TAX PLAN THREATENS PRIVATE INVESTMENT: When Maryland officials announced last year they had secured funding for a $5.6 billion light rail project in the Washington suburbs, they touted the millions of dollars in private money that had been put up to offset the cost to taxpayers. Now, writes John Fritze for the Sun, as construction on the Purple Line gets underway, some of those same officials — Republicans and Democrats — are warning that a provision of the tax overhaul moving through Congress would threaten similar projects by making it more difficult to lure that private investment.
SUPREMES UPHOLD MD WEAPONS BAN: The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday let stand without comment a lower-court decision upholding the constitutionality of Maryland’s ban on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, those carrying more than 10 rounds of ammunition, Steve Lash of the Daily Record reports. The justices declined to hear gun-rights advocates’ appeal of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ conclusion the ban on the high-powered guns and ammunition quantity does not implicate the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms due to the weapons’ lethal ferocity “most useful in military service.”
The Supreme Court on Monday declined to review a Maryland law banning the sale of semiautomatic guns with certain military-style features, similar to weapons used in recent mass shootings, writes Robert Barnes in the Post. Maryland’s ban on “assault” weapons was passed after the 2012 mass shooting at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school. A district judge had cast doubt on the constitutionality of the law. But the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Richmond upheld the ban in a 10-to-4 vote.