By Adam Pagnucco.
Have you ever run for office? I have not, but I have worked for a few campaigns and written about many of them. It’s HARD. There are all the phone calls, often to complete strangers, to beg for money. There is all the door knocking, sometimes in hot weather, sometimes in rain or snow and even sometimes in the face of rude voters and aggressive guard dogs. Then there are the endless, maddening questionnaires from groups that might not endorse you or anyone else. They come on top of the endless forums in which the same 18 people – all of whom have already made up their minds – appear in the audience. And after many months of doing this, you just might lose.
What if you could skip all of this and just appoint yourself to office? Would you do it?
While you ponder that, let’s recognize that folks appoint themselves to office all the time. Their mechanism for doing so is membership on party central committees, which are empowered by the state constitution to fill vacancies for state senators and delegates. When a state senator or delegate leaves office in the middle of a term, the constitution requires the governor to appoint a successor picked by the central committee of the party and county of the departing officeholder. So if a Montgomery County delegate who is a Democrat leaves in the middle of a term, the Montgomery County Democratic Central Committee (MCDCC) appoints a replacement. This happens often. Of the county’s current 32 state legislators, 11 were appointed to a senate or delegate seat.
MCDCC’s members are elected in gubernatorial primary elections. They are supposed to work for the good of the party. In practice, some put in a lot more work than others. But all pay attention when a state legislative vacancy appears in their districts. Four current delegates in Montgomery County – Pam Queen (District 14), Linda Foley (District 15), Jheanelle Wilkins (District 20) and Kirill Reznik (District 39) – were sitting MCDCC members when they were appointed to office. Senator Susan Lee (District 16) was on the central committee when she was appointed as a delegate twenty years ago. This past April, MCDCC member Aaron Kaufman had himself appointed to the ballot and a sure House seat after District 18 voters were robbed of a contested primary. The issue is at hand again with the pending departure of Delegate Eric Luedtke, who will be serving in the administration of incoming Governor Wes Moore. MCDCC members don’t always win when trying to appoint themselves – for example, David Fraser-Hidalgo defeated a central committee member when he was appointed to a District 15 delegate vacancy. But enough of them do win that it’s noticeable.
The temptation of avoiding the difficulty of campaigning and simply zipping straight to Annapolis is understandable. Some of these folks turn out to be decent elected officials – Reznik, for example, is a great delegate – but the whole process violates the concept that voters should pick their leaders. Way back in 2008, I asked Delegate Kumar Barve if central committee members should be banned from appointing themselves to office. Barve laughed and said, ““My goodness, if you took that away from them, no one would serve on the central committee! We’d have to pay them to serve!” And that’s the point – the notion that insiders, not voters, divvy up the electoral spoils for themselves is terribly damaging to democracy. Who cares about the voters when you can simply bypass them for a state office (and a state salary)?
One of the worst examples of this process occurred in the City of Baltimore two years ago, when a delegate convicted of accepting bribes was replaced by the city’s Democratic central committee. The winner was the daughter of a long-time delegate. She also happened to be a committee member (a party chair, no less) and cast the deciding vote for herself on a 3-2 tally. A party official threw out a reporter right before the candidates began answering questions from the committee. Only after a firestorm of condemnation was the reporter allowed back in. The party official in question blamed the building’s landlord for the ejection, but the landlord later claimed to know nothing about it. The appointment winner told Baltimore Brew, “I’m a daddy’s girl, but I’m my own person and I won’t allow our relationship to interfere with my work,” as she entered the legislature along with her father.
Voters want special elections. Every time Marylanders are given a choice between appointments and special elections, they pick elections. And yet many party officials are loath to give up their appointment power and fight hard against most efforts to repeal it. (MCDCC did endorse a compromise measure limiting but not repealing appointments in 2018.) Several lawmakers over the years including former State Senators Jamie Raskin and Rich Madaleno and current Delegate David Moon have proposed partial or full repeal of state legislative appointments, but so far, all of their bills have failed.
While reformers like Moon fight on, one thing can be done to limit the worst excess of appointments: MCDCC can ban its members from appointing themselves to office. They can do that any time they want through changing their bylaws. This raises the question of whether Barve was right: if the ability to get lucky and go straight to Annapolis is stripped from them, would anyone serve on the central committee? So let’s call the question right now and see if MCDCC will do the right thing and end this practice.
Is being on the central committee about service? Or power?