Delegate Pat McDonough has “had it with the legislature,” he said.
“It will be torture for me even to go back for the last session,” said the populist conservative from Middle River in Baltimore County.
McDonough, 73, is serving his 19th straight year as a Republican delegate. In the early 1980s, he served a single term as a conservative Democrat from Baltimore City.
Any torture was mutual for the 91 Democrats in the House of Delegates.
McDonough would flay them over illegal immigration, high taxes, excessive regulation and any legislation he saw as soft on crime. Half the Democrats are leftist “radicals,” McDonough said.
He is a loner and maverick even among Republican lawmakers, going his own way to provoke Democratic leaders. Most of them have “had it” with McDonough, too.
Now he’s set his sights on the Towson courthouse, hoping to become county executive for Maryland’s third largest county that has turned more Republican over the past decade, particularly on its east side.
