STENY AIN’T DEAD YET

MARYLAND’S PREEMINENT DEMOCRAT HOLDS HIS ANNUAL BULL ROAST ON LAND THAT WAS ONE OF PRINCE GEORGE’S LARGEST PLANTATIONS

BY KEN ROSSIGNOL
THE CHESAPEAKE TODAY

MITCHELLVILLE, MD – As Democrats gather on June 13, 2025, to honor United States Representative Steny Hoyer and wonder who he is going to toss the mantle of leadership in the Fifth Congressional District or take side bets on when he will croak, they might be surprised to learn that the many black Democrats in attendance may be chomping on roast beef and sloshing down cold beer on land their ancestors once toiled raising tobacco as slaves.

According to the Maryland Historical Trust, the Newton White mansion was constructed in 1940 by a retired Navy captain on land previously owned by the Waring family. Marsham Waring was one of Prince George’s County’s preeminent plantation owners.

THE LONGEST-SERVING MARYLAND CONGRESSMAN

Those who have never met Steny Hoyer have to learn about him from news articles written by journalists who might be better at joining a pickleball team of old ladies than writing front-page articles for the Baltimore Sun about the Maryland congressional delegation. One such effort by a reporter on January 3, 2025, incorrectly reported that Hoyer was swept into Congress along with the Reagan victory over Jimmy Carter in 1980. Not true. The Fifth Congressional District Democrat who won in 1980 was veteran Congresswoman Gladys Noon Spellman, who was first sworn into the House on January 3, 1975.

Rep. Spellman had suffered a heart attack before the election, and since Prince George’s County wasn’t going to turn her out of office even though she was comatose, she won the General Election. With her husband running the congressional office and her hopes for a return vanishing, the office was declared vacant. House of Representatives records indicate that H. Res. 80, 97th Congress, was adopted on February 24, 1981, declaring the seat vacant due to the member’s incapacitating illness. Still, she lived until 1988.

A special election was held on May 19, 1981, after voters in both parties chose candidates in a special primary election, picking Steny Hoyer as the Democratic nominee and Bowie Mayor Audrey Scott as the GOP candidate. While support for Scott in polls was strong, it was a mistake to underestimate the support Hoyer enjoyed due to his twelve years as a State Senator from Prince George’s County and his role as the youngest Senate President in Maryland history. Hoyer gave up his seat when he joined Acting Governor Blair Lee III as the pair ran in the 1978 Democratic Primary. Lee lost to Harry Hughes, and Hoyer went back to practicing law until 1981.

Hoyer and two political allies, also Prince George’s County state senators, Thomas E “Mike” Miller and Peter O’Malley III, ran the Democratic Party in Prince George’s County, having supporters, poll workers, and campaign funds to ensure victory. Audrey Scott was a hard-working mayor and a formidable campaigner. When the votes were tallied, Hoyer bested Mayor Scott with 55.8 percent of the vote to her 44.2 percent. Hoyer worked hard and won 42,573 votes to 33,708 for Scott, with 960 votes going to Thomas P. Mathers in the May 19, 1981, special election.

While the borders for the Fifth District have shifted, swirled, moved, and been gerrymandered with stretches and tweaks, Steny Hoyer remains in the same district as the congressman he was first elected to represent in 1981. Hoyer has been in Congress for longer than half the nation has been alive. His ability to achieve results for the residents of his district is unmatched, perhaps anywhere and certainly in Maryland’s history. Hoyer set the record for the longest-serving member from Maryland in the House of Representatives in 2007.

Hoyer defeated a long slew of hapless Republicans put up against him for the past four decades. The best vote gained by a GOP candidate was in 1992 when Hoyer gained Charles, St. Mary’s, Calvert, and the southern tip of Anne Arundel counties into the Fifth District. His opponent that year was a realtor, and the son of former GOP Congressman Larry Hogan Sr. – Larry Hogan Jr. Larry Hogan Jr. racked up an impressive vote. As a result, Hoyer got a scare, running hard two years later in the newly acquired Southern Maryland counties.

Where in the 1992 election, he relied on the good old boy crowd and the elitist liberals of his party, Hoyer began to take his message to conservatives, promising to secure more investments of the federal government at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station, the Naval Ordinance Station at Indian Head, the Solomon’s Navy facility and Dahlgren in Virginia. Hoyer delivered and did it in a big way. He picked up John Bohanan as a district representative who had worked for Congressman Roy Dyson and as a defense contractor. Bohanan’s experience enabled him to work effectively with the Base Closure and Realignment Commission, commonly referred to as BRAC, to counter the efforts of other powerful members of Congress to divert units from Pax River and Webster Field at St. Inigoes.

When Dyson was defeated in 1990 by Republican Wayne Gilchrest, NESEA at Webster Field was ripe for the picking by Charleston and other military bases.

Hoyer winning in 1992 made all the difference in the world for Southern Maryland.

When the BRAC process unfolded in Washington and Pax River emerged as the winner, St. Mary’s County banker Jack Daugherty proclaimed that Hoyer handled making the arguments for relocating units from Crystal City, Virginia, and Warminster, Pennsylvania, to Pax River “masterfully.” Over the next ten years, Hoyer relocated approximately twenty thousand new jobs to Southern Maryland, primarily in units associated with defense installations.

Hoyer still held quirky liberal views on various topics, such as abortion and approving of burning the American flag, which displeased conservatives and made it difficult for many people to like and appreciate him. When Hoyer was challenged to embrace common-sense issues like the spreading crack cocaine epidemic in the early nineties, this is what he did:

Unlike his embrace of the current far-left “progressive socialist Democrat” agenda of opening up prisons to release violent criminals, in 1994, Hoyer sponsored “Three Strikes, and You’re Out” legislation in the House of Representatives.

The following article appeared in my newspaper, ST. MARY’S TODAY on March 15, 1994.
HOYER SAYS, “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH” OF HARDCORE VIOLENT CRIMINALS
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U. S. Rep. Steny Hoyer (MD-5) appeared as the lead-off witness before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Criminal Justice as congressional hearings were convened on legislation designed to put violent criminals away for life. The so-called “Three Strikes, You’re Out” bill.

Hoyer, principal sponsor of HR 3424, the Three Time Loser Act of 1993, told the subcommittee member, “Enough is Enough. There should come a time when society says it’s over. No more will we tolerate the terror visited on our communities by these repeat offenders.”

Hoyer introduced federal legislation last year after meeting with federal, state, and local law enforcement officials, as well as listening to the cries for action from his constituents. Hoyer, as a Maryland State Senator in the 1970s, was instrumental in passing the current three-time loser legislation in the State of Maryland.

Critics strongly argue that the three-time loser is costly. But they don’t include the direct and indirect costs that society is paying for violent crime: hospital costs, lost time at work, family trauma, increased insurance premiums, business disruptions, and countless other financial and personal consequences.

“The three-time loser bill makes it perfectly clear – you get only a limited number of offenses against society before you forfeit your right to be a member of society,” concluded Hoyer.

In 2016, Hoyer seemed to have forgotten who introduced and passed strict criminal laws in Maryland and in the federal system when he made these statements at a roundtable on criminal justice reform in Largo, Maryland, which was attended by an array of criminal advocates, including Michelle Harewood, a public defender charged with assault on a Charles County deputy in 2024.

“I want to thank reform advocates and law enforcement officials in Maryland for joining me at a critically important roundtable to discuss a matter that Congress must address: comprehensive criminal justice reform,” said Congressman Steny Hoyer. “Today, over two million Americans, some only teenagers, are serving time in federal or state prisons. Many of these prisoners are people of color who have committed relatively low-level offenses and, because of inflexible federal or state sentencing guidelines and poor legal representation, are serving sentences that any objective observer would say are disproportionate to the crimes they committed.”

“The flaws in our criminal justice system are also very costly to taxpayers,” continued Congressman Hoyer. “The system is too focused on punishment and not enough on rehabilitation, with high recidivism rates as a side-effect. Recently, the House and Senate have been engaged in a bipartisan effort to make our federal criminal justice laws more rational, and so far, the process has been mostly positive. We must ensure that our system of justice protects law-abiding citizens, assigns a just punishment to those who have done wrong, and provides a real chance for people who have made mistakes to make something of themselves after they have paid their debt to society.”

2026 ELECTION FINANCES
Hoyer has picked up $54,447 in contributions as of March 31, 2025, with his 44^th annual Bull Roast fundraiser set for Friday, June 13, at the Newton White Mansion in Mitchellville, Md. The organizers are fearless in setting up this event on a Friday the 13th; perhaps they will hold a raffle after attendees walk under a ladder to buy a raffle ticket.

Hoyer’s Majority Fund raised $420,803 in the 2023-2024 cycle and spent $414,557, leaving $13,389 to carry over to 2025-2026, according to Federal Election Commission records.

2026 PRIMARY OPPONENT FILED FOR THE FIFTH DISTRICT CONGRESSIONAL SEAT HELD BY HOYER SINCE 1981.

Harold “Harry” Jarin registered with the Federal Election Commission on May 29, 2025, with the committee name of HARRY JARIN FOR CONGRESS in the Democratic Party, and Victoria Perrone of Washington, D.C. named as his treasurer.

Jarin has a firm that writes contracts and grant proposals for various fire departments. With his husband, Raymond Pham, an IRS employee, he bought a waterfront home in Edgewater, Anne Arundel County, on November 30, 2020. The house is currently valued at approximately $1 million.

Volunteer firefighter?

Jarin claims to be a volunteer firefighter. A Facebook Post by the Edgewater Fire Department (formerly Woodland Beach VFD) showed that Jarin and another new member joined on January 19, 2025, which makes his claim to be a volunteer firefighter relatively empty. His campaign website states that he became a volunteer firefighter for the first time in 2013 without specifying the name of the fire company to which he belonged. On his campaign website, Jarin poses in a jacket with the word “firefighter” on it, without a typical company insignia, as he sits in the rear doorway of a rescue unit. Another campaign photo portraying Jarin as a firefighter shows him wearing a blazer and standing next to an EMS vehicle.

Jarin comes from the hardcore Marxist wing of the Democratic Party and states that Congress has been a declining institution for decades. “We are hurtling into a Constitutional crisis because Congress couldn’t solve basic problems. That’s what opened the door to Donald Trump and the fascist MAGA movement.”

Sure, nobody can ever remember Steny Hoyer campaigning on letting the federal government deliver health care like the Postal Service delivers mail and run health care like Amtrak runs its Trains.

However, when Hoyer pushed through Obamacare in the face of opposition from his constituents, he pulled out lots of labor union tricks to force his Southern Maryland constituents to shut up and get in line with the leftist agenda of the Democratic Party. Hoyer’s pals in the SEIU moved a mobile command center to Waldorf. They bussed in hundreds of union members from out of the district to fill up the first two-thirds of the auditorium at Westlake High School for a Town Hall that Hoyer sponsored to “explain” the Obamacare bill.

The “explainers” were a handpicked panel of sycophants who were not objective, and little time was given for those in the audience to make objections. The stage manager for the old-time snake oil show was Terry Lierman, Hoyer’s chief of staff and father of current Maryland Comptroller Brooke Lierman. Shoving those opposed to the Hoyer Obamacare Town Hall to the rear bleachers of the school auditorium was intentionally staged to block opposition and show support from a crowd of people who didn’t even live in the district. It was a classic example of Democratic Labor tactics at their finest.

As a result of the Obamacare nightmare foisted upon the nation in 2010, the voters threw out the Democratic majority in Congress, and Hoyer was sent packing from his post of Majority Leader to once again becoming second-fiddle to Nancy Pelosi as the Minority Whip.

MARYLAND STATE SENATOR MICHAEL A. JACKSON
& THE PHONEY VOLUNTEER FIREFIGHTER

Senator Michael Jackson, a former Prince George’s County Sheriff and the occupant of the Senate seat formerly held by the late Mike Miller, which spans Prince George’s County and extends into Calvert, is the likely successor to Steny Hoyer. Sen. Jackson has $188,647 in his campaign account as of January 2025. Raising the funds for a race for Congress shouldn’t be a problem, especially if Hoyer urges his supporters to back him.

Jackson, along with several other Prince George’s politicians, paid their dues and waited until Hoyer gave the signal that he was ready to retire. The idea that a gay white guy from the sliver of the district that reaches into Anne Arundel County would be the replacement for Hoyer is silly.

Harold “Harry” Jarin has unleashed a vicious “agist” attack on Hoyer and other elderly Democrats that certainly wears out the apparent point of Hoyer’s advanced age to the point of being obnoxious. The shallow and phony attempt of Jarin to portray himself as a volunteer firefighter is insulting to the thousands of actual volunteer firefighters in the Fifth Congressional District, many of whom have been strong supporters of Hoyer. Hoyer has guided millions of federal dollars to the fire departments in the district, and members of the various Southern Maryland volunteer fire departments will support Hoyer until he croaks or quits, whichever comes first.

DEMOCRATS PARTY AT ONE OF PRINCE GEORGE’S MOST PROMINENT PLANTATIONS