Anthony Brown tweeted that “no one is above the law” and everyone deserves “equal protection.” Three years of documented failures say otherwise — for children, parents, and anyone without a partisan use to Brown.
By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
At 3:07 p.m. today, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown posted a tribute to the rule of law on X. “No one is above the law,” he wrote. “Everyone is entitled to equal protection.” MDBayNews posted a direct reply: fix the family courts, stop allowing false accusations to destroy lives, stop releasing violent criminals, stop interfering with federal immigration enforcement, stop allowing courts to deny parents their court-ordered time with their children.
Brown didn’t respond. He rarely does to the Marylanders whose problems don’t translate into press releases.
This is not a screed against Anthony Brown as a person. He is, by most accounts, intelligent, credentialed, and personally committed to his version of justice. The problem is that his version of justice is a partisan instrument — selectively aimed at enemies of the Democratic coalition, studiously silent about failures within it, and consistently indifferent to the Marylanders who can’t be weaponized for a fundraising email or a podium announcement. His Law Day tweet isn’t a statement of principle. It’s a talking point from a man who has spent three years in office demonstrating that some Marylanders matter considerably more than others.
The record is not ambiguous. Let’s go through it.
Sixty-plus lawsuits and counting: the Trump obsession
Since the day after Donald Trump’s second inauguration on January 20, 2025, Anthony Brown has made filing lawsuits against the federal government the defining project of his tenure. By January 2026, his office had participated in more than 51 formal lawsuits and joined approximately 70 additional legal briefs — over 100 legal actions in total. In the months since, the count has continued climbing: USDA funding conditions in March 2026, ICE detention facilities in Baltimore and Hagerstown in February and March, mail-in voting rules in April. By any honest count, Brown has now filed or joined at least 60 lawsuits against the Trump administration in under 16 months.
Brown’s own office created a dedicated “Federal Accountability Unit” — funded by Maryland taxpayers — to sustain the litigation campaign. He openly admits that planning for the lawsuits began before Trump was inaugurated, using Heritage Foundation policy documents as a roadmap for what to challenge. That is not legal defense. That is a pre-scripted political opposition campaign dressed in a law degree.
“I think this is the most politically motivated attorney general Maryland has ever seen.”
— Del. Lauren Arikan (R-Harford County), March 2026
Brown’s defense is a financial one: his Federal Accountability Unit recovered over $110 million in education funding, $12 million for AmeriCorps, and other withheld federal grants. That return-on-investment argument would carry more weight if it were the whole story. It isn’t. The same period has seen Maryland rack up a $1.5 billion budget deficit. The state is cutting services, underpaying workers, and struggling to fund basic programs — and the AG’s office is directing legal resources toward a coordinated, nationally organized Democratic strategy to tie up a Republican administration in court.
A constitutional law professor at the University of Maryland’s Francis King Carey Law School noted the obvious: only Democratic attorneys general are filing these suits. Republican attorneys general did the same thing to the Biden administration and to Obama before him. What Brown is doing is not the rule of law. It is a partisan relay race with attorneys general passing the litigation baton in alternating administrations. The difference is that Brown is running his leg of the race with a publicly funded office, a publicly funded dedicated unit, and public statements framing it all as a principled stand for constitutional order.
Del. Matt Morgan, chair of Maryland’s House Freedom Caucus, stated flatly: “Years ago, politicians used to put the country ahead of their own ambitions and political parties.” That used to be called statesmanship. Brown calls filing his 60th lawsuit “protecting Marylanders.” Marylanders facing a deficit-driven budget can draw their own conclusions.
The Voting Rights Act: a deliberate lie about what the law does
On April 29 — two days before his Law Day sermon — Brown issued a sweeping statement condemning the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais. The ruling held that Louisiana’s racially engineered congressional map, which created a second majority-Black district, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Brown called it “a devastating blow” to voting rights. Governor Moore called it a “betrayal” of democracy. The Maryland General Assembly, in the closing minutes of the 2026 session, passed the Maryland Voting Rights Act of 2026 to “fill the gaps.”
Every word of this framing deserves challenge, because it is false on its face.
The Supreme Court’s ruling did not make it harder for Black voters — or any voters — to cast a ballot. It did not shorten polling hours, reduce polling locations, add ID requirements, cut early voting, restrict mail-in ballots, or change a single procedural rule governing how any Maryland resident votes. What it ruled was that drawing congressional district lines specifically to produce racial outcomes — engineering a map so that a particular district returns a Black representative — is itself a form of unconstitutional discrimination: sorting Americans into political boxes by race.
The Voting Rights Act’s original purpose was to stop Southern states from using bureaucratic machinery to prevent Black citizens from registering and voting at all. The right to cast a ballot. Brown and his allies have morphed that language into something categorically different: a claimed right to a guaranteed racial outcome in representation. Those are not the same thing, and conflating them is not an error — it is a political strategy.
| What the ruling actually did — and didn’t do |
|---|
| The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais (April 2026) ruled that Louisiana’s congressional map — drawn specifically to create a second majority-Black district — was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. It did not overturn Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which still prohibits discriminatory voting procedures. It did not remove any voter’s right to register, vote, or have their ballot counted. It raised the evidentiary threshold for racial gerrymandering claims, requiring plaintiffs to prove intentional discrimination rather than statistical disparity alone. Characterizing this as “gutting” voting rights or “devastating” the right to vote is factually inaccurate. |
Maryland’s response — the Voting Rights Act of 2026 — prohibits counties and municipalities from weakening the voting power of members of a “protected class,” meaning racial and language minorities. Republicans fought the bill as constitutionally suspect, warning that it enshrines in state law the same race-conscious framework the Supreme Court just held is impermissible at the federal level. Those legal objections may be proven right in court. What is not debatable is the framing: Brown portrayed a decision about racial gerrymandering as an attack on the act of voting itself. That is a dishonest characterization of a complex ruling, designed to inflame racial grievance rather than inform legal analysis.
Brown did not draft a statement the day the decision came down explaining what the ruling actually changed, what it actually left intact, and what it means for Maryland voters’ ability to cast their ballots — because that statement would have been boring. The accurate version has no political utility. The apocalyptic version raises money, generates headlines, and fits the narrative that Maryland’s Democratic institutions are the last line of defense against a racist federal government. Brown chose the apocalyptic version. That is not the conduct of an attorney general committed to the rule of law. It is the conduct of a partisan operative with a bar license.
Erasing Republican voters: redistricting and the map that would wipe them out
While Brown was filing lawsuits about the sanctity of voting rights, his party was engineering a congressional map designed to eliminate Maryland’s last Republican in the U.S. House. The Maryland House of Delegates passed the new map on February 2, 2026, on a vote of 99 to 37. The explicit purpose was to flip the seat held by Rep. Andy Harris and produce an 8-0 Democratic congressional delegation in a state where approximately a third of voters are registered Republican.
This was not a close call on the law. A Maryland state court had already condemned a functionally identical 2021 map as “a product of extreme partisan gerrymandering.” That prior map was struck down. A citizens’ redistricting commission had produced a map graded “A” by the Princeton Gerrymandering Project — meaning it was genuinely fair to both parties. That map was offered as an amendment to the 2026 bill. The Democratic majority defeated it 37 to 95. They did not want a fair map. They wanted the one that erases Republican representation.
Del. Kathy Szeliga, who successfully challenged the 2021 gerrymander in court, made the stakes explicit during floor debate: “Maryland Republicans, we won’t be erased. We will not be silenced, and we will not accept this.” Governor Moore, in a remarkable admission, said he was “working with lawyers and working judges” to ensure the map would survive legal challenge — a statement that drew immediate criticism as potentially improper ex parte contact with the judiciary.
The Senate ultimately blocked the bill — not on principle, but because Senate President Bill Ferguson calculated that the legal exposure was too great and the electoral risk of losing Democratic seats through court-imposed remedies was too high. Maryland Republicans were saved from being wiped off the congressional map by a Democratic Senate leader’s political self-interest, not by any principled defense of their right to representation.
And where was the Attorney General of Maryland — the state’s chief law enforcement officer, the man who tweeted today about equal protection — during all of this? His office provided legal analysis to the governor and the General Assembly supporting the redistricting effort. Brown was not defending the voting rights of Republican Marylanders. He was advising on how to legally engineer their political erasure. If the rule of law means equal protection for every Marylander, it means Republican voters in Maryland’s 1st District deserve representation as much as Democratic voters in the 4th. Brown’s Law Day tweet did not extend to them.
The children Brown ignores: foster care, CPS, and a system failing the most vulnerable
Set aside the federal lawsuits. Set aside the redistricting. Set aside the voting rights theater. The deepest indictment of Anthony Brown’s tenure as Maryland’s attorney general is what his office has not done about the state’s catastrophic, documented, ongoing failure to protect children.
While Brown was filing his 47th, 51st, and 60th lawsuit against the Trump administration, Maryland’s child welfare system was generating a scandal of its own — one that received far less attention from the AG’s office than the FBI headquarters relocation dispute.
In September 2025, a 16-year-old girl named Kanaiyah Ward died while in state custody — not in a foster home, not in a therapeutic placement, but in a hotel room in Baltimore, where she had been placed because Maryland’s foster care system lacked adequate licensed placements. She was not a runaway. She was not lost. She was a child the state had taken responsibility for, and the state warehoused her in a hotel room until she was dead.
Ward’s death was not an isolated failure. It was a symptom. A 2025 state audit of the Department of Human Services revealed that foster children had been placed in homes with registered sexual offenders. From 2023 through 2024, 280 children were placed in hotels because there were no appropriate placements available. Eighty-two of those children remained in hotels for periods ranging from three months to two years. The federal government fined Maryland $700,000 in 2024 for failing to meet key foster care performance benchmarks, including child safety and educational outcomes.
The records crisis is worse than the placement crisis. The Baltimore Banner obtained — only after threatening litigation — evidence that Maryland’s Department of Human Services had failed to complete required internal reports for roughly a third of all children who died from suspected abuse or neglect in 2023 and 2024. Form 1080s — mandatory documentation designed to force accountability and prevent future deaths — simply did not exist for 68 children. When the Banner requested the records, DHS initially denied the request as “unduly burdensome.” Only the threat of a lawsuit produced the admission that the records had never been created.
A child welfare expert described the missing records as “evidence of either corruption or incompetence.” The Moore administration’s response was to announce a $210,000 database fix. The attorney general’s response has been silence.
Maryland’s child death rate from abuse and neglect, even after the state corrected years of inflated federal reporting, still exceeds the national average. The state reported 46 deaths from child abuse or neglect in 2024 — roughly four per month — up from 23 a decade earlier. The state has struggled for years to explain why its rate remains so high and has produced no meaningful accountability for the caseworkers, supervisors, and judges whose decisions preceded these deaths.
| Zona Byrd: five years old, starved to death |
|---|
| In October 2024, five-year-old Zona Byrd died of starvation after being returned to her parents’ custody by a Maryland court. Her death was part of a recurring pattern: children flagged by caseworkers, returned by judges over professional objections, and killed. Maryland courts have returned children to dangerous households repeatedly — the Malachi case, in which a child was twice returned to his mother over caseworker objections before being killed years later, is another documented example. The Attorney General’s office has produced no systemic investigation into judicial decision-making in these cases. |
The failures extend to Child Protective Services’ handling of domestic violence and abuse referrals. CPS has documented, systemic shortfalls in following up on abuse and neglect reports within required timeframes. State audits going back years have cited failures in supervisory oversight, inconsistent safety assessments, and inadequate connections to community resources. These are not new findings. They are recurring findings that produce recurring condemnation, recurring pledges of reform, and no meaningful accountability for the agencies or individuals responsible.
The family courts he has never touched
Brown’s indifference to children at risk extends into a category of state failure that is even more invisible to him: Maryland’s family courts and the parents — mothers and fathers — who have had court-ordered time with their children denied without consequence.
Family court in Maryland is a system in which false accusations are made without evidentiary requirement, in which court-ordered parenting time is violated without enforcement, in which court-appointed professionals — guardians ad litem, custody evaluators, parenting coordinators — operate with financial incentives to extend litigation rather than resolve it, and in which the attorney general has produced exactly zero investigations, zero task forces, and zero enforcement actions.
The Maryland equal parenting bill — which would have created a rebuttable presumption of joint physical custody in an initial custody proceeding — failed in the 2025 legislative session. It was not opposed by Brown, because Brown did not engage with it. A parent whose court order is being violated today in Montgomery County, or Prince George’s County, or Baltimore City has no mechanism to compel enforcement, no state-level advocate, and no accountability from the office whose occupant is currently tweeting about equal protection.
In Maryland, if a parent is denied their court-ordered time with their child, they can return to court — at their own expense, before a judge who may or may not enforce the order, against an opposing party who faces no criminal consequences for contempt in the vast majority of cases. The attorney general has no program for this. He has no task force for this. He has no enforcement unit for this. He has a press release about Law Day.
Children who lose meaningful contact with a fit parent due to family court dysfunction do not appear in the AG’s annual reports. They are not a media constituency. They do not hold press conferences. They grow up with one parent, systematically removed from their lives by a court that neither party asked to stop. Brown has never treated this as a civil rights issue, though the documented financial disparities in who can afford prolonged custody litigation, and the documented outcomes for children who lose parental contact, would meet any reasonable threshold for systemic harm.
“You fight for every Marylander except for every Marylander. Fix the family courts and parents’ rights unjustly denied. Stop allowing false accusations to destroy lives.”
— MDBayNews reply to @OAGMaryland, May 1, 2026
The disability community Brown forgot to protect
Maryland has roughly 900,000 residents with disabilities — about one in seven Marylanders. They navigate a state whose public systems have been documented, repeatedly and recently, to violate federal disability law. The attorney general whose Law Day tweet invoked equal protection for every Marylander has produced no meaningful enforcement action on their behalf. The failures are not minor or isolated. They are systemic, documented, and longstanding.
Start with transportation. In June 2023, the U.S. Attorney’s Office sent Maryland Transit Administration a formal letter finding that its MobilityLink paratransit service — the door-to-door transportation system for Marylanders with disabilities who cannot use fixed-route transit — was not in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Federal investigators found a pattern of late and missed pickups, capacity constraints that effectively denied service, and long call center waits that left riders stranded. In one documented case, a rider scheduled for an 8:30 p.m. pickup was told at 8:55 p.m. that her ride would not arrive until 2:37 a.m. — more than five hours after the event she attended ended. She was forced to leave her wheelchair at the venue and retrieve it the next day.
Disability Rights Maryland described MobilityLink failures as endangering “the health and safety of riders” and violating federal law. Riders missed doctor’s appointments, religious services, and visits with family. Some became so fearful of being stranded that they stopped leaving home except when absolutely necessary. The federal government found these violations and threatened a lawsuit. The Maryland Attorney General’s office, whose mandate includes civil rights enforcement, produced nothing. The U.S. Attorney did the work Brown’s Civil Rights Division should have been doing.
The story is the same in public benefits. In October 2024, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights announced a settlement agreement with Maryland’s Department of Human Services, resolving disability discrimination complaints that had been piling up since 2011 — over a decade. Investigators found that DHS lacked consistent policies for assessing whether applicants had disabilities, had no reliable system for providing required accommodations, and had been cutting off or denying cash assistance to disabled Marylanders without the legally required disability-related review. Nearly 28,000 Maryland families rely on Temporary Cash Assistance. Many of those families include disabled parents or caregivers who were systematically denied the accommodations the law requires.
“People have been waiting over a decade for this news,” said Michelle Salomon Madaio of the Homeless Persons Representation Project, which had represented dozens of families in discrimination complaints against DHS. “To have the TCA program designed to end poverty, but then you can’t access it because you have a disability” — that is what a decade of non-enforcement looks like. The settlement was extracted by the federal government, not championed by Maryland’s own attorney general.
Then there are Baltimore’s sidewalks. In 2021, Disability Rights Maryland filed a federal class action lawsuit against the City of Baltimore on behalf of pedestrians with mobility disabilities, documenting that just 1.3% of surveyed curb ramps in the city met ADA standards. Thousands of Baltimore residents in wheelchairs and with mobility devices were being forced into traffic because their city’s sidewalks and curb cuts were impassable. A partial settlement was reached in December 2024 — requiring the city to spend $44 to $50 million repairing ramps and sidewalks. That settlement was won by a nonprofit disability rights organization. The Attorney General of Maryland, who speaks regularly about civil rights and equal protection, played no visible role.
And this spring, Maryland state agencies faced a federal deadline — April 24, 2026 — to bring government websites and documents into compliance with ADA Title II digital accessibility standards. For years, state websites and forms have been inaccessible to Marylanders who are blind, deaf, or have cognitive disabilities that require accessible formatting. Brown’s office has provided no enforcement framework, no accountability mechanism, and no public pressure on agencies that have lagged. The work of compliance has been left to the state Department of Information Technology and individual agencies — with no legal teeth from the AG’s office behind the deadline.
Brown’s “equity” framework — the Office of Equity, Policy, and Engagement, the Civil Rights Division, the Equitable Justice Collaborative — is constructed almost entirely around race. Disability is conspicuously absent from his public priorities, his press releases, and his enforcement record. Maryland has roughly a million residents whose equal access to transportation, housing, public benefits, government services, and the built environment is guaranteed by federal law. That law has been repeatedly violated by state and local agencies on Brown’s watch. He has filed 60-plus lawsuits against the federal government in the name of civil rights. He has filed zero proactive enforcement actions on behalf of Maryland’s disabled community that this publication has been able to identify.
That is not an oversight. It is a choice. Disabled Marylanders don’t generate the same press conference energy as transgender military service bans or FBI headquarters disputes. They are not a coalition partner in the Democratic Party’s national litigation strategy. They are Marylanders who need a state attorney general willing to enforce the law on their behalf — not just invoke it on Law Day.
What an equal-protection attorney general would actually look like
An attorney general who meant what Brown tweeted today would look different from what Maryland has had for the past three years.
He would have created an enforcement mechanism for court-ordered parenting time, because court orders mean nothing if the state will not enforce them. He would have launched an investigation into the financial architecture of Maryland’s family court system — the professional fees, the billing incentives, the judicial referral patterns — because a system that profits from prolonged litigation is a system structured against children. He would have pushed legislation requiring CPS to document and report every suspected abuse death, and he would have prosecuted agencies that didn’t, rather than waiting for a newspaper to sue for records that were never created.
He would have stood up during the redistricting fight and said, publicly, that engineering a map to produce an 8-0 Democratic congressional delegation in a state with a third Republican electorate is a violation of the equal protection principle he claims to champion. He would not have provided legal cover for it.
He would have issued a statement after the VRA ruling explaining accurately what the decision did and did not change, rather than a statement designed to maximize racial grievance and Democratic turnout ahead of a midterm election year.
And he would have stopped filing reflexive partisan lawsuits long enough to ask whether the people of Maryland — facing a $1.5 billion deficit, a child welfare system that warehouses teenagers in hotel rooms until they die, family courts that operate without meaningful accountability, and violent criminals cycling through a revolving-door justice system — are actually well-served by having their attorney general as the lead litigant in a nationally coordinated Democratic legal assault on the federal executive branch.
| The verdict |
|---|
| Anthony Brown is running for reelection in 2026 against Republican challenger James B. Rutledge III — a Bel Air-based practicing attorney designated by the GOP Central Committee in March. His record is a choice — not a circumstance. He chose 60-plus lawsuits over child welfare accountability. He chose redistricting cover over equal protection. He chose racial grievance framing over legal honesty on the VRA ruling. He chose the families and children who generate good press over the ones who don’t. That is not the rule of law. It is the rule of a man who wants to be governor and has decided that Maryland’s most vulnerable are an acceptable price for the political brand he is building. On November 3, Marylanders will have a choice. They should use it. |
Sources: William J. Ford, “Brown compiles ‘voluminous’ record of legal challenges to Trump administration policies,” Maryland Matters, November 7, 2025; William J. Ford, “Attorney General Brown: Biggest challenge against Trump is protecting ‘the rule of law,'” Maryland Matters, January 20, 2026; William J. Ford, “As Trump hits 100 days, Brown among attorneys general battling him at every turn,” Maryland Matters, April 29, 2025; Jeff Abell, “Critics call it ‘political theatre’ as AG Brown racks up 100+ actions against Trump admin.,” Fox Baltimore / WBFF, March 11, 2026; “Maryland AG advocates against Montgomery County parents in Supreme Court case,” Fox Baltimore / WBFF, April 16, 2025; “Brown Leads MD in 47th Suit Against Trump Policies,” Southern Maryland Chronicle, December 27, 2025; Anthony G. Brown, “Maryland’s legal victories show prudent use of resources,” Baltimore Sun, August 29, 2025; Office of the Attorney General, “Attorney General Brown Files Lawsuit Challenging Trump Administration Threats to Billions in Critical USDA Funding,” OAG Maryland, March 23, 2026; “Redistricting in Maryland ahead of the 2026 elections,” Ballotpedia, accessed May 2026; “Maryland House OKs new congressional map, but Senate will likely prove a roadblock,” CNN Politics, February 3, 2026; Bryan P. Sears, “Redistricting bill sails through House, faces troubled waters in the Senate,” Maryland Matters, February 3, 2026; “Redistricting bill nears finish line in MD House,” The Daily Record, January 30, 2026; “Could the gutting of Voting Rights Act reinvigorate Maryland’s stalled redistricting plan?,” WYPR, April 30, 2026; Jessica Calefati, “Maryland DHS failed to document many deaths from suspected child abuse or neglect,” The Baltimore Banner, October 13, 2025; Jessica Calefati, “Fewer Maryland children are dying from abuse or neglect than originally reported,” The Baltimore Banner, March 5, 2025; “Maryland Audit Reveals State Failed to Shield Foster Children from Registered Sexual Offenders,” Survivors Rights, September 18, 2025; “Maryland’s Most Vulnerable: The Children Who Died While Systems Failed,” Father & Co., February 2026; “Maryland’s $1.2 billion ‘child welfare’ blunder,” NCCPR Child Welfare Blog, April 2026; “Q&A: Maryland’s AG highlights wins against landlords and Trump,” The Daily Record, December 22, 2025; “Republican Emerges to Challenge Anthony Brown in Maryland Attorney General Race,” MDBayNews, March 11, 2026; “A Lawyer for Maryland, Not Washington,” Montgomery County Republican Club, April 2026; “Maryland Sues Trump Administration Over Federal Funding Conditions Tied to Immigration Enforcement,” WMAR, May 13, 2025; “Maryland AG joins coalition suing Trump admin over mail-in voting executive order,” WMAR, April 2026; William J. Ford, “U.S. Attorney: Maryland paratransit system does not comply with ADA; lawsuit threatened,” Maryland Matters, July 19, 2023; “MTA’s MobilityLink/Paratransit program investigated after disability groups file complaint,” CBS Baltimore / WJZ, July 2023; “MobilityLink: Share Your Story,” Disability Rights Maryland; Penelope Blackwell, “Changes coming to Maryland agency after discrimination complaints,” The Baltimore Banner, October 18, 2024; “HHS Office for Civil Rights Secures Agreement with the State of Maryland to Make Programs More Accessible for Persons with Disabilities,” HHS.gov, October 10, 2024; “Voluntary Resolution Agreement Between HHS and Maryland Department of Human Services,” HHS.gov, October 2024; “Disability Rights Maryland — Baltimore sidewalk ADA settlement, Goodlaxson v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore,” Disability Rights Maryland, December 2024; “ADA Title II Compliance Timeline,” Maryland Digital Playbook, 2026; “Maryland Disability Rights Progress: Challenges and Triumphs,” Hello ABA, 2025.
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