Everyone in the Chesapeake Bay region should be outraged about the blatantly anti-environmental arm twisting and intimidation that is now rearing its ugly head in the Maryland General Assembly.
Eastern Shore lawmakers are threatening to withhold $250,000 or more of the budget of the University of Maryland’s Environmental Law Clinic unless it submits a report of the work it has performed over the last two years, including a list of its clients.
The subtext here is obvious, and appalling. It appears that some powerful people are trying to punish the law clinic for representing the Waterkeepers Alliance, an environmental organization, for filing lawsuits to stop pollution from poultry farms and other sources of runoff.
The Baltimore Sun’s editorial page called it a “poultry power play.” State Senator Jim Broachin called it “something straight out of communist China."
Whatever you want to call it, it is clearly wrong for the General Assembly to use the state budget process to try to browbeat the attorneys at the University of Maryland. Which cases the law professors and students take up should be evaluated on their merits, not politics. And under no circumstances should the Maryland attorneys be forced to compromise their clients' confidentiality.
The law clinic has a strong reputation for fighting for the common good and for a healthy environment. The attorneys there should be allowed to do their jobs, not threatened.
Our government is broken, overrun by people who have become so greedy that it is a way of life for them. I snicker when I hear that we are "helping" establish "democracy" in other countries. God help them if they are using our government as an example. It seems that a majority of the people holding elected positions are interested ONLY in their own wealth, and so become pawns of whoever is contributing to it, and useless to the common good as a result. It is becoming an embarrassment.
Posted by: Linda Redding | 03/30/2010 at 09:30 PM