I currently represent District 5, which includes most of Carroll County and a part of Frederick County, in the Maryland House of Delegates and I am seeking a second term. I’ve lived in Carroll for nearly my entire life and I made the decision to raise my family here. We know what it means to work hard, raise strong families and give back to our community. When my neighbors, family and friends elected me in 2022 to represent them in the Maryland General Assembly, I promised to bring our traditional conservative values to Annapolis — and deliver results. And I did just that. Representing District 5 is an honor and a responsibility I take seriously. If re-elected, I will continue to fight for accountable government, safer communities, small businesses, commonsense energy policies, our agricultural heritage, stronger schools, respect for the law, tax relief and policies that respect the values we share.

President Harry Truman rose from very humble beginnings on a Missouri farm to became one of the most influential world figures of the 20th century. Truman overcame the lack of a college degree (he was the only 20th-century U.S. president not to obtain one) and numerous personal and professional failures to become the president of the United States of America, and he was the man who effectively ended WWII in victory for the allies. Truman was, of course, a Democrat – back when Democrats loved America more than they hated Republicans and back when they took American leadership and exceptionalism seriously. It led Truman to such accomplishments as the implementation of the Marshall plan to rebuild Europe, and the formation of NATO, to protect it. Truman was a great man and a great president, and I greatly admire him.

Maryland taxpayers are already grossly overburdened. The Democrat supermajority in Annapolis has too little respect for the hardworking families that earn their livings in Maryland and far too much love for new and expanded sources of revenue to fund their vision of a progressive utopia. It is driving residents and businesses out of the state, and it needs to stop. The Maryland state government needs to learn to live within a more modest means and abandon its stubborn belief that it can spend dollars more wisely or efficiently than regular Marylanders who earn those dollars. I can’t stress this strongly enough: Maryland needs to lower taxes and fees, unburden its taxpayers from its relentless pursuit of ever-higher revenue and make our state a more affordable, livable place. We can and must find places to cut the budget, starting – but not ending – with waste, fraud,and abuse, which recent evidence indicates is running rampant in Maryland. Beyond that starting point, we must shrink the government bureaucracy and stop creating new bureaus, departments and commissions for every new progressive idea that comes along. Raising taxes on the wealthy is not the answer. First, they can (and do) leave, to escape the onerous tax burden. Second, since many of these so-called wealthy individuals are actually small businesses, raising taxes simply makes it harder for those businesses to thrive and hire people. It must stop now – we must cut taxes and spending, not raise them.

An energy affordability crisis is spiraling up in Maryland, due to the ill-advised, hasty, and reckless crushing of existing energy production industries and facilities in our state. These rash moves were wildly premature and counterproductive, shackling our economy, making us poorer as a society and as individuals, and thus hindering our ability to afford to build and develop modern energy sources. And it was all done in the name of Green idealism, despite Maryland’s negligible contribution to global emissions. I am an all-of-the-above proponent of energy policy. Nearly every form of viable energy production has its place in the modern economy. And while I understand the push to transition from a high-carbon energy portfolio to a lower-emission strategy, the transition must be managed slowly and carefully so as not to starve our state’s economy and residents of much-needed affordable energy. The short-term answer ought to emphasize and rely on natural gas, the transition to which has done more to reduce the power industry’s carbon emissions in the U.S. than all other forms of clean energy COMBINED. The primary long-term answer is nuclear power. Solar and wind power ought to be part of the answer as well, but those technologies come with their own set of environmental, economic and reliability problems. Bottom line, all viable energy sources have their place in a modern economy which values affordable energy. We should make any necessary transitions slowly and carefully, and prioritize affordable and abundant energy along the way.

The Maryland General Assembly should focus on market-based approaches to reducing the cost of housing in our state by reducing or eliminating administrative, environmental, and tax obstacles and burdens on homebuilders and by simplifying and speeding the various permitting and approval processes inherent in housing development. The market will generally respond to meet consumer needs – including housing needs -- when the government simply gets out of the way and employs the lightest possible touch in its regulatory approach. The worst – but most likely – approach by the Democrat supermajority in Annapolis would be to try to solve the problem through bureaucratic government spending, new programs, draconian regulations and ramped-up subsidies. That simply leads to ever-higher taxes and makes the state all the more unaffordable. It is time we finally learned this lesson and changed directions.

No, the DECADE Act will most certainly not do enough to boost job creation in Maryland because it fails to address the primary obstacles to business and job creation and growth in the state: onerous tax rates, an unfriendly business climate, a heavy-handed regulatory environment and a propensity by the General Assembly to resent and punish successful businesses and people with confiscatory taxes and fees, driving them from the state in record numbers. While there may be some short-term good to come out of the DECADE Act’s temporary special treatment targeting specific industries, what is really needed is not a fresh regime of targeted bureaucratic government programs, subsidies,and special temporary tax and regulatory relief, but rather a permanent statewide re-orientation toward low, broad-based and stable tax rates and minimal regulatory and administrative burdens. The Maryland General Assembly needs to stop seeing businesses as cash cows to be milked and bullied, but rather as the very lifeblood of a healthy economy in this state, to be left alone to work their magic. The government does not create jobs or wealth – businesses do that.

This is absolutely one of the silliest, most ill-advised, reckless exercises in virtue signaling disguised as legislation that I can even imagine. Those newly-banned 287(g) agreements were NOT sending local police out to knock down doors or pull people out of cars, but rather to cooperate with ICE by letting them know when they had an illegal alien that they had arrested (for a crime other than their immigration violation), so that ICE could come and SAFELY take custody, thereby AVOIDING the kind of dangerous public incidents seen in Minneapolis. Banning such agreements very clearly makes such dangerous public clashes MORE likely, not less likely. It was done for absolutely no reason other than to affirm the Democrats’ hatred of immigration law enforcement in general and Donald Trump in particular. This was one of the worst and most counterproductive bills passed in Maryland in many years. It doesn’t keep ICE out of Maryland – it only makes ICE agents’ job harder and more dangerous to themselves and to the public.

The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future is an overly ambitious, excessively expensive and unnecessarily restrictive monstrosity of a law, intended to bundle every item on the progressive educational wish list together to be shoved down the throats of every local jurisdiction in Maryland, including those which have long demonstrated an ability to effectively manage their own school system with excellent outcomes and without state micromanagement, and those which feature demographic mixes for which Blueprint was not designed and does not fit. While there are laudable goals and a few workable elements in Blueprint, it is MUCH too restrictive, MUCH too expensive and MUCH too heavily laden with unfunded mandates. I do believe there will be some reform to the Blueprint – because there desperately needs to be – but unfortunately, the Democrats will not touch that sacred cow in an election year. I’m cautiously optimistic that we will see some needed reform in the 2027 session.