approved high-rise, mixed-use, densely populated districts in designated cities around the United States. O’Malley’s Plan Maryland encourages development in “approved” growth areas along the Baltimore-Washington corridor.

Protecting individual property rights are guaranteed in the United States Constitution, but the United Nations Agenda 21 plan takes the opposite stance: “Land… cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice; if unchecked, it may become a major obstacle in the planning and implementation of development schemes. The provision of decent dwellings and healthy conditions for the people can only be achieved if land is used in the interest of society as a whole.”

The United Nations is a corrupt international body controlled by many nations hostile to the United States like Russia, China, and Syria. Should we be taking pointers from these nations on our constitutional rights as American citizens?

In 1997, the anti-American George Soros’s Open Society gave the International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) a $2,147,415 grant to support its Local Agenda 21 Project. Since then, the program has grown from a handful of local municipalities to a network in more than 500 cities, towns and counties actively striving to create more ‘sustainable communities’. It appears American politicians are, indeed, taking their cues from international bodies and operatives that do not have our constitution or our people’s interest at heart.

From the redistricting of Anne Arundel County to the erosion of local government autonomy in Plan Maryland – the American ideals of limited government and local self-governance are in decline. The Democratic Party’s determination to centralize political authority in Annapolis, along with the abandonment of any pretense of separation of powers, removes vital political safeguards instituted by the nation’s founders to protect citizens from the prospect of a tyrannical government.