GOVERNOR HOGAN: Good afternoon. I want to begin today by giving a brief COVID-19 update. This morning we held another meeting of our COVID-19 response team. I said last week that Maryland has begun to see an uptick in our key health metrics, and we’re increasingly concerned by the sharp rise in hospitalizations which have doubled over the last 3 weeks. Health officials are warning that the convergence of the flu, omicron, and COVID-19 can lead to further hospitalizations. Based on the preliminary data, omicron is believed to be potentially four times more transmissible than previous strains of COVID-19, and it is anticipated to rapidly overtake delta as the main driver of new cases over the next 12 weeks.
Omicron has already been detected here in the state of Maryland as well as in 18 other states and 50 other countries. Initial studies do indicate that higher levels of immunity from booster shots does provide protection against the omicron variant, which makes it more important than ever that every single Marylander that is eligible for a booster shot should get a booster shot as soon as possible.
I want to thank all the Marylanders who have already gotten their boosters in record numbers. As of today, the state of Maryland has administered 1.3 million booster shots, and all Marylanders 18 and older are eligible for a booster.
Especially as we approach the holidays, I want to stress that getting the booster is the single most important thing you can do to protect yourself, your family, and your fellow Marylanders.
We’ve also been working closely with our hospital partners to make sure providers are aggressively offering monoclonal antibody therapy. State health officials strongly recommend this treatment for COVID-19 positive individuals. It’s one of the first things you should consider doing before going to hospital, when it may already be too late. We will be introducing emergency legislation to give our hospital systems some tools to address staffing shortages. During the state of emergency and during the pandemic, we took steps to increase nursing workforce in hospitals, including providing flexibility to provide registered nurses and licensed practical nurses who hold a current active license in any other state or jurisdiction to be able to render nursing care in the state of Maryland. State health officials have strongly encouraged hospital systems to utilize nursing students, nursing assistants, and physician assistants as force multipliers. We have asked programs to expedite classes and to allow for the earliest possible graduation for qualified nursing students. The emergency legislation we submit will allow all of these important emergency actions to be made permanent. The Health Department will be taking some additional immediate actions in the days ahead as we continue to use every tool at our disposal to help Maryland hospitals to get the resources they need to respond to this and to future hospital surges.
Now I want to move on to the special or perhaps not so special session of the legislature. Before Thanksgiving, following a string of particularly heinous and disturbing violent crimes in the streets of Baltimore, we submitted emergency legislation for tougher sentencing for violent criminals, specifically those who continue to commit violent felonies with guns, and the legislation that brings greater transparency to the sentences handed down by judges for violent crimes. We have repeatedly proposed this legislation, but year after year, the legislature has refused to take action. Meanwhile, while we wait for them to act, thousands of people have been killed in the city of Baltimore. As an example, the suspect who was recently arrested for the murder of 69-year-old Evelyn Player at her church had been previously arrested over and over and over again for other violent crimes against women, and he was repeatedly let back out on to the streets. Yet day after day, year after year, as violent crime escalates and the death toll rises, the General Assembly continues to fail to pass critical anti-violent crime measures. These bills are strongly supported by an overwhelming majority of Baltimore City residents and all Marylanders, yet legislators continue to ignore the desperate pleas of their constituents.
This week despite the fact that Baltimore surpassed the staggering milestone of 300 murders for the seventh straight year, legislators claimed they just didn’t have time to even consider this critically needed emergency legislation. They are ignoring the out of control violent crime, the shootings and murders that are destroying Baltimore City, and they’re ignoring the desperate pleas of more than 80 percent of the people of Baltimore and the rest of the state who support this legislation.
Same politicians who have repeatedly ignored and rejected these proposals to fight violent crime continue to offer no alternatives or solutions of their own. Instead, in the past few days, they actually voted instead to make it even easier for violent criminals to get out of jail rather than imposing consequences and taking shooters off the streets. Yesterday, despite the efforts of Senate republicans, not one single democrat was willing to vote with them, join with them, to even bring these bills to the floor for an up or down vote.
This isn’t just politics as usual. This is disgraceful and dangerous. It isn’t a matter of republicans versus democrats. It’s a matter of life and death. It’s not just about the differences between the right and the left. It’s a difference between right and wrong. And there is still time for the legislature to reverse course and follow the will of nearly all their constituents by taking immediate action on this emergency legislation.
Today I am once again calling on city leaders and the city delegation to stop working against this legislation and calling on legislative leaders across the state to finally take action on violent crime. The citizens will not be able to take back their streets and their communities without city leaders and legislators doing the jobs that they were elected to do.
Rather than passing these emergency crime bills and protecting our citizens, the focus of the legislature this week has instead been on protecting themselves by making the worst, most gerrymandered districts in America even worse. Being worst in America is not the distinction we want for the great state of Maryland. The actions of these politicians in Annapolis this week are perfect example of everything that’s wrong with our broken political system. It’s an unmitigated arrogance of power, and Marylanders are completely fed up.
Last month I accepted and submitted the fair legislative and congressional maps which were created by the Maryland Citizens Redistricting Commission, comprised of citizens free from any kind of legislative or political influence, who were representative of the state’s diversity and demographics. The commission held 36 open public meetings in which thousands of members of the public participated. Their focus was on fairness, transparency, and accountability. And the results was a set of maps that received a grade of A for fairness by the Princeton gerrymandering project. But it’s been made crystal clear this week that the legislature has rigged the process and predetermined the result from the outset to ignore the commission’s maps. These politicians drew their own districts in secret, behind closed doors. These terrible maps drawn by the legislature have been universally panned and have received a flunking F grade from the Princeton project. Even democratic Congressman Kweisi Mfume, a former President of the NAACP, called democrats’ attempts to seize control of the state overreach and a bridge too far. And the congressman said that it’s been Baltimore that’s been chopped at and bitten at, in 1990, 2000, 2010, here we go now again in 2020. These gerrymandered maps will be challenged in both the federal and state courts. These maps disenfranchise voters, they violate the Voting Rights Act, and they are in violation of numerous state and federal laws.
On Monday Attorney General Merrick Garland announced at the Department of Justice, that DOJ is suing the state of Texas in order to block its new gerrymandered congressional map. The map passed by the legislature here in Maryland is a far more egregious civil rights violation than the Texas map, and so today we’re calling on the Biden Administration to immediately add the state of Maryland into that lawsuit. For many years I’ve been a leading advocate at the state and national level pushing for real nonpartisan redistricting reform to allow citizens to actually pick their representatives rather than politicians picking their voters. We are here in the nation’s old estate house that served as the first capital of the United States, where we ratified the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War. American democracy literally began right here in this very place, and yet when it comes to free and fair elections, Maryland is failing to live up to that proud legacy. This congressional map, drawn in back rooms by party bosses in Annapolis makes a mockery of our democracy, and it’s an embarrassment to all that our state stands for. And if you think these congressional maps are bad, just wait until you see what they plan to do with the legislative maps which, as we speak, they’re conspiring on in secret behind closed doors.
On behalf of all the people of Maryland who value fairness and integrity in our elections and in our political system, I am vetoing these disgracefully gerrymandered illegal maps which are a shameful violation of state and federal law. This is not the end of the process. This is just the beginning. The courts will be the final arbiter, not partisan legislature. These maps cannot and will not stand.
With that, I will be happy to take a few questions.
(Question off mic).
GOVERNOR HOGAN: I think the lawmakers are fully aware of my opinion for the past seven years. There was no reason to speak to them.
(Question off mic).
GOVERNOR HOGAN: I’m always an optimist. They can. They’ll be here another day. I believe they’re going to try to publicly override this veto, which I wanted to take the action right away rather than waiting another week, because we want to be able to let the court process begin right away to overturn their action. But they’re going to be here in session. They could very easily pass the crime bill just as quickly as they passed these maps. And I’m still hopeful. But I wouldn’t put all the money on it (Question off mic).
GOVERNOR HOGAN: I’m very disappointed though not surprised. The Senate has passed the bill a couple of times. The House never has. Frustrating. We bring them into session for 90 days if they don’t get it done tomorrow.
(Question off mic).
GOVERNOR HOGAN: I think there will be different federal and state actions, but they’ll be taken by (inaudible).
(Question off mic).
GOVERNOR HOGAN: I would say they’re absolutely wrong. That map up there on the wall right there. They’re probably the most egregious representation of a violation of the Voting Rights Act. You see what they did to PG county? To create minority majority districts. The fourth congressional district carves out through multiple counties, Edgewater, Davidsonville. When you look at the district, instead of having a Baltimore City congressional district as originally intended, they take Baltimore City and spread it all around multiple districts. Anybody who looks at the map, you don’t have to be a lawyer to figure that out these are not fair maps. They are like contortionists the way they had to create these tortured maps.
(Question off mic).
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Oh, we’re going to see what the courts decide. These maps were created by the same person who did the gerrymandering last time. Martin O’Malley admitted in federal court that he did break the law, but the Supreme Court kicked it back to the states. This is the next step in the process.
(Question off mic).
GOVERNOR HOGAN: The way the process works is the Governor submits a set of maps to the legislature, and the legislature then takes action. I happen to be the first republican in the history of the state to be involved because every single 10-year cycle since 1790 has been a democratic Governor and democratic legislature. So it’s an unusual process where they weren’t just getting together behind closed doors to do it together.
I could have drawn maps and tried to do the same thing and been unfair and drawn districts that would enable republicans, and I didn’t because I’m very much opposed to that. We allowed the state citizens to draw fair maps that are fair to everybody.
For them to ignore, basically dismiss in an arrogant way the people that spent months and months and held 36 hearings and thousands of people that participated, and say, we don’t care what you want, we don’t care what the people want, people don’t like this unfair process.
So I think the process is starting now. My guess is that they’ll take some action tomorrow to overturn my veto, and then it will be many months before we get to the bottom of exactly what will happen next.
(Question off mic).
GOVERNOR HOGAN: It’s an ongoing, you know, investigation. I’ll just say that it was a cyber-attack, that we were hit. Luckily we have been take something pretty serious actions over the past several years and over the past many months, and we’re in a much better position than we would have been. I pushed to make sure that cyber was added into the infrastructure bill when it wasn’t in the republican bill or the Biden bill, we got that taken care of. We’ve been taking action at the state, holding cyber summits.
This is the wave of the future. People will be vulnerable whether they’re state agencies or private sector companies or federal government. Everybody is going to be — just cyber is the number one threat we face in America. This was a — you know, our system was comprised but at this point it appears to be much, much less intrusive and with a much better outcome than we were afraid might be the case. We don’t believe that any data was sacrificed. And I think they’re digging into it and getting to the bottom of it. They’ve made a lot of progress already, and we’re hopeful it will be a good result.
(Question off mic).
GOVERNOR HOGAN: No, it slowed down some of the posting of things on websites. We’re all about transparency and updating things. We have all the data still. None of the data has been comprised. I think as of today or tomorrow, all of the postings on the websites will be back up to date. But it hasn’t changed any of the data gathering or really put us in any kind of a tough position with respect to the data in our system.
(Question off mic).
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Well, I’ve been pushing for that for more than 20 years. Look, I think gerrymandering say cancer on our come to occupancy. There’s no question that both parties are guilty of it. It happens across the country. Republicans do it just as much as democrats. I think it should be resolved at the federal level. I think the Supreme Court should have resolved it but they didn’t; they kicked it back to the states. And now we are the worst. It happens to have been democrats that have been in control since 1790. That’s not to say that the other side isn’t guilty. But two wrongs don’t make a right. This is not just congressional maps but the legislative maps, and we want to do the right thing here and lead by example. I don’t like being the follower. We can’t say we won’t do it until everyone else does it.
I’ve been supporting that type of legislation for a long time. It’s a little bit rich. The legislation is sponsored by Congressman Sarbanes, the worst in America, and he’s not willing to fix his own district.
SPEAKER: Last question.
(Question off mic).
GOVERNOR HOGAN: You know, I don’t have — I didn’t hear what he said about it. I just picked up in between meetings that he either said something or was taking some action today. I know that we have a meeting scheduled with Governor-Elect Youngkin at some point over the next couple of weeks. I think he’s going to come visit us here in Annapolis and we’re hoping to have a chance to catch up with him and talk about his plans for the Commonwealth of Virginia, we’re talking about the bridge, fixing traffic on the beltway. I’ll probably talk to him and find out more about what he’s talking about, but we’re supporting RGGI. We’re encouraging other states to join RGGI. And doing something about greenhouse gas emissions and clean air is important, but I can’t really speak for the Governor-Elect.
Thank you, guys.
Omicron has already been detected here in the state of Maryland as well as in 18 other states and 50 other countries. Initial studies do indicate that higher levels of immunity from booster shots does provide protection against the omicron variant, which makes it more important than ever that every single Marylander that is eligible for a booster shot should get a booster shot as soon as possible.
I want to thank all the Marylanders who have already gotten their boosters in record numbers. As of today, the state of Maryland has administered 1.3 million booster shots, and all Marylanders 18 and older are eligible for a booster.
Especially as we approach the holidays, I want to stress that getting the booster is the single most important thing you can do to protect yourself, your family, and your fellow Marylanders.
We’ve also been working closely with our hospital partners to make sure providers are aggressively offering monoclonal antibody therapy. State health officials strongly recommend this treatment for COVID-19 positive individuals. It’s one of the first things you should consider doing before going to hospital, when it may already be too late. We will be introducing emergency legislation to give our hospital systems some tools to address staffing shortages. During the state of emergency and during the pandemic, we took steps to increase nursing workforce in hospitals, including providing flexibility to provide registered nurses and licensed practical nurses who hold a current active license in any other state or jurisdiction to be able to render nursing care in the state of Maryland. State health officials have strongly encouraged hospital systems to utilize nursing students, nursing assistants, and physician assistants as force multipliers. We have asked programs to expedite classes and to allow for the earliest possible graduation for qualified nursing students. The emergency legislation we submit will allow all of these important emergency actions to be made permanent. The Health Department will be taking some additional immediate actions in the days ahead as we continue to use every tool at our disposal to help Maryland hospitals to get the resources they need to respond to this and to future hospital surges.
Now I want to move on to the special or perhaps not so special session of the legislature. Before Thanksgiving, following a string of particularly heinous and disturbing violent crimes in the streets of Baltimore, we submitted emergency legislation for tougher sentencing for violent criminals, specifically those who continue to commit violent felonies with guns, and the legislation that brings greater transparency to the sentences handed down by judges for violent crimes. We have repeatedly proposed this legislation, but year after year, the legislature has refused to take action. Meanwhile, while we wait for them to act, thousands of people have been killed in the city of Baltimore. As an example, the suspect who was recently arrested for the murder of 69-year-old Evelyn Player at her church had been previously arrested over and over and over again for other violent crimes against women, and he was repeatedly let back out on to the streets. Yet day after day, year after year, as violent crime escalates and the death toll rises, the General Assembly continues to fail to pass critical anti-violent crime measures. These bills are strongly supported by an overwhelming majority of Baltimore City residents and all Marylanders, yet legislators continue to ignore the desperate pleas of their constituents.
This week despite the fact that Baltimore surpassed the staggering milestone of 300 murders for the seventh straight year, legislators claimed they just didn’t have time to even consider this critically needed emergency legislation. They are ignoring the out of control violent crime, the shootings and murders that are destroying Baltimore City, and they’re ignoring the desperate pleas of more than 80 percent of the people of Baltimore and the rest of the state who support this legislation.
Same politicians who have repeatedly ignored and rejected these proposals to fight violent crime continue to offer no alternatives or solutions of their own. Instead, in the past few days, they actually voted instead to make it even easier for violent criminals to get out of jail rather than imposing consequences and taking shooters off the streets. Yesterday, despite the efforts of Senate republicans, not one single democrat was willing to vote with them, join with them, to even bring these bills to the floor for an up or down vote.
This isn’t just politics as usual. This is disgraceful and dangerous. It isn’t a matter of republicans versus democrats. It’s a matter of life and death. It’s not just about the differences between the right and the left. It’s a difference between right and wrong. And there is still time for the legislature to reverse course and follow the will of nearly all their constituents by taking immediate action on this emergency legislation.
Today I am once again calling on city leaders and the city delegation to stop working against this legislation and calling on legislative leaders across the state to finally take action on violent crime. The citizens will not be able to take back their streets and their communities without city leaders and legislators doing the jobs that they were elected to do.
Rather than passing these emergency crime bills and protecting our citizens, the focus of the legislature this week has instead been on protecting themselves by making the worst, most gerrymandered districts in America even worse. Being worst in America is not the distinction we want for the great state of Maryland. The actions of these politicians in Annapolis this week are perfect example of everything that’s wrong with our broken political system. It’s an unmitigated arrogance of power, and Marylanders are completely fed up.
Last month I accepted and submitted the fair legislative and congressional maps which were created by the Maryland Citizens Redistricting Commission, comprised of citizens free from any kind of legislative or political influence, who were representative of the state’s diversity and demographics. The commission held 36 open public meetings in which thousands of members of the public participated. Their focus was on fairness, transparency, and accountability. And the results was a set of maps that received a grade of A for fairness by the Princeton gerrymandering project. But it’s been made crystal clear this week that the legislature has rigged the process and predetermined the result from the outset to ignore the commission’s maps. These politicians drew their own districts in secret, behind closed doors. These terrible maps drawn by the legislature have been universally panned and have received a flunking F grade from the Princeton project. Even democratic Congressman Kweisi Mfume, a former President of the NAACP, called democrats’ attempts to seize control of the state overreach and a bridge too far. And the congressman said that it’s been Baltimore that’s been chopped at and bitten at, in 1990, 2000, 2010, here we go now again in 2020. These gerrymandered maps will be challenged in both the federal and state courts. These maps disenfranchise voters, they violate the Voting Rights Act, and they are in violation of numerous state and federal laws.
On Monday Attorney General Merrick Garland announced at the Department of Justice, that DOJ is suing the state of Texas in order to block its new gerrymandered congressional map. The map passed by the legislature here in Maryland is a far more egregious civil rights violation than the Texas map, and so today we’re calling on the Biden Administration to immediately add the state of Maryland into that lawsuit. For many years I’ve been a leading advocate at the state and national level pushing for real nonpartisan redistricting reform to allow citizens to actually pick their representatives rather than politicians picking their voters. We are here in the nation’s old estate house that served as the first capital of the United States, where we ratified the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War. American democracy literally began right here in this very place, and yet when it comes to free and fair elections, Maryland is failing to live up to that proud legacy. This congressional map, drawn in back rooms by party bosses in Annapolis makes a mockery of our democracy, and it’s an embarrassment to all that our state stands for. And if you think these congressional maps are bad, just wait until you see what they plan to do with the legislative maps which, as we speak, they’re conspiring on in secret behind closed doors.
On behalf of all the people of Maryland who value fairness and integrity in our elections and in our political system, I am vetoing these disgracefully gerrymandered illegal maps which are a shameful violation of state and federal law. This is not the end of the process. This is just the beginning. The courts will be the final arbiter, not partisan legislature. These maps cannot and will not stand.
With that, I will be happy to take a few questions.
(Question off mic).
GOVERNOR HOGAN: I think the lawmakers are fully aware of my opinion for the past seven years. There was no reason to speak to them.
(Question off mic).
GOVERNOR HOGAN: I’m always an optimist. They can. They’ll be here another day. I believe they’re going to try to publicly override this veto, which I wanted to take the action right away rather than waiting another week, because we want to be able to let the court process begin right away to overturn their action. But they’re going to be here in session. They could very easily pass the crime bill just as quickly as they passed these maps. And I’m still hopeful. But I wouldn’t put all the money on it (Question off mic).
GOVERNOR HOGAN: I’m very disappointed though not surprised. The Senate has passed the bill a couple of times. The House never has. Frustrating. We bring them into session for 90 days if they don’t get it done tomorrow.
(Question off mic).
GOVERNOR HOGAN: I think there will be different federal and state actions, but they’ll be taken by (inaudible).
(Question off mic).
GOVERNOR HOGAN: I would say they’re absolutely wrong. That map up there on the wall right there. They’re probably the most egregious representation of a violation of the Voting Rights Act. You see what they did to PG county? To create minority majority districts. The fourth congressional district carves out through multiple counties, Edgewater, Davidsonville. When you look at the district, instead of having a Baltimore City congressional district as originally intended, they take Baltimore City and spread it all around multiple districts. Anybody who looks at the map, you don’t have to be a lawyer to figure that out these are not fair maps. They are like contortionists the way they had to create these tortured maps.
(Question off mic).
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Oh, we’re going to see what the courts decide. These maps were created by the same person who did the gerrymandering last time. Martin O’Malley admitted in federal court that he did break the law, but the Supreme Court kicked it back to the states. This is the next step in the process.
(Question off mic).
GOVERNOR HOGAN: The way the process works is the Governor submits a set of maps to the legislature, and the legislature then takes action. I happen to be the first republican in the history of the state to be involved because every single 10-year cycle since 1790 has been a democratic Governor and democratic legislature. So it’s an unusual process where they weren’t just getting together behind closed doors to do it together.
I could have drawn maps and tried to do the same thing and been unfair and drawn districts that would enable republicans, and I didn’t because I’m very much opposed to that. We allowed the state citizens to draw fair maps that are fair to everybody.
For them to ignore, basically dismiss in an arrogant way the people that spent months and months and held 36 hearings and thousands of people that participated, and say, we don’t care what you want, we don’t care what the people want, people don’t like this unfair process.
So I think the process is starting now. My guess is that they’ll take some action tomorrow to overturn my veto, and then it will be many months before we get to the bottom of exactly what will happen next.
(Question off mic).
GOVERNOR HOGAN: It’s an ongoing, you know, investigation. I’ll just say that it was a cyber-attack, that we were hit. Luckily we have been take something pretty serious actions over the past several years and over the past many months, and we’re in a much better position than we would have been. I pushed to make sure that cyber was added into the infrastructure bill when it wasn’t in the republican bill or the Biden bill, we got that taken care of. We’ve been taking action at the state, holding cyber summits.
This is the wave of the future. People will be vulnerable whether they’re state agencies or private sector companies or federal government. Everybody is going to be — just cyber is the number one threat we face in America. This was a — you know, our system was comprised but at this point it appears to be much, much less intrusive and with a much better outcome than we were afraid might be the case. We don’t believe that any data was sacrificed. And I think they’re digging into it and getting to the bottom of it. They’ve made a lot of progress already, and we’re hopeful it will be a good result.
(Question off mic).
GOVERNOR HOGAN: No, it slowed down some of the posting of things on websites. We’re all about transparency and updating things. We have all the data still. None of the data has been comprised. I think as of today or tomorrow, all of the postings on the websites will be back up to date. But it hasn’t changed any of the data gathering or really put us in any kind of a tough position with respect to the data in our system.
(Question off mic).
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Well, I’ve been pushing for that for more than 20 years. Look, I think gerrymandering say cancer on our come to occupancy. There’s no question that both parties are guilty of it. It happens across the country. Republicans do it just as much as democrats. I think it should be resolved at the federal level. I think the Supreme Court should have resolved it but they didn’t; they kicked it back to the states. And now we are the worst. It happens to have been democrats that have been in control since 1790. That’s not to say that the other side isn’t guilty. But two wrongs don’t make a right. This is not just congressional maps but the legislative maps, and we want to do the right thing here and lead by example. I don’t like being the follower. We can’t say we won’t do it until everyone else does it.
I’ve been supporting that type of legislation for a long time. It’s a little bit rich. The legislation is sponsored by Congressman Sarbanes, the worst in America, and he’s not willing to fix his own district.
SPEAKER: Last question.
(Question off mic).
GOVERNOR HOGAN: You know, I don’t have — I didn’t hear what he said about it. I just picked up in between meetings that he either said something or was taking some action today. I know that we have a meeting scheduled with Governor-Elect Youngkin at some point over the next couple of weeks. I think he’s going to come visit us here in Annapolis and we’re hoping to have a chance to catch up with him and talk about his plans for the Commonwealth of Virginia, we’re talking about the bridge, fixing traffic on the beltway. I’ll probably talk to him and find out more about what he’s talking about, but we’re supporting RGGI. We’re encouraging other states to join RGGI. And doing something about greenhouse gas emissions and clean air is important, but I can’t really speak for the Governor-Elect.
Thank you, guys.