By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Before we get to the bills, a word about the messenger.
Del. Christopher Eric Bouchat of District 5 has had a difficult few weeks. His symbolic protest on the House floor generated national attention, then generated backlash, then generated an email to Republican leadership that was intemperate by any measure. His colleagues have called for his resignation. His name has become shorthand, in some corners of the Maryland press, for political dysfunction.
None of that is what this piece is about.
This piece is about three constitutional amendments that Bouchat introduced in the Maryland General Assembly — bills that have received almost no coverage, that have been ignored by both parties for reasons that are entirely self-serving, and that deserve a serious public hearing regardless of what anyone thinks of the man who introduced them.
Ideas do not become wrong because their authors are imperfect. And these ideas are not wrong.
The Problem All Three Bills Are Trying to Solve
Start with a fact that is uncomfortable but undeniable: the citizens of Maryland are not actually sovereign over their state legislature.
That is not a partisan talking point. It is a structural reality. The majority party in the General Assembly controls the redistricting process — meaning the people who benefit most from how districts are drawn are the same people who draw them. The result is a chamber whose composition is, in practice, predetermined. Not by voters. By mapmakers.
Bouchat took this argument to the United States Supreme Court in 2012. He lost — but the legal challenge produced case research that informed the constitutional framework behind all three of the bills he introduced this session.
Maryland Democrats have held a supermajority in the General Assembly for over a century. That is not because Maryland voters are monolithically Democratic. It is substantially because the districts have been drawn to make any other outcome nearly impossible. Republicans, to be fair, do the same thing wherever they hold power. The problem is the system, not the party.
These three bills are an attempt to fix the system.
HB56: The Citizen Redistricting Convention Amendment
This is the most consequential of the three, and the most elegant in its design.
HB56 would remove redistricting authority from the legislature entirely. Every ten years, following the census, each Maryland county would elect a nonpartisan citizen delegation — current elected officials explicitly prohibited from participating — to convene in Annapolis and draw the state’s legislative and congressional districts. The size of each county’s delegation would be proportional to its share of the state’s population.
The genius of the mechanism is that it pits county interests against each other rather than party interests against each other. Each delegation would be fighting for its community’s representation, which tends to produce districts that reflect actual geographic and demographic communities rather than partisan calculations.
Bouchat’s analogy is apt: kids do not grade their own papers. Legislators drawing their own districts is precisely that — and the grades they give themselves are always excellent.
It is worth noting that the Maryland Republican caucus has introduced its own redistricting reform bill — one that Bouchat explicitly distinguishes from his. His argument is that any reform that still allows politicians, or politician-appointed commissions, to draw districts is not reform at all. It is the appearance of reform designed to inoculate the system against genuine change. Whether you agree with that critique or not, it deserves engagement.
HB56 was referred to the House Rules and Executive Nominations Committee, where it received a hearing on March 16. It has not advanced further.
HB190: The County Sovereignty Amendment
This bill is the least understood of the three and potentially the most historically significant.
Most Maryland counties operating under a commissioner-style government — a holdover from colonial British rule — have no local constitution and no formal separation of powers. Their effective legislative authority flows from the General Assembly in Annapolis, not from the citizens of the county itself. County commissioners, under this structure, are largely executing the state’s budget priorities rather than governing as independent local authorities.
HB190 would change that by requiring every Maryland county to adopt a charter by December 31, 2032, establishing elected county councils chosen by voters within councilmanic districts. Maryland would become the first state in the country to guarantee constitutional government with separation of powers at every level — state, county, and municipal — giving citizens genuine sovereignty over the officials they elect at every level.
This is not a conservative idea or a liberal idea. It is a structural idea rooted in the same logic as the U.S. Constitution — that concentrated, unchecked power at any level of government is a problem, and that citizens should have meaningful mechanisms to check it.
The entire Maryland Republican caucus opposes this bill. Bouchat’s explanation for why is worth considering: local power, even small and constrained local power, is still power. And those who hold it are rarely enthusiastic about sharing it with the citizens who gave it to them.
HB190 was initially referred to the Environment and Transportation Committee, then rereferrred to Government, Labor, and Elections on February 2 — an unusual procedural move that suggests friction. It received a hearing on March 4. It has not advanced further.
HB206: The Senate Continuity Amendment
This is the most technical of the three, but its logic is straightforward.
HB206 would expand the Maryland Senate from 47 to 48 members and the House from 141 to 144, then stagger Senate elections so that 24 senators are elected every two years on four-year terms. This mirrors the structure of the U.S. Senate, where one third of members face election every two years.
The purpose is stability and deliberation. Under the current system, a single wave election can transform the entire chamber at once — producing legislatures that reflect a moment’s political passion rather than the considered judgment of the electorate over time. The staggered model forces continuity, ensures institutional knowledge survives electoral swings, and creates a modest check on the kind of unchecked legislative power that the founders feared.
Bouchat cites the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror as a historical example of what happens when a legislature with no such check acts on pure passion. That may be a dramatic reference for Maryland politics — but the underlying political science is sound. The U.S. Senate was designed precisely to prevent that kind of legislative capture, and it has largely worked.
HB206 was referred to the House Rules and Executive Nominations Committee, where it received a hearing on March 9. It has not advanced further.
Why Nobody Is Covering This
The answer is simple: neither party wants these bills to pass.
Democrats benefit from the current system and have no incentive to reform it. Republicans, despite their stated commitment to democratic principles, benefit from the same gerrymandering dynamics at the local level and are institutionally resistant to giving citizens more direct power over their own governance.
The press, for its part, has been understandably focused on the drama surrounding Bouchat himself — the protest, the email, the checks, the resignation calls. That coverage is legitimate. But it has come at the cost of any serious examination of what he has actually proposed.
These three bills represent a coherent, internally consistent theory of democratic reform. They are rooted in genuine political philosophy — Hamilton, Madison, Aristotle — and in Bouchat’s own hard experience navigating a system he believes is structurally rigged against citizens and working people alike.
They may not be perfect. They are almost certainly not going to pass this session, or next session, or the session after that. But they deserve a public debate. They deserve to be examined, challenged, and either adopted or rejected on their merits.
Instead, all three received committee hearings in early March — and then quietly stalled. No votes. No debate on the floor. No serious public engagement with the substance of what they propose. Hearings in Annapolis, without follow-through, are sometimes less a sign of interest than a procedural courtesy before burial.
Aristotle — whose bust briefly occupied a seat in the Maryland House of Delegates — wrote that the purpose of political community is the good life for its citizens, not the perpetuation of those in power.
Three bills are waiting for someone to take that seriously.
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