The second, though, pertains to those PRPs themselves. Last July, the Maryland Behavioral Health Administration had to place a moratorium on the growing number of PRPs because there are now so many of them that state oversight of quality was becoming problematic. The pause is still in effect in Baltimore and nine counties.

The first PRPs in Maryland were established in the late 1970s and early 1980s by visionaries who were convinced that, with the proper support, most men and women with even the most disabling mental illnesses could live productive lives in community settings and outside the back wards of state institutions. That has proven to be the case for thousands of Marylanders and for people with psychiatric disabilities across the country.

As PRP services grew over time, advocates, community providers and state agency staff collaborated year after year on enhanced regulations and outcome measures to maximize quality. One of the last jobs I had before retiring at the end of 2015 was to work with stakeholders on procedures to mandate national accreditation for all community behavioral health programs in Maryland.

In my experience back then, achieving national accreditation was rigorous and arduous but, according to the PRPs and other community-based programs that went through it, the process resulted in improved quality and service outcomes and, most importantly, higher consumer satisfaction.

So, 10 years later, I have to ask: What happened? Did all the new PRPs endure the same accreditation challenges as PRPs of the past? Did accreditation standards weaken? Were state quality monitors asleep at the switch? Above all, are Marylanders with behavioral health conditions receiving the services they need and deserve?

A witty colleague once said: If you’re making money in community mental health, you’re not doing it right. I hope money is not the reason there are so many PRPs today.

— Herb Cromwell, Catonsville

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This year, we are honored to host the 52nd reunion of my paternal family — the Hathaways — right here in Baltimore, a city that has nurtured my personal and professional journey.

Our family’s journey began on the shores of West Africa, continuing through the Somerset Plantation in Creswell, North Carolina. Through bondage and beyond, our ancestors never lost sight of their North Star: freedom. That freedom was not just physical, but intellectual, spiritual and communal — embodied in our pursuit of academic achievement, economic empowerment, faith formation and civic engagement.

Our careers have touched every corner of society — ministry, education, arts and culture, politics, sports and entertainment and business. The strength of our family has fortified each of us, helping us resist the traps, tragedies and tricks that too often pull others down. In each story of resilience, in every achievement, in all our sacrifices, we find living proof that “knowing your family strengthens each other.”

Family reunions such as this serve a vital role. They are more than social gatherings — they are sacred moments of reconnection. They anchor each generation with pride and purpose, reminding us of who we are and where we come from. We are descendants of survivors, dreamers and doers.

I’ve been blessed with an active career in the life of Baltimore. Any success I’ve achieved is because I’ve been rooted and grounded in a faith tradition passed down through generations — nurtured by my family, upheld by our ancestors. Truly, “we’ve come this far by faith.” And I still believe, “the family that prays together, stays together.”

So, to my beloved Hathaway family: Welcome to Baltimore. Welcome home.

— Alvin C. Hathaway Sr., Baltimore

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First, I was initially hesitant to support this bill — and for good reason. As a fiscal conservative, I raised concerns about its potential to add to the deficit. Those concerns were not just for show; I withheld support to ensure Maryland taxpayers wouldn’t be saddled with more Washington debt.

Because conservatives pushed back, major changes were secured before the final vote. Among the wins:

Stronger Medicaid integrity provisions were included to stop states from improperly paying benefits — including to illegal immigrants — while protecting care for truly needy Marylanders.

Green New Scam rollbacks, ensuring Maryland families and businesses aren’t burdened with radical energy mandates that drive up costs. This is especially essential as offshore wind adversely affects watermen, communities and constituents in my district.

Strengthening work requirements: The One Big Beautiful Bill strengthens common-sense work requirements for able-bodied adults receiving federal government assistance on the taxpayer dime — an important step toward restoring the dignity of work and ensuring taxpayer dollars aren’t used for those who choose not to work.

These changes are real, tangible victories for Marylanders who expect their representatives to fight for fiscal responsibility. The OBBB also contains wins that will make the lives of all Marylanders better:

No taxes on tips — more money in workers’ pockets

Maryland’s restaurant and hospitality workers work hard for every dollar they earn, and they shouldn’t have to share their tips with the IRS. Thanks to the OBBB, qualified tips are no longer taxed, putting more money directly into the hands of servers, bartenders and hotel staff across our state. This is especially meaningful for younger workers and single parents juggling multiple jobs just to make ends meet.

Relief for seniors — protecting retirement security

The bill also delivers meaningful tax relief for seniors, ensuring they keep more of their retirement income. At a time when many older Marylanders are living on fixed incomes while dealing with rising health care and energy costs, this is a major step forward. Seniors have spent their lives working and paying into the system; they deserve to keep more of what they’ve earned.

Tax relief for Americans

The One Big Beautiful Bill delivers real tax relief for hardworking middle-class Americans, putting more money back into the pockets of those who need it most.

No tax on overtime pay

The One Big Beautiful Bill delivers a major win for hardworking Americans by ensuring no tax on overtime pay. This means extra hours worked truly pay off, allowing workers to keep the money they earn when they put in the long hours to provide for their families.

Meanwhile, the media is busy telling a different story — painting the bill as some sort of attack on working families and suggesting conservatives “caved.” That’s simply false. No eligible Marylander is losing Medicaid coverage. No eligible person is losing SNAP benefits. Rural hospitals are not being “defunded.” And the Freedom Caucus didn’t “fold” — we fought, we negotiated and we secured major spending policy wins that would never have been in this bill without conservative leverage.

This is what responsible legislating looks like. We said “no” to reckless spending until the bill was improved. We worked with President Donald Trump and his team to make sure the final product delivered for taxpayers. And now, the One Big Beautiful Bill reflects conservative priorities Maryland families can feel good about — lower spending, stronger safeguards against waste and real accountability for Washington.

The bottom line is this: The One Big Beautiful Bill is a win for Maryland. It gives workers a break and provides real relief for seniors — all without raising taxes or adding new burdens on Maryland families.

The critics may keep shouting, but for Maryland’s seniors, service workers and hard-working taxpayers, the benefits of this bill will be felt every day — and that’s what really matters.

Andy Harris (X: @RepAndyHarrisMD) is a Republican representing Maryland in the U.S. House of Representatives.

I am in Europe, and the question is: Why is our president, Donald Trump, in Scotland?

The mainstream media would have you believe it’s a golfing trip. A New York Times headline reads, “Trump is greeted by protesters in Scotland.” NPR wrote that “protesters troll Trump on his golfing trip.” CNN said that “Trump flees Washington controversies for a golf-heavy trip to Scotland.” The Associated Press wrote, “Trump plays golf in Scotland while protesters take to the streets and decry his visit.”

But what’s the real purpose of his visit?

Scotland, of course, has some of the most beautiful golf courses in the world. But Trump is also in the midst of negotiating major international conflicts and pushing his audacious agenda in Washington. Could there be more to this trip?

What does Trump have up his sleeve? That’s the thing with him, you never really know what his true motivations are. Could he simply be golfing? Could he also be negotiating?

In the business world, golf is the game of business deals and negotiation. So maybe it’s a mix of both.

And maybe we should ask ourselves: Does the president simply deserve a vacation? Some time away to relax, to refresh, to renew himself?

You be the judge.

Armstrong Williams (www.armstrongwilliams.com; @arightside) is a political analyst, syndicated columnist and owner of the broadcasting company, Howard Stirk Holdings. He is also part owner of The Baltimore Sun.

While in the United Kingdom, I found myself right in the middle of a transgender rights protest. What I noticed in the difference between protests that occur in the United Kingdom and in the United States was shocking.

During the protest, counter-protesters who opposed transgenderism were seen being recorded by police up close and at different camera angles. After speaking to a U.K. citizen, I learned that not only is it used as evidence in court if criminal charges are brought against a person, but it’s also used to identify them via facial recognition to determine if they should be arrested on the spot for any outstanding criminal charges.

The surveillance of protesters and counter-protesters is undoubtedly a sore spot. Yet the protests themselves, as I was told, are generally peaceful. In the United States, protests often devolve into riots, where looting, burning buildings, assault and more are the norm rather than the exception. The U.K. is different (except for the George Floyd protests, as I was told).

It seems that the U.K., which has notoriously draconian speech laws, has traded free speech rights for safer protests.

Armstrong Williams (www.armstrongwilliams.com; @arightside) is a political analyst, syndicated columnist and owner of the broadcasting company, Howard Stirk Holdings. He is also part owner of The Baltimore Sun.

Despite the doom and gloom from many, there’s a lot to celebrate. For many Maryland families, the immediate benefits are real. The White House, for example, projects that typical two-child family households will see $8,300 to $12,200 more in take-home pay over the next four years, while single earners stand to gain $4,700 to $8,400. These gains will come from making the 2017 tax cuts, made during Trump’s first term, permanent. It will eliminate federal taxes on tips and on overtime, which will affect 4% and another 21% of Marylanders, respectively, and it will remove taxes on Social Security income. That alone will assist roughly 1 million Maryland seniors.

Approximately 86,000 small businesses across Maryland (41% of the total) can now claim enhanced pass-through deductions, while farmers will have the ability to benefit from permanent 100% bonus depreciation on capital assets and other programs. It is estimated that agricultural producers will stand to spend nearly $66 billion on new investments over 10 years as a result.

However, all budgets need to be balanced, and the cost to many Marylanders may be extraordinary (particularly for the state’s most vulnerable residents). Current state projections now show 175,000 Marylanders will lose Medicaid coverage, with the state losing up to $2.7 billion annually in federal funding when fully implemented. The cuts are projected to disproportionately impact rural communities, children, seniors and disabled residents who depend on Medicaid.

Maryland’s rural hospitals may also face particular peril. Rural hospitals nationwide could lose 21 cents of every dollar in Medicaid funding. This, no doubt, threatens closures in communities already struggling with health care access. Gov. Wes Moore warned that rural hospitals could lose $250 million.

The bill allocates over $170 billion nationally for immigration enforcement, including $45 billion for detention facilities and massive Border Patrol expansion. Meanwhile, “sanctuary” jurisdictions in Maryland will face potential federal funding cuts for defying the federal government in its efforts to deport illegal aliens.

The One Big Beautiful Bill presents Maryland with a fundamental trade-off: immediate tax relief and increased wages for many families against potentially long-term damage to health care, education and social services. This “beautiful” bill delivers on many good things, but Maryland families will ultimately decide whether the price, paid by our most vulnerable residents, was worth it.

Baltimore Sun editorial writers offer opinions and analysis on news and issues relevant to readers. They operate separately from the newsroom.

The decision has sparked debate over who should pay for disaster relief — the federal government, states, or both. What do you think?

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When I sought public office, I called for serious, common-sense, community-driven solutions. I warned that failure to act boldly would lead to chaos — and now, in July 2025, we’re seeing exactly that.

In just one week, 27 people overdosed in a single Baltimore neighborhood — a horrifying figure that should shake every public official to their core. According to Baltimore Police, the first wave of overdoses occurred in Penn North on July 11, and then again on July 18, when officers responded around 8:55 a.m. to multiple 911 calls about suspected overdoses along West North Avenue. Five individuals were rushed to area hospitals in serious condition. Two others were revived with Narcan but refused further treatment. One simply walked away after on-site assistance.

This is unacceptable.

Penn North — located at the intersection of Pennsylvania and North Avenue — is infamous not just for the open-air drug market that has festered for years, but as the flashpoint of the 2015 Freddie Gray uprising. Yet despite the visible presence of mass transit police, a substation for the Baltimore Police Department and squad cars routinely stationed at this exact intersection, drug dealing continues in broad daylight. It’s as if this corner has been abandoned to destruction — as though it’s meant to stay broken.

We cannot allow this to continue.

Mayor Brandon Scott held a press conference following the most recent overdoses, promising expanded naloxone distribution, 24/7 treatment access and possibly mobile treatment centers. But while these efforts are well-intentioned, they fall short of the decisive action needed to end this crisis.

The truth is this: Baltimore doesn’t need more press conferences — it needs a cleanup. It needs enforcement, real-time intervention and full-on accountability for the dealers and traffickers poisoning our people. This isn’t about criminalizing addiction — it’s about stopping those who prey on the addicted and leave death in their wake.

At the federal level, we’ve seen real leadership work on this as well. President Donald Trump signed the HALT Fentanyl Act into law, permanently classifying fentanyl-related substances as Schedule I drugs under the Controlled Substances Act. Surrounded by families whose lives were shattered by fentanyl, he called the bill “another defeat for savage drug smugglers and cartels.” That’s the kind of historic action we need to replicate here in Baltimore.

Let me be clear: The opioid epidemic is no longer a distant health issue — it’s a war zone in our own backyard. And we can’t afford more inaction. We need police accountability, community intervention, drug court reforms and neighborhood restoration plans backed by policy, not platitudes.

Penn North is more than a headline. It is a historic neighborhood that deserves to be remembered not for tragedy, but for triumph.

We need to clean up this corner. We need to restore its dignity. And we must act — now — before more lives are lost.

Christopher Anderson is a third-generation Baltimorean, a U.S. Coast Guard veteran and a community advocate. He is chairman of the Maryland Black Republican Council and a member of the Baltimore City Republican Central Committee. He has run for Congress and the Baltimore City Council.

Turley says that Mamdani has said that he favors the government “seizing the means of production,” but he acknowledges that Mamdani does not propose this on his candidate for mayor website.

But Turley argues that Mamdani believes governments in the United States, presumably at the federal as well as state and local level, should seize the means of production.

It is important to distinguish what candidates believe from what policies they promote.

If Mamdani is not proposing that the City of New York seize the means of production — basically take over all business — then it does not make sense to call him a socialist because nationalization of the means of production is the defining feature of socialism.

It is still an interesting and important question if Mamdani thinks that New York City and the country overall should seize the means of production someday. For now, though, it really does not make sense for anyone to insist that Mamdani is a Marxist or for Mamdani himself to say that he is a socialist if none of his policies distinguish him from a progressive Democrat.

The same can be said of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, who calls himself a democratic socialist (as does Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), but he really is not a socialist in any interesting sense of the term either. His views align more with social democracies in the Nordic countries, whose economies have core capitalist components.

The attention given to whether Mamdani is a socialist of some kind is a wake-up call to observers and citizens to look more carefully at questions about political economy and the language that is used by candidates, the media and pundits.

The media, in general, has for decades used cartoon language to identify our economy and the economy of other countries. For one, the nonstop identification of our economy as “capitalist” is a serious oversimplification.

For over one hundred years, the U.S. economy has involved considerable government intervention in the economy itself, starting in the Progressive Era and running through the New Deal Era and the Great Society Era.

There can be no doubt that we have a “mixed economy,” namely a society in which the government plays a major role regulating the economy and redistributing both wealth and income. Yet it is a rare day when a politician or a member of the media says that we have a “mixed economy,” even though middle school students learn about laissez-faire economies, mixed economies and socialist economies.

Calling ourselves capitalists just sets us up in opposition to communist states — of which there are very few in the post-Cold War world. Moreover, it creates the misleading impression that the two main economies in the world are traditional capitalism (which we had in 1890) and Marxist-Stalinist Russia and Maoist China from the 1950s and 1960s.

For years we have needed a debate between advocates of a progressive mixed economy and advocates of a conservative mixed economy. That is what we actually have now. But no one calls it that, and the capitalist and socialist labels generate extremist reactions on both sides.

Even the Big Beautiful Bill is nothing close to a defense of a laissez-faire capitalist economy. The cut to Medicaid is about 10% a year over the course of 10 years — namely $1 trillion. It is nothing close to a cut of the entire program, which would inch us closer to a laissez-faire economy.

With Medicare and Social Security barely touched — and that is about $2.5 trillion of our annual $7 trillion federal budget — the point stands that the Ds and Rs are fighting over what kind of mixed economy to have and not whether to have a socialist economy or a laissez-faire capitalist economy.

Pundits and the media in general and certainly our education system need to work with politicians to get us to a space where we stop using language to distort both the left and the right and, in the process, a reasonable centrist middle position.

The debates we are having today in New York City and around the country are about very important issues, but they are not about fundamentally moving outside of the mixed economy framework.

Dave Anderson (dmamaryland@gmail.com) has taught political philosophy at five colleges and universities, is editor of the interdisciplinary volume “Leveraging,” and ran for Congress as a Democrat in Maryland in 2016. 

It wasn’t the first time such a complaint had been made against an American university. For almost a century, conservatives have accused them of being hostile to their views. But their real target has always been the students. Conservatives believe universities indoctrinate young people to reject conservative ideas. The complaint has been raised by many prominent conservatives from William F. Buckley in the ‘50s, to Lewis Powell in the ’70s, to Vice President JD Vance today. Each time they suggest that increasing the number of conservative voices on campus will fix the problem. It hasn’t, and it won’t.

When it comes to swaying the opinions of the young, conservatives don’t have an access problem, or even a messenger problem — they have a message problem. The conservative message is failing because it conflicts with how young people think.

The influential child psychologist Erik Erikson described the psychosocial developmental stage of young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 as a period defined by the need to shape identity through connection. During this period, a hunger for belonging fuels the young person’s moral sensitivity, and they tend to respond most strongly to frameworks that emphasize fairness and inclusion — moral values that align more closely with progressive politics than traditional conservatism.

What’s often overlooked is how this developmental trajectory is reflected in the brain. Neuroscientists have found that the region of the brain responsible for long-term reasoning and impulse control doesn’t fully mature until around age 25. As a result, college-aged adults are especially attuned to emotional and moral messages, particularly those centered on harm and justice. They’re also more reactive to authority-based reasoning, which can make conservative appeals grounded in hierarchy or tradition feel threatening.

Instead of shaping a message that meets young people where they are emotionally and developmentally, conservatives accuse universities of indoctrinating them. Buckley, the father of American conservatism, was the first to suggest this in his 1951 book, “God and Man at Yale” — a foundational text for conservatives. Buckley offered few practical solutions for addressing the problem, but his complaint inspired other conservatives to seek solutions, including Lewis Powell, the future Supreme Court Justice.

In what would become known as the Powell Memo, a highly influential 1970s blueprint advising conservatives on how to push back against the social advances of the Civil Rights Movement, Powell suggested that one key reason conservatives were failing to reach college students was that conservatives were comparatively poor communicators. He thought more charismatic, dynamic speakers were the answer. He proposed pressuring universities to invite conservative speakers to campus who were “attractive, articulate and well-informed,” hoping they would attract young followers.

A similarly false assumption underlies the Trump antisemitism task force’s suggestion that Harvard increase the number of conservative voices on campus. “Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity.” This strategy did not work in the 1950s when Buckley proposed it, nor in the 1970s when Powell did.

Greater access and better spokesmen alone will not make conservative ideas more attractive to young people. Views that don’t match the emotional and relational priorities of emerging adults whose brains are still forming the very circuits that govern moral judgment will always struggle on campus. Not because these views are being deliberately silenced, but because they are out of sync — with psychology, with neuroscience and with what it means to grow into adulthood.

K. Ward Cummings is an essayist and social critic. He lives in Baltimore. Anne Tapp Jaksa is a professor of education at Saginaw Valley State University. She also chairs the board of directors of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.