Democrats are ignoring Martin O’Malley’s disastrous record in Maryland as they applaud his effort to embarrass citizenship director Ken Cuccinelli at a Thanksgiving Eve school reunion.

The Washington Post reported the barroom tirade by O’Malley, the former mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland:

Siobhan Arnold, who was visiting from Philadelphia, had just met O’Malley at the bar when Cuccinelli walked in. Soon the two men were face-to-face, she said, with O’Malley excoriating Cuccinelli over the Trump administration’s immigration policies. O’Malley said “something about his [Cuccinelli’s] grandparents,” Arnold said in an interview. Cuccinelli said little if anything in reply, she added, quickly leaving the pub. “O’Malley was shouting,” Arnold said. “I don’t think Cuccinelli was responding. I think he’s like, ‘Time to go. Just got here and I’m leaving.’ He pretty much retreated.”

Cuccinelli runs the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency and is serving as the acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. That task is difficult because he is trying to balance competing demands from business groups and employees, while fending off Democrats’ emotional criticism and insults.

In contrast, O’Malley took a hardline policy of backing investors’ demands for more illegal workers and renters.

O’Malley was mayor of Baltimore from 1999 to January 2007 and was governor of Maryland from 2007 until January 2015.

Many of the illegals were let through the U.S. border in 2014 by President Barack Obama, often after being detained in so-called “cages” at border patrol stations.

The influx of Central American migrants helped to push up Maryland’s housing prices and suppressed wages, so delaying the nation’s recovery from the post-2008 recession.

Under O’Malley, Maryland’s median wages rose by a mere 2.2 percent over the 11-year period from 2007 to 2016, according to governing.com.

Meanwhile, housing prices rose at a much higher annual rate of 3 percent, so boosting housing prices up by 82 percent from 2000 to 2019.

O’Malley also presided over a period of declining education trends. The Baltimore Sun reported in 2018:

Two years ago, the state experienced an historic drop in scores that education officials partially attributed to the fact that the state previously excluded too many special education students from taking the tests — more than was allowed. Maryland went from one of the top-performing states to the middle of the pack among states.

The newspaper also reported education scores from O’Malley’s Baltimore: Baltimore City students scored near the bottom in reading and math compared to children in other cities and large urban areas on an important national assessment given in 2017, according to scores released Tuesday morning.

In fourth- and eighth-grade reading, only 13 percent of city students are considered proficient or advanced. In fourth-grade math, 14 percent were proficient and in eighth-grade math 11 percent met the mark, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally mandated test from the U.S. Department of Education.

That put the Baltimore ahead of only Detroit and Cleveland, and sometimes ahead of Milwaukee and Fresno, Calif. — areas of the country that also suffer from high poverty and crime. The economic stress from O’Malley’s term helped spark a murder boom in Baltimore.

In 2007, 282 people were killed in the majority-black city as the murder rate continued falling from the 1990s records.

By 2015, the number of murders in Baltimore has jumped to 344 as Democrats denounced police nationwide for strict enforcement. In 2016, the murder rate slid down to 318, according to a report in the Baltimore Sun:

Thirteen-year-old DiAndre Barnes was fatally shot this summer when he was out late with a squeegee, hoping to make a few bucks washing windshields, his father said. The bullets weren’t meant for him, but they ripped into him anyway, making him another bystander injured by violence in Baltimore’s second-deadliest year.

“They don’t care who they shoot anymore,” said Ronnie Barnes, the boy’s father, as he looked through his son’s left-behind baseball gear. His son had a fantastic pitching arm, he said, but that promise is gone now. “They shoot women and children and everybody.”