Crossover 2025: Where Are We Now?
We’ve made it past Crossover Day! Crossover Day is one of the most critical days during the Maryland General Assembly legislative session. It’s the day bills have to pass out of either the House or the Senate to have a good shot at final passage. Bills that haven’t yet passed through either chamber will need to go through a more complicated process, meaning there is a much smaller likelihood that they will pass.
What does this mean for JUFJ’s agenda? Thanks to your advocacy, JUFJ and our coalition partners have helped move many important bills forward and blocked dangerous ones from advancing!
Let’s take a look at what progress we’ve made and where we need to concentrate our organizing for the next three weeks before the legislative session ends.
Big advancements of critical legislation in Maryland!
- JUFJ is supporting a package of three bills that will help protect immigrant Marylanders from a hostile federal government. All of the bills in the Immigrant Justice Package made it through either the House or Senate by Crossover Day! The Maryland Values Act passed out of the House, and the Maryland Data Privacy Act and Protecting Sensitive Locations Act both passed out of the Senate.
- An attempt to undermine past wins for youth justice, the deceptively named Juvenile Justice Restoration Act, did not receive a committee vote in either the House or Senate by Crossover Day.
- Several bills we are supporting in a more limited capacity moved forward in one of the two chambers by Crossover Day, including legislation to help implement prerelease services for incarcerated women, funding for the Access to Counsel in Evictions Program, the Tenant Possessions Recovery Act, and the Maryland Second Look Act.
We’ll keep organizing on all of these issues, alongside our coalition partners and legislative allies, so that all of the good bills pass out of the General Assembly before the end of the legislative session, and the bad ones do not.
Legislation that met the Crossover deadline, but needs some work.
- One of our issues this session is to pass a more equitable tax structure that distributes our collective resources more fairly. Although the Fair Share for Maryland Act did not make it out of committee in either chamber before Crossover Day, we and our partners are making progress in getting the Governor and the budget committees to include key provisions of the Fair Share for Maryland Plan in the state budget, which is still being negotiated.
- Another bill we are supporting would limit the harmful practice of automatically charging kids as adults in Maryland’s criminal justice system. This bill is up in the air right now, with a narrow chance of it still being brought to the Senate floor despite not having passed out of committee before Crossover Day. While the Senate President opposes the bill, there is support throughout the Senate and House for this common-sense and cost saving legislation. We will continue to organize in hopes of moving things forward in the coming days.
- Legislation that would delay the implementation of paid family and medical leave did not move forward by Crossover Day! We will work with our partners in the Time to Care Coalition to monitor this issue and continue pushing for the strong and timely implementation of this much needed program.
Setbacks
- Good Cause Eviction legislation, which would help keep renters in their homes and prevent arbitrary evictions, failed to pass either chamber by Crossover Day. The Senate refused to move the bill again this year unless it contained an amendment to undermine hard fought local renter protections. This is an extremely disappointing setback, but we and our partners at Renters United Maryland (RUM) are shifting our focus for the remainder of session to stop harmful bills and pass other needed protections that are still moving forward, including the Tenant Possessions Recovery Act.
- Two public safety related bills that we supported did not move out of committee by Crossover Day: granting investigatory powers to Police Accountability Boards, and Safer Traffic Stops for All.
Our work moving forward
In an incredibly difficult year, we have already had a tremendous success rate! Of the four issues we are putting the most organizing time into, three have a chance to advance this year! We’ll continue to send out updates and issue-specific action alerts as the legislative session progresses. If you haven’t already filled out our action alerts to contact legislators about these issues, use the button below to do so. Make sure to check out all of our upcoming statewide events, too!
