Campaign

The Senate gave its preliminary approval Tuesday to a comprehensive campaign finance reform bill after refusing to strip out a provision letting counties set up their own public-financing systems.  The measure, which has already passed the House, could receive a final vote as early as Wednesday. It would need to be reconciled with a slightly different House version.  Among other things, the legislation would raise campaign donation limits that haven't changed in two decades, curb giving through multiple corporate entities to evade those limits, increase reporting requirements and give the State Board of Elections new enforcement powers.

After spending three decades at the Hyatt Regency Baltimore, Kevin Hux eagerly joined efforts this past year to unionize his workplace. "I joined this union to have some kind of voice and be protected," said Hux, 55, who started in housekeeping shortly after the Inner Harbor hotel opened and now sets up tables for conventions and receptions. Because of staffing cuts, Hux said, he now shoulders tasks that three workers would have handled several years back. Hux and other employees have been working with organizers from Unite Here, which represents hospitality workers and has embarked on a national campaign aimed at unionized and nonunionized Hyatt hotels.

The House unanimously approved campaign finance reform Thursday, closing a loophole in state law that allows businesses to give far more than individuals can to political candidates. Without debate, delegates voted 136-0 to curb business giving while increasing donation limits for individuals.  The measure, HB1499 , was drawn up in response to changes recommended by a legislative commission that studied the state's campaign finance law. Under the bill, business owners would no longer be able to sidestep Maryland's campaign donation limits by giving to politicians through multiple "limited liability companies.

Gov. Martin O'Malley and gun-control advocates launched an offensive Thursday to protect his proposed ban on assault-type weapons from a House committee's efforts to scale it back. "Military-style assault weapons belong on the battlefield, NOT on the streets of our cities and towns," said an email O'Malley's political action committee sent to gun-control supporters, urging them to lobby against efforts to exempt some guns used in recent mass shootings. "We need you to ACT NOW. " Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown, flanked by police chiefs and state's attorneys, held a news conference Thursday morning calling for lawmakers to pass the "common-sense, balanced approach" that has already been approved by the state Senate.

After three months of licking the wounds of his defeat, Mitt Romney surfaced this week on Fox News with a somewhat unexpected rationale for his disappointing election outcome. What cost him the White House, he seemed to say, was what he loved to call and still calls "Obamacare. " Throughout the campaign, Mr. Romney hammered away at President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act. He depicted it as a hugely unpopular power grab that he would "repeal and replace" when he got to the Oval Office, with the grateful relief and support of the American public.

The House of Delegates approved a bill Thursday that would allow political candidates to use campaign funds to pay for the cost of attending professional conferences. The legislation, sponsored by Del. Carolyn J.B. Howard, a Prince George's County Democrat, passed on a vote of 110-27. It now goes to the Senate. The bill would let incumbent officeholders and candidates use their campaign funds to pay for the travel, lodging, meal and registration costs of conferences focused on policy issues related to the office they hold or are seeking.

Hoping to open Carroll County's first Montessori public charter school by the fall of 2014, a group of parents is now working on an application to submit to the county by April 1. Sustainable Futures hosted a public meeting at South Carroll High School on Feb. 25 to discuss its proposal for a tuition-free public school for county children in grades 1-5. The group had submitted a letter of intent to Carroll County Public Schools in December and,...

On a recent cold, gray morning, state bridge inspector Van Swift jumped into his office: a 4-by-3-foot white bucket at the end of a 60-foot hydraulic arm anchored to a flatbed "snooper" truck. Working a cluster of joysticks, he swung the bucket away from the truck and over the side of the 800-foot Interstate 70 bridge spanning the Patapsco River between Baltimore and Howard counties. As the bucket descended, the whoosh of highway traffic gave way to the rumble of tires overhead. Swift maneuvered the bucket toward a web of girders, beams and turnbuckles about 120 feet above the rushing water.

Some members of the Rev. David Carl Olson's congregation are homeless. A few work minimum-wage jobs, he said, but they still cannot afford to leave shelters. His faith calls him to live in a world with "profoundly more justice," said Olson, who oversees First Unitarian Church of Baltimore, and that starts with increasing wages. Olson spoke to about 25 people gathered to protest the corporate profits of low-wage employers Thursday morning at a Walmart store in Catonsville. Demonstrators chanted "Raise the minimum wage!"

Last week, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal called on his fellow Republicans to stop being "the stupid party" Yet in his recent column, commentator Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. made it clear that if he got the memo, he chose to ignore it ("The vast left-wing conspiracy," Feb. 3). There's not enough space in your entire Sunday edition to point out all the things Mr. Ehrlich routinely gets wrong. But this time there was one thing that stood out as an especially excellent example of the "stupid" Governor Jindal was referring to. The "you didn't build that" remark, which Mr. Ehrlich erroneously referred to as President Obama's "rhetoric" from the 2012 campaign, was actually part of a longer quote that the GOP took completely out of context, then used as their theme at the Republican National Convention in what may be the lamest move in presidential campaign history.