By: Miranda Spivack, Bethesda Magazine
Maryland House Majority Leader Anne Kaiser rarely misses her weekly poker game in Annapolis. It’s a chance for her to chat with longtime friends, catch up on the gossip and unwind after long and often tense days during the three-month legislative session that begins each January. Kaiser is usually the only woman playing, but she hardly notices—she’s used to the boys club atmosphere that still permeates the state legislature, and she’s busy concentrating on her cards. Kaiser is steady and cautious when it comes to poker, colleagues say, not a big risk taker, at least not without adequate preparation. If she’s still in the hand after other players have folded, that’s a sure sign things are going her way. Bluffing is not her style.
“If she stays in, nine times out of 10 you are going to lose,” says Prince George’s County Del. Jay Walker, a regular in the weekly games, which cross county and occasionally party lines.
Poker night isn’t the only time Kaiser, a Montgomery County Democrat, plays her cards carefully and often wins.
The Rockville High School alum has managed to make her way into the leadership circle in Annapolis, a rarity among lawmakers who represent a county often viewed as too privileged and too liberal. The fact that Kaiser, a lesbian, is a leader in a Maryland State House long dominated by a well-entrenched cadre of mostly white men from rural communities makes her even more unique. Kaiser, who lives with her wife, Nancy Lineman, in Silver Spring’s Calverton neighborhood, helped shepherd same-sex marriage legislation in 2012 that led to a referendum legalizing the union later that year. “I became a Democrat because of civil rights,” Kaiser says. “Thirty years later, I was fighting for my own civil rights.”
Despite her ascension to power in the Maryland capital, Kaiser, 48, who was raised in a Republican household, is not a show horse. Many county residents probably don’t recognize her name. Yet the self-described “policy nerd” has been a steady presence in Annapolis for more than a decade—in 2014, she became the first woman from Montgomery County to be tapped as house majority leader—and she is considered one of the rising stars in the General Assembly.
When Kaiser was 5 years old, she read books about Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson over and over again.
“I was just fascinated from the beginning, without really knowing what politics meant,” she says. She thought that when someone ran for office, there was a footrace down the aisles of the U.S. Senate chamber, a place she had seen on television. Looking back, she says, she started becoming sensitive early on to the way boys might be treated differently from girls. Kaiser’s father and two older brothers were cleaning the roof of their Rockville house one day, and she wanted to climb up there, too. But her father said no, that she was too small. “You won’t let me up there because I am a girl,” Kaiser remembers telling him. He insisted it was because of her size, but at 7 years old, she kept pressing him.
In 1984, during her sophomore year in high school, Kaiser had what she calls the start of a “political awakening.” Her father, Jesse, was going to vote Republican in a local race, and her mother, Marian, was voting Democratic.
Because her parents’ votes were going to cancel each other out, they decided not to bother going to the polls. So Kaiser lectured them. “I gave them my rights and responsibilities speech, and compared it to Nazi Germany and why voting matters,” she says.
Kaiser’s parents ended up casting their ballots. Eventually, her father switched parties and became a Democrat so he could vote for his daughter when she ran for a spot on the Montgomery County Democratic Central Committee in 1998, a move that helped launch her political career.
Eighteen years later, Kaiser is spending her days trying to improve public education in Maryland, corralling votes for Democratic priorities in the legislature and encouraging women to get into politics. The job of majority leader, to which she was appointed in late 2014 by House Speaker Michael Busch, a Democrat from Anne Arundel County, requires her to patiently line up support, make deals, and do whatever it takes to guarantee a majority for the legislative leadership’s issue du jour. In the past year, that has included figuring out ways to end-run Republican Gov. Larry Hogan on budget and education issues without seeming obstructionist.
It’s an unlikely position for a lawmaker who, by her own admission, is reserved and a bit socially awkward. “I am basically a shy person,” Kaiser says. She would rather give a speech in front of 500 people than mingle at a small gathering. “I am not comfortable with small talk.”
Still, since she was first elected to the House of Delegates in 2002, Kaiser has knocked on thousands of doors in an attempt to woo voters in District 14, which comprises parts of Silver Spring, Olney and Damascus. Along the way, she’s earned Busch’s trust and has become one of his key advisers, especially on education. After realizing that many students were arriving at community colleges in need of remedial math classes, Kaiser and former state delegate John L. Bohanan Jr. urged Busch, himself an expert on education, to push for a law requiring Maryland high school students to take four courses—one each year—that involved computation. “It was going to have an impact on curriculum throughout the state,” Kaiser recalls.
The law went into effect across Maryland in 2014, and is a rare example of the state dictating detailed standards to local school districts. “I take what she tells me as gospel,” Busch says.
In Annapolis, despite a style that she attributes to shyness but some say makes her come off as brusque, Kaiser has managed to win friends and influence colleagues, generally by studying hard. She first takes a broad look at an issue to figure out what needs to be done, who needs to be persuaded and how to fend off any opponents, she says. Kaiser works with her small staff to compile detailed, 3-inch-thick briefing books on whatever matter is before her. Few in the General Assembly are as well prepared, her colleagues say. Longtime friend and fellow poker player Justin Ross, a former delegate from Prince George’s County who is now a lobbyist, says legislators know it’s hard to dislodge Kaiser in a debate because she anticipates the questions. She doesn’t need to call on her staff to help. “She’s no pushover,” Ross says. It doesn’t hurt, he and others say, that Kaiser also has a wicked sense of humor, and can leaven serious moments with amusing comments.
Del. Ariana Kelly, a Bethesda Democrat, says Kaiser also has been successful in Annapolis because she has mentored female lawmakers, as well as newcomers to the House of Delegates, both men and women. “She took us under her wing, taught us the do’s and don’ts of Annapolis that wouldn’t necessarily be obvious to us coming from Montgomery County,” Kelly says. “Not every senior legislator takes that amount of time to nurture new legislators.” Among the advice Kaiser has given to new lawmakers: Plan your lunch order ahead of time during a legislative session so you don’t miss any key moments during a debate, don’t hog the microphone during a press conference (even now, Kaiser prefers to stand to the side and work from a script)and don’t try to pass a major bill in the first few years of your term.
“I convey to people that they need a level of patience,” Kaiser says. “You can’t hit a home run in your first two or three years—it’s as if you have a Wiffle bat in a major league game. You need to show dignity and walk off when you strike out. But then, eventually, you do get a chance.”
Ross says Kaiser also has risen in the Annapolis power structure because she has embraced one of the less pleasant aspects of politics: the importance of following the money. Kaiser has become a prodigious fundraiser for other Democrats in Maryland, crisscrossing the state to appear at events for colleagues and political hopefuls. That kind of support can help her when or if she has higher ambitions in the legislature (maybe the first female house speaker?) or when she’s looking for help on a bill. “When I first met Anne, being in leadership did not cross her mind,” Ross says. “She realizes you can do a lot more good when you are in charge.”
Kaiser was 16 when her older brother Phil pointed out to her that the honors classes at Rockville High School largely consisted of white, middle-class students from Earle B. Wood, the middle school Kaiser had attended, and not from Edwin W. Broome, the other feeder school, which had a less affluent population with more minority students. It seemed, she felt, inherently unfair, a form of de facto segregation at a time when Montgomery County schools had long been racially integrated. When she arrived at the University of Chicago as an undergraduate in 1986, she began to realize that what she had seen in high school had broader implications—that education policy was at the heart of equal rights and civil rights debates in the United States.
“It was the fundamental core issue that could solve a lot of problems,” she says. The great equalizer, if done right, she believed. She studied both public policy and education policy at the University of Michigan, earning two master’s degrees before returning home to Rockville to begin working on Capitol Hill for Rep. Neal Smith, a Democrat from Iowa. She later worked for Maryland state Del. Hank Heller (D-Montgomery) before running for the House of Delegates in 2002.
In Annapolis, she joined the House Ways & Means Committee, serving on subcommittees that dealt with revenue, children and families, and education. She showed up well prepared at meetings, asking pointed questions that often drew praise from colleagues, and finally, in 2007, attained the chairmanship of the education subcommittee, where she could begin to more directly shape legislation. In one of her early victories, she successfully pushed for a law that gave schools more leverage over bullying, even if the behavior didn’t occur during school hours. “We said that if kids are being tormented and don’t want to come to school, that creates a negative atmosphere in schools,” she recalls. “As long as it affects the school atmosphere, we said the schools have a right to punish.”
The measure won praise from national anti-bullying organizations, propelling Maryland to the top of a list of states that were taking steps to insulate children from such harassment. In 2010, Kaiser successfully managed a group of bills that helped restructure state financing and steer more funds toward public school systems, especially those that were growing rapidly, such as Montgomery County’s. In 2011, she worked with colleagues on a measure that requires school athletic programs to more closely screen for concussions when athletes are injured during competitions. She was able to get support for those bills, she says, because she quickly figured out that “concussions and bullying are not partisan issues.”
That same year, Kaiser served as the House floor manager for a contentious bill that made it easier for illegal immigrants to get in-state college tuition in Maryland. She overcame intense opposition during what she calls her “political coming-out party.”
“People were worried I would not be able to handle myself on the House floor—that the debate would get ugly,” she says. Kaiser parried questions from colleagues for more than three hours, and the bill was eventually enacted.
“You can be doing good work all these years and finally someone notices. It was my ninth year, and finally people are paying attention to me.”
Justin Ross says Kaiser played a crucial role in winning over reluctant Democrats like him to support same-sex marriage in 2012. Ross was for civil unions and did not want to get mired in a fight with religious leaders, many of whom he represented in Prince George’s County, where a good number of white and African-American lawmakers were reluctant to endorse same-sex marriage. Kaiser eventually wore him down by being patient, he says, by telling him she knew that when it came time for a vote, he would “do the right thing.” She didn’t hector him or put on the hard sell, he says: “She just kept talking. And talking.”
Not long after same-sex marriage became legal in Maryland, Kaiser married Lineman, her longtime partner, and the couple moved into a brick split-level house in Silver Spring. Their neighborhood is a “mini-United Nations,” Lineman says, and more families with children are starting to move in. Kaiser and Lineman haven’t decided whether to start a family of their own—for now they’re content with their cocker spaniel mix and three cats. They also spend time mentoring a 16-year-old girl who lives with a foster family in nearby Beltsville. They’ll meet her for lunch or take her to a museum or a concert at the University of Maryland, where Kaiser teaches a course on women in politics. In 2013, they got tickets for the teen to hear first lady Michelle Obama’s commencement address at Bowie State University. “She has grown more comfortable with us, and we have helped her see a bigger world out there,” Kaiser says.
Lineman, a former assistant state’s attorney in Prince George’s County who now works in communications at Montgomery College, says she and Kaiser complement one another. “She’s the reasonable voice. She doesn’t overwhelm people with her approach,” says Lineman, 40, who calls herself the “intense one” in the marriage. She says Kaiser, while very attentive to details at work, is less focused when it comes to doing chores at home. After the couple returned from a recent trip, Kaiser left her suitcase packed for more than a week. “It would not occur to Anne to move it or unpack it,” Lineman says. (Kaiser, who is vacuuming the couple’s home on a recent day, notes that Lineman has never taken her own clothes to the dry cleaner. They both laugh.) Kaiser does the laundry; her wife can repair a sink or wallpaper a bathroom. “She’s the mountain. I’m the weather,” Lineman says.
Michael Busch has no plans to retire from the speakership anytime soon, and Kaiser demurs when asked about her ambitions. Meanwhile, she’s trying to recruit more women to run for office. While women make up 52 percent of the population in Maryland, the number of females in the General Assembly has decreased in recent years. In 2005, 67 of the 188 state legislators were women. Last year, the number was 60. At a gathering of young Democratic women in Silver Spring last summer, Kaiser urged the attendees to get involved. “I knew when I was 5 that I wanted to run for office,” she said. “Leap in at every opportunity.”