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MARYLAND ISSUES

Hogan vetoes bills pushed by teachers union

Hogan vetoed three education bills, two of the bills were backed by the Maryland State Education Association, the state's largest teachers' union. The legislation would have changed the composition of the Maryland Board of Education to include two teachers and a parent, made it possible for more school supervisors to join the union and made it harder to fire hundreds of political appointees at the state Department of Education. The state’s largest teachers’ union issued a statement calling Hogan partisan for vetoing the legislation that required him to appoint teachers — who would have been recommended by the union — and a parent to the state school board. “It’s the very definition of common sense that teachers should be at the decision-making table when developing policies that affect our students,” MSEA president Betty Weller said in a statement. “Gov. Hogan is sending a very clear message: He doesn’t believe teachers should have a voice in decisions about our schools, students and profession.”

Hogan called removal of confederate monuments political correctness "run amok".

Hogan stated that additional efforts to remove controversial Confederate symbols in Maryland was "political correctness run amok." A national debate over Confederate flags, statues and symbols erupted in 2015 after the shooting death of nine people in a historically black church in Charleston, SC. The racist shooter and his white supremacist views prompted calls for state and local governments to stop using the flag and to remove Confederate symbols from government properties. In Maryland, MoveOn.org launched a petition asking the state of Maryland to remove a statue of former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney outside the Annapolis statehouse. Taney wrote the majority opinion in the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, which upheld slavery and said blacks born in the United States could not be U.S. citizens. Hogan stated that he would not support the removing of the Taney statue. Hogan, completely incapable of understanding that the issue surrounds the Civil War and these men's position on that war stated “George Washington was a slave owner,” Hogan said. “Should we remove him from the statehouse?” Hogan is completely unaware that George Washington passed away a good sixty years before the Civil War began.