Because Ian passed his road test at 18 as a first-time driver in Maryland, the state issued him a provisional license, leaving him ineligible for employer insurance and out of a job. Maryland requires a provisional license for 18 months, far more restrictive than nearly all 50 states.

Two brothers, same preparation, but one is working and one is waiting, separated by a piece of paper.

Ian is not an outlier. Last month, I testified in Annapolis to support S.B. 856, introduced by Sen. Charles Sydnor, which would eliminate the provisional license for adults 18 and older. A new report from the Abell Foundation, which I co-authored with Cherie Chung, documents why this reform is urgently needed.

In the past 12 months alone, NCIA has documented 25 graduates denied employment solely because of provisional license status — 10% of their graduates — excluded from high-demand jobs such as HVAC and automotive technology that pay $30 per hour or more. Many, like Robby Frazier, are hired days after the 18-month waiting period expires.

Employers are dumbfounded by the state’s restrictiveness. Express Employment Professionals, a staffing agency that has worked with 13 NCIA graduates in the last 18 months, confirmed that many could not be placed because the positions require a full license for insurance purposes. Their hands are tied.

For Baltimore, the license to drive is a license to work. Only 8.5% of jobs in the Baltimore region are reachable by public transit within an hour, a figure that has fallen every year since 2015. More than one in four Baltimore households lacks a vehicle; in neighborhoods such as Sandtown-Winchester and Oldtown/Middle East, it is more than half. And driver’s licensure carries the widest racial disparity of any employment barrier measured in the Baltimore region out of 29 categories surveyed. One in five Black jobseekers cited it as a direct barrier. Among white respondents, it was one in 11.

Residents from households without a licensed driver face a waiting game that can exclude them from whole industries. This is how poverty becomes multigenerational.

S.B. 856 would change that. Adults would go directly to a full license after completing training and passing their exam. The bill preserves the provisional system for drivers under 18, and it maintains the 18-month penalty for violations like drunk driving. What it eliminates is the blanket requirement that every adult new driver sit in provisional status for a year and a half.

The safety argument against this reform is thin at best. Maryland’s fatality rate of approximately 1.08 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled is below the national rate of 1.26 and consistent with peer states that have far shorter or nonexistent provisional periods for adults. Maryland’s traffic fatalities dropped from 582 in 2024 to 480 in 2025, a decline the state attributed to enforcement, impaired driving prevention and infrastructure improvements. The provisional licensing structure did not change during that period.

The greater safety risk runs in the other direction. The AAA Foundation found that unlicensed drivers are involved in roughly 20% of fatal crashes and are nearly 10 times more likely to flee the scene than licensed drivers. People who need to work will drive. The question is whether the state makes it possible to do so legally.

Baltimore does not need to wait for Annapolis to remove its own barriers. For our Abell report, we analyzed 572 Baltimore City job classifications. Of the 261 that require a driver’s license, 86 job classes could relax or remove requirements without impacting service delivery.

One of them, ironically, is the city’s own Bikeshare coordinator, a role dedicated to alternative transportation that nonetheless requires a driver’s license to even apply.

Baltimore has already shown what happens when you remove a barrier instead of screening people out. The police department dropped the driver’s license requirement for its Cadet Program, accepting a Maryland ID instead. With Abell Foundation funding, they launched a pilot providing cadets with free driver’s education as part of their training. The program went from four or five trainees a year to 20 in 2025.

Ian Jackson did everything the state asked him to do. He completed his training. He passed his test. He is ready to work. Maryland should let him.

Brendan Hellweg is cofounder of Holly, a government technology company that works with public agencies to modernize job classification and compensation systems. He previously served across three Baltimore mayoral administrations and helped launch the Baltimore Health Corps, the city’s COVID workforce program that was recognized as a national model in workforce development by the White House.

Their claims land in a movement already splitting along a newly exposed fault line. President Donald Trump’s decision to strike Iran has triggered an identity crisis inside MAGA, pitting traditional “America First” isolationists against the faction that still sees Trump as the movement’s unquestioned center of gravity. Carlson and Owens have placed themselves at the front of the rebellion, insisting that the strikes prove Trump has been captured by outside forces and is no longer acting in the movement’s interest. What began as a policy disagreement has quickly hardened into a purity test, with influencers and activists treating the Iran operation as evidence of ideological betrayal. And increasingly, they are reaching for conspiratorial explanations that cast Israel and Jews as the hidden hand behind it.

Far too many Republicans are choosing to look away. It wasn’t so long ago that the GOP was sounding the alarm about antisemitism on the left, pointing to college campuses, polarizing figures like Ilhan Omar and the BDS movement while insisting that Democrats had a moral obligation to police their own ranks. Well, it’s time for Republicans to look in the mirror. The antisemitism emerging from the right is no longer subtle, and no longer fringe. It is becoming more blatant and more dangerous than anything the party once claimed to see only on the other side.

To be clear, Americans can and should be free to criticize Israel, just as they would any foreign government. But anyone who watches Carlson’s recent content, for example, can see that what he is doing is not policy critique. It is narrative construction. One of his latest videos, framed as an exposé on the “treatment of Christians in the Holy Land,” has already been dismantled by Israeli Christian leaders, civil‑rights attorneys and official data. Carlson takes isolated incidents, such as a fringe group of Jerusalem youths who sometimes spit near clergy, and inflates them into a sweeping indictment of Israel, ignoring the fact that Christian populations in Israel are growing, not shrinking, and that Israel remains the only country in the region where Christians enjoy full legal rights and religious freedom.

But Carlson packages these distortions as a suggestion that Jews are hostile to Christians, a framing clearly designed to inflame Christian resentment at home. Meanwhile, Owens follows the same script, hiding behind the claim that she is “just criticizing Israel” while amplifying conspiratorial narratives about Jewish power. That shield doesn’t work anymore. Their rhetoric is not about foreign policy at all. It is about priming their audiences to see Jews as the source of global harm.

What Owens and Carlson have become is profoundly dangerous, not only to Jewish communities who inevitably bear the brunt of this rhetoric but to the Republican Party itself. Their conspiratorial narratives threaten to drag the GOP into the orbit of antisemitic ideology, especially among younger, highly online audiences who are impressionable and spend hours marinating in algorithm‑driven outrage. This is how extremist movements take root. The resistance to this must be strong, unequivocal and immediate. If Republicans fail to confront this now, they risk allowing a toxic, antisemitic fringe to redefine the party’s future.

Baltimore Sun editorial writers offer opinions and analysis on news and issues relevant to readers. They operate separately from the newsroom.

If you really value independence, then someone with no connections to Maryland should be nominated to expose the waste, fraud and abuse in public schools. And, yeah, I am going to heed the advice of Maryland Attorney General Anthony G. Brown, who sues President Donald Trump practically every week but will not look into the theft of Maryland taxpayer money — at least not by nonprofits — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

— Martin Sadowski, Fallston

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While this statement may be true, Williams fails to mention that there is already great division between us and many of our allies. The irony is that our own president has been the main cause of this division. These include President Donald Trump’s attempts to take Greenland and to downgrade and disrespect the United Nations.

Trump also failed to really support Ukraine and show strong opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin rather than appeasement (even in the face of Russian assistance to Iran’s military response), along with his arbitrary, excessive and illegal imposition of tariffs on most of our allies. And that’s just to name a few.

China and Russia could not be more pleased about the division with our allies and within our own country, but it is mostly self-inflicted. Bombarding Iran will not change this. In fact, it is only adding to the division.

— L.G. Connor, Ellicott City

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Putting a stop to hotel and hospital stays may be admirable, but increasing the funding for therapeutic foster care and out-of-state institutional placements would help immensely. It is acknowledged that the reason for these placements or failures to remove children from them stems from a lack of alternatives for children with serious mental health and behavioral problems.

It then stands to reason that giving DHS the ability to find better and more appropriate ones should help solve the problem. And, by the way, increasing foster care staffing would decrease the caseworker load and increase their ability to spend more time finding these placements.

Come on folks, balance the negative actions with some positive steps this time.

— Alan L. Katz, Owings Mills

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The Sun and its watchdog partnership have raised concerns about spending of taxpayer funds, oversight failures and transparency in the Maryland state and city governments. In response, Spotlight has experienced repeated delays, elevated costs tied to public records requests, social media commentary directed at reporters, requests to go off the record in conversations that are materially different from on-the-record statements, and silence and threats.

The investigations come as Maryland faces budget pressures and growing scrutiny over government accountability. Do you have concerns about transparency in government spending of taxpayer funds?

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The world has seen this kind of evil before, and as it rose, leaders faced the same difficult decision: take the politically easier road of isolationism or face evil with courage. As we pass the one-week mark in this critical military operation against Iran, it would be good for those who don’t know the history of World War II to learn the important lesson of Neville Chamberlain.

Chamberlain was prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1937 to 1940. He was followed by Sir Winston Churchill, who is widely credited with ensuring the defeat of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. Chamberlain had a long career in public service, but his name will forever be tarnished in the annals of history and remembered for one thing — appeasement.

As prime minister, Chamberlain faced the reality of a brutal fascist enemy in Hitler. Germany’s ally, Italy, had invaded Ethiopia in 1935, and Germany annexed Austria in 1938. Chamberlain did nothing, and Europe stood by, hoping that diplomacy with Germany would somehow prevail. Sound familiar? Chamberlain travelled to Germany multiple times to try to negotiate with Hitler. War was unpopular, and the British public largely believed that affairs of mainland Europe were not their concern. When Hitler rolled his tanks into Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain again tried to negotiate with the Nazis. Desperate for a deal, Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement in 1938, allowing Hitler the annexation of the Sudetenland in exchange for an agreed end to Nazi expansion. Chamberlain declared that he had negotiated “peace for our time.” This, of course, was a fallacy, and months later, Hitler seized all of Czechoslovakia and quickly moved beyond. Appeasement was a failure. Chamberlain’s attempts to negotiate with evil did not prevent war. It only made the inevitable conflict more challenging.

Iran is today’s Nazi Germany. It is a little-known fact that Nazi Germany was pursuing a nuclear bomb. Can you imagine the ramifications of the Nazis acquiring nuclear capabilities? The Iranian dictatorship has likewise been on a mad dash to obtain nuclear weapons. That pursuit has never been for peaceful reasons. Iran has built an arsenal of ballistic weapons and drones for use in war with America and our allies. For decades, Iran has been the world’s leading exporter of international terrorism. Thousands have died at the hands of Iran and its terrorist networks. Iran has created and funded proxies around the Middle East for the purpose of sowing division, hatred, violence and chaos. Over the years, those proxies, including Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, the Houthis and more have murdered, raped, tortured and kidnapped thousands. And just recently, Iran murdered up to 50,000 Iranians simply for asking for freedom.

Since seizing power in 1979, Iran’s regime and its proxies have repeatedly targeted Americans, starting with the 444-day takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, where 66 Americans were held hostage. Iran-backed groups have since carried out bombings, hijackings, kidnappings and assassinations that killed 241 U.S. military personnel in Beirut in 1983, 19 U.S. Airmen in Saudi Arabia in 1996 and dozens more Americans in attacks on embassies, buses and aircraft. Iran-backed militias killed more than 600 U.S. troops in Iraq and have continued attacks on U.S. personnel, including the killing of three service members in Jordan in 2024. Forty-six Americans were killed in the Iran-backed Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacres in Israel.

This is just a small, partial list of atrocities against Americans since the Islamic Revolution in Iran. There are countless more. Does this seem like a regime where diplomacy or appeasement is working?

Make no mistake about it. The Iranian regime has been a clear and present danger to the United States for decades. Iran has been focused and committed to the destruction of the United States, and has spent years fueling and funding murder, kidnappings and the maiming of Americans and our allies. Khamenei was the chief architect of terror across the Middle East, building, funding and directing a network of proxies committed to death and destruction. Iran’s network has destabilized and spread terror throughout the world. To believe that you can simply wish that fanaticism away or negotiate with these individuals for peace is dangerously foolish.

Which returns us to Chamberlain. He naïvely thought he could reason with murdering tyrants. His policy did not make Britain safer, and it did not stave off war, simply allowing Hitler to grow stronger and bolder while Europe fell. Chamberlain’s foolishness echoes today from both the left and right, as politicians and pundits such as Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Rep. Thomas Massie and Tucker Carlson urge Americans to stand down.

Thankfully, in 1940, Churchill took over as prime minister, and the rest is history. He was not a favorite among politicians or his party, but Churchill’s unwavering leadership during the war was exactly what was needed. Peace through strength. Churchill knew that appeasement was a policy of weakness and failure, and he was defiant and unwilling to bend to fascism. His leadership was what ultimately led to victory over the Nazis.

War against Iran has been a long time coming. The regime’s rush to obtain nuclear weapons and the rapid development of ballistic missiles and drones made Iran an imminent danger to the United States. That does not mean that Iran was on the very edge of attacking. Waiting until that point would have been idiocy. That is why conflict was critical now. And Trump is doing what is absolutely necessary. Leaders today should remember the story of Neville Chamberlain because, as George Santayana said, whoever shall forget the past is doomed to repeat it.

Bobby Zirkin is a columnist at The Baltimore Sun and a partner at Zirkin and Schmerling Law in Baltimore. He represented Baltimore County in the General Assembly for 21 years as a Democratic state senator and delegate. He can be reached at bz@zandslaw.com.

That progress reflects decades of work by families, self-advocates and policymakers who came together to design systems that consider people with disabilities from the start. The past six decades have shown us something important: When inclusion is treated as foundational rather than optional, communities are stronger for everyone.

The more inclusive infrastructure and services people with disabilities rely on today shouldn’t be taken for granted. For decades, families were told institutionalization was the only option for their children. By the mid-1950s, more than half a million Americans with disabilities lived in large, segregated facilities, isolated from community life and stripped of choice. In 1961, Maryland families dreamed of a different future for their children. They organized and helped lay the foundation for what would become Fello — and in doing so, became part of a broader national civil rights movement challenging the country to rethink inclusion.

Federal policy followed. Medicaid provided a pathway to health coverage. Accessibility standards removed more barriers to public life. The assumption that people with disabilities should be hidden away gave way to the understanding that people with disabilities belong in our neighborhoods, workplaces, schools and communities.

That progress was driven by a simple but powerful belief: Systems should work for everyone.

As we look ahead, our next challenge is not simply expanding services — it’s strengthening the infrastructure of inclusion. Too often, disability services are discussed separately from housing policy, workforce development, transportation and health care — but they are deeply connected.

When housing is unaffordable or inaccessible, people with disabilities often feel it first. When employment and transportation are limited, independence and economic participation suffer. When we underinvest in community-based services, we weaken the broader social and economic fabric of our state.

Inclusion isn’t a program. It’s infrastructure.

Housing that allows people to live in their communities strengthens neighborhoods. An economy that values direct support professionals strengthens families, employers and local economies. Accessible transportation and employment connect people to opportunity.

Public policy that treats community-based services as central to a thriving society strengthens us all.

When systems are designed with inclusion at the center, they function better for everyone.

At Fello, our work spans disability services, workforce development, affordable housing, behavioral health and advocacy. While these may appear separate, they are interconnected. Inclusive communities require coordinated, wraparound supports that recognize how housing, employment, health care and self-advocacy reinforce one another.

For 65 years, we have worked alongside families, self-advocates and partners across Maryland to build pathways to stable housing, meaningful work, self-advocacy and full participation in community life.

Each effort strengthens the others. Housing stability supports employment. Employment empowers communities. Self-advocacy shapes stronger public policy. Together, these elements form a coordinated system designed to promote independence and long-term community strength.

This isn’t a collection of programs — it’s a coordinated approach to building inclusive communities where everyone can thrive.

Communities across Maryland are stronger because people with disabilities are living, working, and leading within them. But progress is not permanent.

Fiscal uncertainty, workforce shortages and policy gaps remind us that inclusion requires ongoing investment and leadership. Awareness starts conversations, but infrastructure secures stability.

The next chapter will be defined by whether we move from awareness to action and from isolated services to integrated systems.

Developmental Disabilities Awareness Month should prompt a larger question: Are we building communities that work for everyone?

Jonathon Rondeau is president and CEO of Fello, a Maryland nonprofit that supports people with disabilities and builds inclusive communities statewide.

The hesitation from Ferguson carries real consequences because every week without a fix leaves inspectors general operating under a distorted interpretation of the law that lets agencies decide what investigators may see. And in Maryland, that vulnerability is even sharper than in many states, because local inspectors general are often the only meaningful watchdogs most residents have. The state has no independent, statewide IG to police misconduct across agencies. When subpoenas can be recast as public‑records requests and routed through MPIA timelines, investigations slow to a crawl, and oversight becomes contingent on the cooperation of the very offices being scrutinized. Allowing this ambiguity to persist effectively rewards obstruction and signals to agencies that delaying or withholding records is a viable strategy.

There can be no delay on this legislation because every day the loophole remains open, local inspectors general are forced to operate with one hand tied behind their backs. The General Assembly must take up the bill, move it through committee, and send it to the governor before adjournment, not out of symbolism but because the integrity of ongoing investigations depends on it. And this is the moment when Gov. Wes Moore’s voice matters. A clear, public call from the governor would instantly elevate the bill from a low‑priority procedural fix to a must‑pass safeguard for transparency. Without that intervention, Ferguson’s hesitation becomes the outcome, and Marylanders are left with oversight offices that can be stonewalled at will by political forces.

It’s already bad enough that Maryland lawmakers meet for only a few months each year while the rest of the state works every day under the consequences of the policies they leave unfinished. Failing to make this bill a priority would hand a free pass to Mayor Scott and to any local official who prefers to keep the public in the dark. When inspectors general are the only meaningful watchdogs most Marylanders have, letting this loophole linger is an invitation to evade scrutiny. That outcome is not acceptable in a state that claims to value transparency. Actions always speak louder than words.

So Moore should look to his partners in the General Assembly and make clear that this bill cannot be allowed to die quietly in committee this session. If he is serious about government accountability, as he has consistently said he is, then instructing lawmakers to take up this fix before sine die is the most basic test of that commitment. Marylanders deserve inspectors general who can do their jobs without being stalled by agencies that would prefer to operate in the dark, and the governor’s voice is the one thing that can ensure the legislature treats this as the priority it should be.

Baltimore Sun editorial writers offer opinions and analysis on news and issues relevant to readers. They operate separately from the newsroom.