Del. Emmett Burns vs. Brendon Ayanbadejo: Day Two

• Reporting on Del. Emmett Burns’s appalling attempt to silence Ravens player Brendon Ayanbadejo, NFL.com seems to have a lot of trouble identifying which political party Burns is from. News alert: He’s a Democrat. According to the ratings from Maryland Business for Responsive Government, his voting record was 90 percent anti-business last year (PDF), so we’re not exactly talking about a Republican in Democrats’ clothing here.
• Eugene Volokh finds Burns’ letter: “a pretty inappropriate thing for a legislator, speaking in a way that stresses his role as legislator, to say to a private employer. There is no express threat of retaliation here, but such letters to private businesspeople — who often have to deal with legislature on various regulatory issues — tend to carry something of an implied threat, especially when they stress the author’s legislative position.” Burns sits on the Economic Matters Committee and its business regulation subcommittee.
• “Leviticus should be followed to the letter – minus the shellfish condemnation, because after all this is Maryland.” — classic comment by Brian T. Robinson, prompted by the Volokh post.
• Okay, Maryland Dems, how about we ask disgraced Del. Don Dwyer to step down and you ask power-abusing Del. Burns to do the same? Deal?
• More coverage: Josh Alper/NBC Sports, Ty Duffy/The Big Lead, Chris Greenberg/HuffPost Sports, Jim Buzinski/OutSports, John Riley/Metroweekly, Mike Rosenwald/Washington Post.
• Contrary to our hopes, relatively few big-name conservative commentators — the people who turned politicians’ intimidation of Chick-Fil-A into a big national story — have, as of yet, taken any note of Burns’ abuse of power. And it certainly does complicate the narrative, popular in some quarters, that only backers of traditional religious views on marriage have anything to fear about retaliation against their jobs and livelihoods.