A. Jones on WAMU: ‘I Think Speaker Busch Would Have Been Very Pleased With the Outcome’
New House Speaker Adrienne A. Jones (D-Baltimore County) has kept a fairly low profile since being elected on May 1, as she learns the details of the job and ponders the future. But she did call into “The Kojo Nnamdi Show” on WAMU for a couple of minutes on Friday.
Jones minimized any suggestions that fissures remain within the Democratic caucus following the fight to succeed the late Speaker Michael E. Busch (D-Anne Arundel), who died on April 8.
“It was a whirlwind day – I think about four or five hours till the final outcome,” she said about the deadlocked caucus meeting and the compromise that eventually led to her election. “The main thing was, we were able to bring the Democratic caucus together. I think Speaker Busch would have been very pleased with the outcome.”
Jones said her colleagues turned to her as a unifying figure who is willing to work with everyone. But she conceded that she won’t be able to please everyone all of the time.
“Everybody’s gonna have complaints,” she said. “That’s just the politics of the job.”
Asked by commentator Tom Sherwood if she was contemplating making major changes to the makeup of committees, Jones demurred. She said she planned to spend the next several months traveling the state, meeting with colleagues and hearing their priorities.
“I’m a visual person,” Jones said – suggesting she wanted to see what the state looked like to gauge members’ concerns.
“I’ve been in the job exactly nine days,” she said. “In terms of making changes, I’m not willing to say anything about that.”
Josh Kurtz
Founding editor
Founding Editor Josh Kurtz is a veteran chronicler of Maryland politics and government. He began covering the State House in 1995 for The Gazette newspapers, and has been writing about state and local politics ever since. He was an editor at Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper, for eight years, and for eight years was the editor of E&E Daily, which covers energy and environmental policy on Capitol Hill. For 6 1/2 years Kurtz wrote a weekly column on state politics for Center Maryland and has written for several other Maryland publications as well. Kurtz regularly gives speeches and appears on TV and radio shows to discuss Maryland politics.
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