Ladies, did you realize you were the victims of gender-based exclusion on June 14? That was the day of several “No Kings” rallies throughout Montgomery County. For a county that takes pride in its progressive values, a No Kings rally is outright gender bias. We should be holding No Kings and No Queens rallies, because in Montgomery County we have plenty of both.
The effusive support by some of President Trump and his forceful measures have sparked a suspicion of nobility creeping into American society. How justified that is, or why this suspicion comes up only with Trump, is, like preparing the perfect crème brûlée, beyond my level of expertise. As so often happens, I value the views of both sides on this national matter.
What is more difficult for me to understand is the participants in MoCo’s No Kings rallies. In Residents Show Up Countywide for ‘No Kings’ Protests, reporter Maryam Shahzad posted a video giving a glimpse of the rally from several sites around the county. Watching what they say and how they behave is instructive.
Three things are disturbing about these MoCo rallies. First, my guess is that most of the participants were members of the progressive wing of the local Democratic party. These are the very people who helped defeat the 2020 referendum to eliminate the four at-large positions on the County Council. Multi-winner at-large elections are a voting rights violation, because a small group of people elects 100% of the winners. This has been known since the first congressional elections in 1788, and that’s why the practice was finally abolished for elections to the House of Representatives in the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Why these people are concerned about King Trump, but not concerned about themselves as King Makers, escapes me.
Second, in an email from June 23, Council Member and County Executive candidate Evan Glass made a forceful statement pertaining to the No Kings rallies:
One week ago we marched in the streets with a simple but powerful message: No Kings. No one is above the law—not presidents, not billionaires and not those who seek to dismantle our democracy for personal gain.
Dismantle our democracy? Council Member Evan Glass is an at-large member of the county council, making him a vote diluter! Moreover, he accrued 19% of the vote in the last Democratic primary, which is less than the 20% required for a four-winner race. More Democrats want him out of office than in. The same is true for all the at-large members of the County Council: all of them “won” primary elections even though more Democrats voted against them than for them. When we have primaries decided by majority vote, then we can complain about monarchs, presidents, and billionaires.
The worst voting rights violation in our county is the Board of Education. All seven members of that board are elected at large. For example, Laura Stewart “represents” District 4, but she received more votes outside that district than inside it (a total of 220,679 votes, only about 34,584 from her own district)!
Montgomery County has its own nobility, bottom-feeding off perennial voting rights violations and policies that favor the kingmakers and queenmakers. When we resolve that problem, I’ll attend a “No Kings” rally and, finally, learn how to make the perfect crème brûlée.
