http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
The Washington Post's Jenna Johnson takes a closer look at Maryland's one Republican Congressman. He's decided that he's qualified to tell Washington DC residents how to handle marijuana decriminalization -- because of his medical degree, he's qualified to put his oar in.
When the activist group D.C. Vote tried to pressure Harris by calling for a boycott of beaches in his district, including Ocean City, Harris shrugged off the threat.
D.C. residents “love coming to the Eastern Shore,” he said on July 3 on WTTG (Channel 5). “We don’t have the kind of drug-abuse problem that D.C. has. We don’t have the kind of crime problem that D.C. has.”
"We?" (I'm reminded of the Lenny Bruce routine where the Masked Man finds himself surrounded by warriors ... "what do we do?" he asks his Faithful Indian Companion. "What 'we,' white man?" is the answer.)
According to the Post, Harris is "unfairly typecast" as a Tea Party type. Of course, his positions are indistinguishable from any Teapublican's, and his infrequent "town hall" meetings devolve into lectures about why he's right and everyone else is wrong.
During last fall’s budget standoff, Rep. Andy Harris was one of the last true believers, continuing to vote against the federal budget even at the risk of prolonging a government shutdown. He equates mandated insurance coverage of contraception with the burning of churches and medical use of marijuana with telling patients to chew on mold instead of taking penicillin.
Harris hails from the northern suburbs of Baltimore,
not from the Eastern Shore. What's interesting is that the bulk of his district, the Eastern Shore, has a poverty problem and an access-to-medical-care problem.
If the "drug problems" and the "crime problems" are somehow smaller, it has to do merely with population density.
Hey Andy! Over here!