Suit claims Annapolis blew past its own statutory deadline to rush HB 2100 onto the ballot
By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Maryland Republican lawmakers and a Washington-based conservative watchdog group filed suit Thursday night in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court seeking to block a proposed constitutional amendment on congressional redistricting from ever reaching voters in November, arguing Democratic leaders blew past the state’s own certification deadline to get it there.
The case, Howell v. Maryland State Board of Elections, was brought by the Oversight Project alongside all seven members of the Maryland Freedom Caucus — Chairman Matt Morgan, Vice Chair Kathy Szeliga, Ryan Nawrocki, Lauren Arikan, Mark Fisher, Brian Chisholm, and Robin Grammer — plus Senate Minority Leader Steve Hershey and Senate Minority Whip Justin Ready. It names the Maryland State Board of Elections, Secretary of State Susan Lee, Attorney General Anthony Brown, and Governor Wes Moore as defendants.
What the amendment would do
At issue is HB 2100, which Moore signed after the General Assembly’s Aug. 3-5 special session. The amendment asks voters whether the state constitution’s compactness, contiguity, and county-line requirements — which currently apply to both legislative and congressional districts — should be narrowed to cover only General Assembly districts. Congressional maps would still have to satisfy federal population-equality law, but would no longer be bound by the tighter state standard.
That standard is a legacy of the last redistricting fight: in March 2022, an Anne Arundel County judge struck down Maryland’s prior congressional map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, with Szeliga as lead plaintiff in that case. If HB 2100 is ratified, Democrats — who hold supermajorities in both chambers — would be free to draw a new, mid-decade congressional map without that constraint, a map Republicans say would eliminate Rep. Andy Harris’s 1st District, the state’s only GOP-held congressional seat, and produce an 8-0 Democratic delegation.
“Supporters call HB 2100 a restoration of pre-2022 law. Opponents call it the roadmap to an 8-0 Democratic congressional delegation.”
The Eastern Shore stake
The 1st District is the target because it’s the only one left to take. Harris, an eight-term incumbent, holds the state’s sole Republican-leaning seat — Cook Political Report rates it R+8 — and it’s also Maryland’s largest district geographically, running the length of the Eastern Shore’s nine counties plus Harford County and part of Baltimore County. A Moore-created redistricting panel had already floated a plan to make the seat more competitive for a Democrat before this year’s special session; that effort stalled in a Senate rules committee, and a second attempt died there too, before Senate leadership reversed course this spring following the Callais ruling and a redistricting fight in Indiana.
During House debate, Del. Thomas Hutchinson (R-Lower Shore) tried to attach a nonbinding referendum asking the Shore’s nine counties — Caroline, Cecil, Dorchester, Kent, Queen Anne’s, Somerset, Talbot, Wicomico, and Worcester — whether they favored seceding from Maryland altogether, reviving a decades-old idea associated with the late state Sen. Richard Colburn. The amendment failed, but Hutchinson argued on the floor that the bill would all but guarantee Congress no longer has a member who actually lives on the Shore. Sens. Mary Beth Carozza and Johnny Mautz separately pushed an unsuccessful amendment requiring any new map to account for the Chesapeake Bay as a shared regional resource, arguing the redistricting push ignored how central the Bay is to Eastern Shore life.
The opposition wasn’t confined to Republicans. Del. Sheree Sample-Hughes, a Democrat who represents part of the Shore, told colleagues on the floor that she wasn’t defending Harris personally but that her constituents still “want to have a voice” and worried that a rural district diluted with suburban precincts would lose it. HB 2100 ultimately passed the House 96-38 and the Senate 32-13, both on essentially party-line votes — Sample-Hughes’s floor remarks notwithstanding.
That regional angle carried into the lawsuit itself: Howell’s statement singled out the Shore by name, arguing Moore’s plan would let Annapolis Democrats “turn the Eastern Shore into Baltimore and Prince George’s County” — rhetoric that underscores how much of the opposition to HB 2100, inside and outside the legislature, has been framed as a fight over Shore representation specifically, not just partisan seat math.
“For Eastern Shore opponents, the lawsuit is about more than party—it is about whether the Shore keeps a representative who actually lives there.”
Democratic leaders have pointed to a wave of mid-decade congressional redistricting in Republican-led states, and to the U.S. Supreme Court’s April 29 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, as the backdrop for the bill. That decision narrowed the circumstances in which Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act can justify race-conscious district lines — it did not categorically bar considering race in redistricting, but made map-drawers that rely on VRA compliance more vulnerable to challenge. In his own statement signing HB 2100, Moore said Republicans nationally were “working to rig the system” and that Maryland “will not be caught flat-footed.” The Oversight Project’s press release goes further, describing the special session as called specifically “in response to” the Callais ruling — a characterization the governor’s own statement doesn’t make explicitly. Senate President Bill Ferguson and House Speaker Joseline Peña-Melnyk have described the bill as restoring the legal standard that existed before 2022, not as a partisan maneuver.
The legal argument
“The lawsuit isn’t about where the lines go—it’s about whether the amendment legally belongs on the ballot at all.”
The complaint doesn’t challenge the amendment’s substance so much as the process used to get it on the ballot. It alleges the General Assembly’s own fiscal note acknowledged that Maryland’s July 1 deadline for certifying statewide ballot questions had already passed by the time the special session convened in August — over a month later. To get around that, according to the complaint, sponsors inserted the phrase “notwithstanding any other provision of law” into HB 2100 less than an hour before the joint committee hearing began, language the plaintiffs argue was designed to override the state’s certification, public-notice, and comment requirements after those deadlines had already lapsed. Election officials are separately required to post the full text of a proposed amendment at least 90 days before Election Day.
“Plaintiffs argue lawmakers missed the state’s own election deadlines and tried to override them after the fact.”
The plaintiffs also point to how the bill was characterized during debate — described as “technical” in the House, according to the complaint, even as Senate floor debate reflected an understanding that the statutory timeline could no longer be met. The complaint cites remarks from the floor by Democratic state Sen. Cheryl Kagan to that effect. Republicans in the House had separately complained during the special session that leadership barred introduction of any bill unrelated to redistricting and instructed the Department of Legislative Services not to draft them.
The suit asks the court to declare the amendment was unlawfully placed on the ballot and to bar state officials from certifying, printing, distributing, tabulating, or canvassing votes on it, with expedited review given the approaching election calendar.
Reaction
“The court now faces the first major test of whether Maryland’s special-session redistricting process complied with state election law.”
“The process matters,” Szeliga said in a statement distributed by the Maryland Freedom Caucus, framing the suit as a continuation of the 2022 case she led. Morgan accused Democrats of ignoring “statutory deadlines” and treating “the Constitution as an obstacle to be removed.” Oversight Project President Mike Howell, whose group describes the litigation as part of its “REPAIR Initiative,” cast the fight in sharply partisan terms, tying it to Moore’s national political ambitions and to redistricting fights in other states.
As of Thursday night, Moore’s office, the Attorney General’s office, and the State Board of Elections had not responded to requests for comment from Fox News Digital, which first reported the filing.
Sources: Oversight Project press release (itsyourgov.org, Aug. 6-7, 2026); Fox News Digital, “Oversight Project sues to block Maryland Democrats’ redistricting measure backed by Gov. Moore”; Fox45/WBFF Baltimore; Maryland Matters, “House set to give final approval to redistricting constitutional amendment”; WBOC, “Eastern Shore Secession question floated during Maryland redistricting debate”; WMDT/47abc, “Maryland Passes Congressional Redistricting Bill”; Fox 5 DC, “Maryland voters to decide redistricting plan targeting Andy Harris’ district”; WYPR; Office of Governor Wes Moore press release; The American Redistricting Project (Szeliga v. Lamone case summary); Wikipedia, “Maryland’s 1st congressional district” (Cook PVI rating).
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