A Bad Session in Annapolis

Problem-solving takes a back seat to partisanship.

IF YOU WERE looking for a break from the dispiriting partisanship in the Maryland General Assembly this year -- and you had to look hard -- you would have had to settle for the universal acclaim from Democrats and Republicans for the University of Maryland women's basketball team, which won the national championship. Beyond that, the 2006 session offered precious little respite from party-line skirmishes, one-upmanship and election-year posturing.

Neither the Democrat-dominated legislature nor Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., a Republican, is blameless, though the Democrats seemed more firmly in the driver's seat. At the outset, they set the tone for the session by overriding the governor's veto of a wrongheaded bill that arbitrarily singles out one company, Wal-Mart, as the whipping boy for the state's, and the country's, soaring health-care costs. The Maryland bill inspired imitators in state capitals nationwide in a spasm of feel-good populism that will do nothing to address the underlying crisis in health care and uninsured Americans.

Later in the game, the Democrats put politics ahead of sensible policy by stacking the deck for the coming elections by allowing early voting at specified polling stations -- most of them in heavily Democratic areas -- selected without Republican input. Democrats innocently stuck to their line that the early-voting polling stations were chosen solely on the basis of mass-transit convenience and proximity to populated areas. But by cutting Republicans out of the process they injected a gratuitous note of partisanship into the November elections even before they take place. And on the session's last day they blocked an attempt by the Ehrlich administration to transfer 11 appallingly bad schools in Baltimore from the city's control to new management. While protesting that the proposed transfer was cooked up to embarrass Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor, Democrats deflected attention away from the ruinous state of the schools themselves.

Then there was Mr. Ehrlich, who, in previous sessions, squandered his energies on ill-fated attempts to expand slot-machine gambling in Maryland. This year, when he wasn't busy taking both sides in the furor over the proposed sale of operations of East Coast ports, including Baltimore's, to an Arab company, Mr. Ehrlich was defending his Public Service Commission despite e-mail evidence that its chairman was inappropriately close to the utilities he is supposed to regulate.

The governor did sign modest legislation to clean up emissions from coal-fired plants. His support for that measure marked a welcome break from his previous stance, doubtless inspired by the tough reelection fight he faces this fall. And the $29 billion budget backed by the legislature contains enormous new sums for schools, teacher pensions and higher education; Mr. Ehrlich joined lawmakers in supporting a one-year freeze on college tuitions.

But the governor has not dispelled doubts about the vigor or maturity of his leadership, questions that will figure in his reelection campaign. Blessed by a flourishing economy and overflowing state coffers, Mr. Ehrlich is presiding over a period of prosperity in Maryland that is mainly a function of national and regional trends; he has done nothing to address the long-term fiscal health of the state. When it comes to legislative achievements, his four-year record remains slim.