House Democrats vowed to press ahead with an amended Senate bill that is their attempt to salvage some type of legislative win on redistricting this session, even as a Senate leader says the effort is dead on arrival.
The issue could come to a head Thursday when House Republicans will try to derail the amended version of Senate Bill 5, a bill that would call for special elections to fill legislative vacancies instead of the current system of appointments.
The bill was quietly amended Tuesday to include language smoothing the way for future congressional redistricting efforts. The Senate sponsor of the bill said the House amendments will effectively kill the measure, but House lawmakers are not backing down.
“I know that people have theories and rumors about whether this is alive or dead, but this is 100% … a live bill, a live language and a live issue until sine die,” said House Majority Leader Del. David Moon (D-Montgomery).
“Essentially, the Senate’s passed over something. We’ve now passed something back, and as this process goes until the presiding officers gavel us out on sine die, we have from now until then to work this thing out.”
The Senate’s top Democrat does not share Moon’s optimism.
“I think we have 20 days left of session, and we’ve got a whole lot of huge issues, and that’s what we’re going to prioritize,” said Senate President Bill Ferguson (D-Baltimore City).
The House in early February approved a bill calling for a mid-decade redrawing of the state’s eight congressional districts, part of a national push by states for partisan advantage in the upcoming midterm elections. In Maryland, one district is held by a Republican and seven by Democrats, but the House bill could have given Democrats an 8-0 sweep.
But senators oppose the move, which they say could backfire on Democrats, and the House bill has been bottled up in the Senate Rules Committee without a vote since it came across. When the election filing deadline passed a month ago, the issue had all but disappeared.
“I think everybody had already moved past this issue, except for a few others who hadn’t,” said Ferguson.
Until Tuesday.
Moon told reporters that the House was focusing less on maps and more on enabling a future push to redraw the districts.
“We’ve thrown in the towel on a map,” Moon said. “The Senate has won that discussion. There’s not going to be a map. We’ve just taken that out. It’s done.”
Moon told reporters — without offering proof — that he believed there is support in the Senate for SB 5 as amended this week by the House Government, Labor and Elections Committee.
“I can tell you in my personal conversations with individual senators since last night, including some who were adamantly opposed to this [redistricting], some of them believe this is a very reasonable compromise and are willing to entertain it,” he said Wednesday.
He declined to identify the senators to whom he was referring.
“That’s not how this works,” he told reporters.
SB 5, sponsored by Sen. Cheryl Kagan (D-Montgomery), originally proposed a change to the state constitution that would require a special election to be held in most cases to fill House and Senate vacancies. Currently, legislative vacancies are filled by the governor, who chooses from candidates submitted by the local central committee of the former member’s party, no matter how much time is left in a term.
Kagan pushed for the change for several years, and often saw it die in a House committee after getting bipartisan support in the Senate. But changes in House leadership this year and the creation of a new committee led Kagan to express hope for the bill this year.
When it came up before Government, Labor and Elections on Tuesday evening, however, it was hurriedly amended in a meeting that took less than two minutes.
The amendment proposes a second change to the Maryland Constitution. It mandates that all appeals of a congressional map go directly to the Supreme Court of Maryland, and it adds language to the constitution effectively nullifying a 2022 ruling by Senior Judge Lynne A. Battaglia.
In that redistricting challenge, Battaglia said the standard of compact and contiguous districts that respect natural political boundaries applied to the drawing of congressional districts. Before that, the rule was seen as applying only to the state’s 47 legislative districts.
Moon said he believed the amendment did not violate the single-subject requirement based on an advisory letter from legislative counsel. The letter was not immediately available to reporters who requested a copy.
Ferguson, speaking to reporters on Wednesday, had doubts.
“I haven’t read the language yet, but having two constitutional amendments with two very different subjects in one bill appears to me to be prima facie unconstitutional for the single subject rule,” said Ferguson.