At least Montgomery County Council members cannot be accused of being too parochial. Instead of focusing their attention on local schools, roads and crime, they’ve been busy making national defense policy. But after eight months of lobbying by Peace Action Montgomery, a majority-backed resolution calling on Congress to cut military spending to free up more money for the council’s priorities was reluctantly withdrawn by President Valerie Ervin, D-Silver Spring.
It seems that executives at Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin expressed their displeasure to Gov. Martin O’Malley, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and County Executive Ike Leggett.
Suggestions that one of the nation’s largest defense contractors would seriously consider taking its 5,200 Montgomery County jobs to Virginia if the nonbinding “end all wars” resolution passed apparently got their attention.
However, that the resolution got as far as it did reveals the disturbingly low caliber of the council’s Democratic majority. With this bunch in charge, no wonder Montgomery is no longer among the 10 richest counties in the United States.
Pundits have already pointed out that, even if Congress did slash the Pentagon’s budget, the resultant savings would not automatically wind up in Rockville.
And by attacking the federal government’s constitutional duty to “provide for the common defense,” council members exposed themselves as ideological fellow travelers — and hypocrites to boot.
Original guns-for-butter resolution sponsors included council members Nancy Navarro, D-Silver Spring, Craig Rice, D-Germantown, and Marc Elrich and George Leventhal, both at-large Democrats from Takoma Park.
Leventhal eventually backed down. Maybe he recalled that embarrassing time during the Cold War when Takoma Park tried to conduct its own foreign policy by adopting a “sister city” in the Soviet Union, only to discover that the progressive enclave had befriended a prison in the Gulag.
Maybe O’Malley or Leggett called. Or perhaps they just weighed the potential loss of 5,200 Lockheed Martin jobs against Busboys and Poets’ owner Andy Shallal’s threat not to open a new location in Silver Spring if the give-peace-a-chance resolution failed.
Whatever. None of the five council members was willing to give peace a chance at the county level. On May 20, the County Council unanimously approved a $4.37 billion budget that slashed county employees’ health and retirement benefits by $33 million and decreased the county transfer to the school system by $25 million.
But the council increased spending on the Montgomery County Police Department by $3 million.
Spending more on police protection when $300 million was being cut elsewhere was justified by the “growing public safety issues in the Silver Spring Central Business District and the Route 29 corridor” in Ervin’s and Navarro’s own backyards, thanks to the county’s own misguided sanctuary policies, which allow MS-13 gang members to roam the streets with impunity. (Hint: Montgomery’s “sister city” is Morazan, El Salvador).
Ervin and her council colleagues want Congress to reduce the $700 billion the U.S. spends on national defense, which has already declined from 10 percent of gross domestic product during the Cold War to just 5 percent today (from a peak of 42 percent during World War II).
But just five months ago, all five voted to increase spending on the police department — the county equivalent of the Pentagon — while simultaneously slashing funding for schools and benefits for county employees.
In other words, spending more on self-defense is OK for Montgomery County, just not for the rest of the nation.
Meanwhile, the nation’s much-maligned military continues to make sure that Takoma Park, and indeed all of America, remains a nuclear bomb-free zone in an increasingly unstable and dangerous world.
You would think even Montgomery County Council members would be grateful for that.
Barbara F. Hollingsworth is The Examiner’s local opinion editor.
