Democrats are ignoring Martin O’Malley’s disastrous record in Maryland as they applaud his effort to embarrass citizenship director Ken Cuccinelli at a Thanksgiving Eve school reunion.
The Washington Post reported the barroom tirade by O’Malley, the former mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland:
Siobhan Arnold, who was visiting from Philadelphia, had just met O’Malley at the bar when Cuccinelli walked in. Soon the two men were face-to-face, she said, with O’Malley excoriating Cuccinelli over the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
O’Malley said “something about his [Cuccinelli’s] grandparents,” Arnold said in an interview. Cuccinelli said little if anything in reply, she added, quickly leaving the pub.
“O’Malley was shouting,” Arnold said. “I don’t think Cuccinelli was responding. I think he’s like, ‘Time to go. Just got here and I’m leaving.’ He pretty much retreated.”
Cuccinelli runs the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency and is serving as the acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. That task is difficult because he is trying to balance competing demands from business groups and employees, while fending off Democrats’ emotional criticism and insults.
In contrast, O’Malley took a hardline policy of backing investors’ demands for more illegal workers and renters.
O’Malley was mayor of Baltimore from 1999 to January 2007 and was governor of Maryland from 2007 until January 2015.
Many of the illegals were let through the U.S. border in 2014 by President Barack Obama, often after being detained in so-called “cages” at border patrol stations.
The influx of Central American migrants helped to push up Maryland’s housing prices and suppressed wages, so delaying the nation’s recovery from the post-2008 recession.
Under O’Malley, Maryland’s median wages rose by a mere 2.2 percent over the 11-year period from 2007 to 2016, according to governing.com.
Meanwhile, housing prices rose at a much higher annual rate of 3 percent, so boosting housing prices up by 82 percent from 2000 to 2019.
O’Malley also presided over a period of declining education trends. The Baltimore Sun reported in 2018:
Two years ago, the state experienced an historic drop in scores that education officials partially attributed to the fact that the state previously excluded too many special education students from taking the tests — more than was allowed. Maryland went from one of the top-performing states to the middle of the pack among states.
The newspaper also reported education scores from O’Malley’s Baltimore:
Baltimore City students scored near the bottom in reading and math compared to children in other cities and large urban areas on an important national assessment given in 2017, according to scores released Tuesday morning.
In fourth- and eighth-grade reading, only 13 percent of city students are considered proficient or advanced. In fourth-grade math, 14 percent were proficient and in eighth-grade math 11 percent met the mark, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally mandated test from the U.S. Department of Education.
That put the Baltimore ahead of only Detroit and Cleveland, and sometimes ahead of Milwaukee and Fresno, Calif. — areas of the country that also suffer from high poverty and crime.
The economic stress from O’Malley’s term helped spark a murder boom in Baltimore.
In 2007, 282 people were killed in the majority-black city as the murder rate continued falling from the 1990s records.
By 2015, the number of murders in Baltimore has jumped to 344 as Democrats denounced police nationwide for strict enforcement. In 2016, the murder rate slid down to 318, according to a report in the Baltimore Sun:
Thirteen-year-old DiAndre Barnes was fatally shot this summer when he was out late with a squeegee, hoping to make a few bucks washing windshields, his father said. The bullets weren’t meant for him, but they ripped into him anyway, making him another bystander injured by violence in Baltimore’s second-deadliest year.
“They don’t care who they shoot anymore,” said Ronnie Barnes, the boy’s father, as he looked through his son’s left-behind baseball gear. His son had a fantastic pitching arm, he said, but that promise is gone now. “They shoot women and children and everybody.”
For the grieving father, Baltimore is a land of the dead and the wounded, drug dealing and no jobs, where gunmen have no conscience and where the system is so dysfunctional that it is somehow possible — as has been alleged in his son’s death — for a man to rob someone, shoot at police, get arrested, be admitted to a local hospital for a psychiatric evaluation, walk off without police knowing, and then kill a child on the street before being brought back into custody.
O’Malley also turned a blind eye as Democrats welcome a wave of MS-13 gangsters into the state’s neighborhoods and schools. In 2015, Breitbart News reported:
At least two of the three alleged members of the MS-13 gang who were indicted this week in Maryland were in the country illegally and had been previously deported, Breitbart News has learned.
As reported earlier, a federal grand jury indicted Aldair Garcia-Miranda, 21, Selvin Raymundo Salazar, 23, and Raul Ernesto Landaverde-Giron, 25, accusing them of being members of the La Mara Salvatrucha gang, also known as MS-13, and for allegedly taking part in several murders, attempted murders, and other extortion and racketeering activities.
MS-13 is comprised primarily of immigrants or descendants from El Salvador, and is active in multiple areas throughout the U.S., including several Maryland counties in the greater Washington, D.C. metro area.
Since O’Malley left the governor’s office, he has tried but failed to regain a role in the Democratic Party.
In contrast, Cuccinelli has worked with President Donald Trump to enforce a moderate immigration policy that protects Americans’ economic interests from the business pressure for more workers and renters.
“The president has made no secret of the fact that he believes immigration, first and foremost, is set up to work for America — that means economically and for the people here,” Cuccinelli told reporters at an October breakfast organized by the Christian Science Monitor.
“There is a lot of pressure in various sectors to utilize more immigrant labor for employment, whether it is for high-tech or low-tech in the economy … [but the president] has also made clear that is is important to protect ordinary American workers and to not displace them,” said Cuccinelli.
Finding the right balance between helping Americans workers and Americans investors is a constant political dilemma, Cuccinelli said:
Is there some perfect [balanced] target point in every industry? Maybe there is, but we’re never going to be able to know it. So which side do you err on? And he has repeatedly emphasized how important it is to protect U.S. workers. Now’s he been clear with me, as well, and you all have heard him say it: he wants to see economic growth and dynamism. And that means, you know, growing companies needing to fill slots. So we’re just in a constant battle to balance those things.