Bouchat Needs to Resign
Delegate's suggestion that House Republicans should be a doormat for Maryland Democrats is an insult to his District, his colleagues, and his constituents.
Delegate Christopher Eric Bouchat has been a Delegate for a whopping nine weeks and he has already shown himself to be incapable of doing the job he was elected for.
Josh Kurtz reports in Maryland Matters that Bouchat is taking his House Republican colleagues to task for….doing their jobs?
But freshman Republican Del. Christopher Eric Bouchat of Carroll County is suggesting that such a strategy has its limits. He asserts that Republicans have become too performative during floor debates in the House and that they run the risk of obsolescence in a chamber where they are badly outnumbered.
That lament has angered several of Bouchat’s more senior colleagues — who characterize his stance as a form of surrender.
The strategic debate was a topic of heated discussion in the weekly House Republican Caucus meeting Tuesday morning and could come up again when the caucus gathers Wednesday morning. To some Republicans, the messenger was just as objectionable as the message.
The internecine conflict started when Bouchat, a conservative who arrived in Annapolis this year after serving a term on the Carroll County Board of Commissioners, sent a letter to his GOP colleagues last week, questioning their tactics and urging them to “look inward for corrective measures that increase our future success rates.”
Bouchat’s gripe seems to be that Republican members of the House of Delegates are actually trying to get bad bills amended on the floor of the House of Delegates. His outrage seems to not be at the way these Delegates are objecting to Democratic legislation, but that they are objecting to the Democratic legislation at all.
What’s even more outrageous is that Bouchat thinks that all of the work of legislating should be done by Committees, not by the full house.
In an interview, Bouchat said he believes that committees, rather than the House floor, are the appropriate venues for lengthy debates over legislation. “Once it’s out of committee, it’s a done deal.”
It is mind-numbingly stupid for any Republican in Maryland to think that a small clique of Democratic subcommittee chairs should decide how legislation gets passed in the House of Delegates.
Bouchat then went on to vote against an amendment that would have rolled back the indexing of the gas tax to inflation. In effect, Bouchat voted for a tax increase on Marylanders just in an effort to get scraps from the Democratic table.
Instead of fighting for conservative principles, Bouchat’s strategy is to look at the Democrats and say “Thank you sir may I have another?”
Delegate Bouchat's suggestion that House Republicans should be a doormat for Maryland Democrats is an insult to his District, his colleagues, and his constituents. And if Bouchat doesn’t want to fight for the principles his party and his district voted for, Bouchat needs to resign from the House of Delegates so somebody who will actually do the damn job can.