Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown is spending a lot of time, and taxpayer-provided resources, to sue President Donald Trump and the federal government. I’ve seen this act before. When Brian Frosh was Maryland’s attorney general, he frivolously sued the Trump administration over 20 times and was specifically funded by the Maryland legislature to do so. Frosh, as I suspect Brown will soon experience, suffered courtroom defeat after courtroom defeat, but it didn’t matter. He was feeding the narrative that “orange man is bad,” pandering to the ultra-left of the Democratic base and using the taxpayers’ dime to pay for it. Of course, all of that was going on at a time when Maryland was trying to land the new FBI headquarters. How did that work out for the citizens of Maryland?
Brown is doubling down on Frosh’s unsuccessful playbook. He has already joined in at least seven lawsuits against the Trump administration (including one over Trump’s effort to stop DEI), and the new president has only been in office for a little more than a month. Some of the lawsuits center around the president’s efforts to roll back woke DEI policies and reign in federal spending on waste, fraud, abuse and nonsense. In order to pursue this folly, the legislature has equipped Brown with a million dollars of your tax money at a time when the state is running a $3 billion deficit and is trying to secure federal funding to rebuild the Key Bridge.
The attorney general of Maryland’s core responsibility is to direct the legal business of the state. He is supposed to enforce the criminal laws that fall under his purview, represent state agencies, review administrative regulations and things like that. In other words, theoretically at least, his office should have plenty on his plate already. Instead, he’s using your tax dollars to engage in tomfoolery. In the last couple days, at a time when people here are getting pummeled by BGE in their electric bills, Brown sent a letter to Congress urging it to terminate the national energy emergency declared by President Trump. Again, he would be better off using the vast resources at his disposal to seek relief for the Maryland rate-payers through the Public Service Commission.
My suggestion to the attorney general, Gov. Wes Moore and the Maryland legislature would be to use some common sense, which I realize isn’t so common these days. How about all of you concentrate on your jobs, stay in your lanes, balance your budgets and stop continuously poking the bear at a time when you need money from the federal government for basics such as a new bridge and continued employment for the thousands of Marylanders who are federal employees? These things aren’t really that difficult, are they?
Haven Shoemaker is the Carroll County state’s attorney.