The Maryland State House by the author.

Starting this week, I’ll be covering the 2020 session of the Maryland General Assembly for Greater Greater Washington, bringing you all the ins and outs of the legislative process on key issues like transit, housing, the environment, and education.

How Maryland’s general assembly works

At first glance, the Maryland General Assembly can seem fairly intimidating in its quirks and peculiarities, at least compared to the US Congress. Rather than a year-round schedule with several breaks thrown in, the General Assembly runs almost continuously from this Wednesday, January 8 to April 6.

Its lower chamber is the House of Delegates, which usually has three Delegates per district. Sometimes, however, if an area doesn’t have quite enough representation to merit its own separate district, those delegates are spread out over two or even three sub-districts. Led by the Speaker, the House has 141 members.

The Maryland State Senate shares a name with its national counterpart. But, while the US Senate’s most powerful position is the Majority Leader, in the Maryland Senate, that role belongs to the Senate President. The Majority Leader is more of a secondary floor leader. The Senate has 47 members.

The General Assembly has strict (and likely to become even stricter) rules on fundraising, a very formal structure and schedule for exchanging bills between chambers, and members of both bodies serve four-year terms, instead of two or six-year terms like the US Congress.

Image of the Maryland House of Delegates and the State Senate

The General Assembly and the budget

One week into the session, Governor Larry Hogan will introduce a bill for the annual state budget. Unlike many other state legislatures, the General Assembly cannot add to the budget or even rearrange it very much to spend more in one area or less in another. They can only cut from it.

They can ask the Governor to add or rearrange certain items in a supplemental budget but he has no legal obligation to honor that request. This frequently results in a frenzy of legislative jockeying by the end of the session to make sure each legislator’s local priorities are met.

How legislation gets passed

Beyond the budget, however, most bills only need a majority vote to pass. Emergency bills and bills requiring amendments to the State Constitution, would each need three-fifths votes to pass (The same goes for overriding gubernatorial vetoes).

While legislators can technically introduce bills at any time during the 90-day session, in practice each chamber only has until the 69th day of the session (March 16, 2020), or “Crossover Day,” to pass a bill and send it over to the other chamber. Any later and bills could come under extensive scrutiny by either the Senate Rules Committee or the House Rules and Executive Nominations Committee.

From that point on, most of the session is consumed with each chamber examining the other’s bills, making alterations as need be, and then reconciling the differences before sending them to the Governor’s desk.

A shake up in leadership

The vast majority of this process hasn’t changed very much since the 19th century, even if some of the districts have. And until very recently, much the same could be said for the General Assembly’s leadership and a great deal of its composition. But starting with the 2018 elections, when 14 incumbents in the House and seven incumbents in the Senate lost their seats, that has quickly changed.

This year’s legislative session will feature at least seven different Delegates and two different Senators who weren’t in office when last year’s session began.

All six of the Senate’s committees have different chairs than they did in 2018, including two new ones this year. Guy Guzzone of Howard County, will take over as Chair of the Budget and Taxation Committee. He will swapping his previous position of Majority Leader with Nancy King of Montgomery County. Will Smith of Montgomery County, will take over as Chair of the Judicial Proceedings Committee, after the resignation of Robert Zirkin of Baltimore County.

Of course, the two biggest changes to the General Assembly this year are at the top. Last spring, on the penultimate day of the session, Michael Busch of Anne Arundel County, who’d served as Speaker of the House of Delegates since 2003, suddenly died from complications of pneumonia.

After an intense and dramatic battle to succeed Busch between Appropriations Committee Chair Maggie McIntosh of Baltimore City and Economic Matters Committee Chair Dereck Davis of Prince George’s County resulted in a stalemate, Adrianne Jones of Baltimore County, previously the Speaker Pro Tem (the No. 2 position in the chamber) emerged in May as a compromise candidate, the first African-American or woman ever to hold the position.

Thomas V. “Mike” Miller, Jr. of Prince George’s, Calvert, and Charles Counties, served as Senate President since 1987. But Miller had also been battling prostate cancer since 2018. This past October he announced that he’d be stepping down from the top position while continuing to serve out the remainder of his term. Senator Bill Ferguson of Baltimore City emerged as the surprise choice to replace him.

For the first time since 1987, both the Speaker of the Maryland House of Delegates and the President of the Maryland State Senate are from the Baltimore area and that might be the most significant change of all in Annapolis.

Stay tuned throughout the Maryland legislative session for more coverage of the General Assembly.