Core values

For me, these are core values.

My life’s work is in a legislative body, where the majority rules. If you can count to 71 in the House and 24 in the Senate, you win.

But the First Amendment provides that the majority does not prevail when fundamental rights are violated.

The constitutional protection of freedom of the press does not prohibit a court from requiring a reporter to reveal a source, the Supreme Court has ruled. Nonetheless, the legislature can provide such protections by statute.

Similarly, the Court has held that the government can burden an individual’s exercise of his or her religious beliefs if there is a rational basis for a law of general applicability. Here as well, the legislature can enact additional protections, and the Congress has.

What prompts this discussion of constitutional law?

After the hearing concluded on my reporter’s shield bill yesterday, I learned that my religious accommodation bill had failed, 8-2.

Fundamentally, we were unable to persuade a majority of the members of the subcommittee that the exercise of religious belief – whether it’s a Shabbat elevator or a Hindu wall covering, is worthy of special consideration.

Defining bloggers

For a handful of my older colleagues, a laptop is a foreign object.

Of course, many younger delegates are far more adept at using the Internet than I am.

So I brought my laptop to the witness table to make this point: A growing number of people get their news from this machine, not from a newspaper delivered to their door or the tv set in their living room.

Maryland was the first state to enact a shield law, which protects a reporter, in certain circumstances, from being compelled by a court to disclose the source for a story.

My legislation would amend that law to include bloggers, using a definition from a bill pending in Congress.

Most of the questions dealt with how “blogger” should be defined, not whether or not someone who communicates over the Internet should receive this protection.

That’s a definite improvement over the reception I got five years ago.

Nonetheless, this is a bill that won’t pass until next year, at best. After the hearing, my witnesses and I agreed to meet this summer to discuss a revised definition.

We’ll invite one of the delegates who raised questions today about that language.