Isn't it time Maryland seceded from the South? Should we finally ratify the coup set in motion by Abraham Lincoln, John W. Garrett and Samuel Gompers?
The state's legislative leaders seem to think we should. Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller and House Speaker Michael E. Busch have asked a government trade group to remove Maryland from the company of Tennessee and Oklahoma in its Southern region and place it with New York and Vermont in the Eastern division.
"Maryland in its policy decisions and economy has gotten more in line with New England and the Middle Atlantic states than it is with the Southern states," says Busch. "We've kind of moved from an agricultural, tobacco-based economy to a research, educated economy. It's just a natural transition for us to go in that direction."
Ya think? They're about a century late.
Maryland was once part of the core of the Old South. It caucused with Virginia, Georgia and other slaveholding states at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
But Lincoln's guns on Baltimore's Federal Hill kept Maryland in the Union during the Civil War. Garrett's B&O Railroad made Baltimore rich, and industrial. Gompers' American Federation of Labor unionized the emerging jobs and made organized labor a potent political force.
Maryland might be below the Mason-Dixon Line. It might have staffed its factories with migrants from South Carolina, West Virginia and Tennessee. But these days it's as Southern as clambakes and Nancy Pelosi.
In a South characterized by Republican politics, Maryland has voted Republican in only two presidential elections since 1976. It has had one Republican governor since the late 1960s.
Only one of its 10 members of Congress is Republican. Maryland joined the rest of the Northeast in voting for Sen. John Kerry, the losing presidential candidate in 2004.
In a South characterized by social conservatism, only 41 percent of Marylanders reported attending weekly church or temple services in a recent Gallup Poll. That was slightly below the national average and far under the upper-50s percentages for the Deep South.
In a South proud of its low taxes, Maryland's "piggyback" tax and a top marginal rate approaching 10 percent for combined state and local income tax should have prompted the Council of State Governments' Southern Legislative Conference to kick it out without being asked.
