I feel very lucky to be a resident of Maryland. Maryland seems to be an island of progressive change in a sea of states where the tea party and the Republican Party are shifting even more rightward.
Today, Robert McCarthy had a column in The Washington Post discussing the leftward shift of Maryland Democrats. Recently, the Maryland legislature has passed the Dream Act and Marriage Equality, and this year gun control laws and a repeal of the death penalty are likely to pass.
According to McCarthy:
Everybody knows the Republican Party has moved to the right in recent years with the tea party’s rise. Attracting less attention, however, is the Democratic Party’s shift to the left, especially on social issues.
The trend, which results partly from generational change, is highlighted this year by the Maryland General Assembly’s surprising move to repeal the death penalty. Opponents have been trying to get rid of it for decades, and a major repeal effort failed in Annapolis as recently as two years ago.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
The quote in the title of my diary (quoted in McCarthy's column) is from Maryland State Senator Jamie Raskin. “The Republican Party is going tea party, and the Democrats are going progressive," Raskin said. After many years of seeing Democrats move to the center, Raskin's words are nice to hear.
When I looked on Senator Raskin's website, I found a link to an article Senator Raskin wrote in The Nation. There, Senator Raskin stated:
We live in what will surely come to be called the Citizens United era, a period in which a runaway corporatist ideology has overtaken Supreme Court jurisprudence. No longer content just to pick a president, as five conservative Republicans on the Rehnquist Court did in 2000, five conservative Republicans on the Roberts Court a decade later voted to tilt the nation’s entire political process toward the views of moneyed corporate power.
. . . . The billions of dollars thus turned loose for campaign purposes at the direction of corporate managers not only can be but—under the terms of corporate law—must be spent to increase profits. If businesses choose to exercise their newly minted political “money speech” rights, they must work to install officials who will act as
corporate tools.
http://www.thenation.com/...
Although I am not in Senator Raskin's district, I am glad to see Senator Raskin and others in Maryland standing up for progressive principles.
Here is a link to Senator Raskin's website if you want to check it out.
http://jamieraskin.com