Senator Angela Alsobrooks, congratulations on starting your tenure as Maryland’s newest U.S. senator. Regardless of our political affiliations or our voting records, we are rooting for you. Maryland needs a compelling voice that has been largely absent from our congressional delegation for decades, and for the good of our great state, we need you to fill a notable void in our federal representation.

Many of us saw a hopeful and positive pathway in the candidacy of our beloved former governor, Larry Hogan, and the optimistic among us still cling to elements of hope as you place a struggling Prince George’s County safely in your rearview mirror. Yet, in order to meet the needs of all Marylanders, we need you to disregard some of your key campaign promises.

Your strategy throughout the campaign hinged on painting Gov. Hogan as a willing instrument of the Republican establishment. We heard endless warnings about Hogan being Mitch McConnell’s 51st vote, though deep inside we knew Hogan to be a trusted, proven, independently minded leader who would be answerable only to the people of Maryland whom he had already served so reliably. Additionally, those of us who were steeped in the details of the national electoral map understood that a solid Republican Senate majority was all but assured, regardless of what happened in Maryland’s election.

Your disingenuous talking points worked, supported by tens of millions of dollars of super PAC money that flooded in from outside the state. Gov. Wes Moore parroted these same concepts and was complicit in a strategy that was based on a blatant mischaracterization of Hogan and federal politics. Despite this repeated untruth, a large percentage of Maryland voters still selected a split ticket — voting for both Vice President Kamala Harris and Hogan. In retrospect, far more would have likely voted for Hogan if they hadn’t been duped by the Democratic Party machine.

All of this leads to my first campaign-promise-related-request — Marylanders deserve truth and transparency from Senator Alsobrooks. We don’t need tricky talking points, deceptive double-speak or slippery strategies. While we deserved such honesty and candor from candidate Alsobrooks, we need you to respect us enough going forward to level with us during your tenure as our senator. It isn’t too late to repair a reputation that quickly soured for many of us because of what we saw during your campaign, but we need that clarity in your character to start now. Also starting now, we need you to reveal yourself as an independently minded member of the U.S. Senate. During the singular debate of the campaign, you only stumbled once — when asked whether there was any issue where you differed from the Democratic Party platform. You said “no,” but it was clear that you understood that Marylanders needed something far more nuanced. The people of Maryland deserve something we haven’t enjoyed in decades — a consequential national-level voice. The desires of our current congressional delegation are consistently ignored because our Democratic federal representatives robotically align with the will of their party bosses. We suffer from such party-aligned simple-mindedness, with the results of the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act as the poster child for our single-party impoverishment. Though we enjoy the strongest cyber workforce on the planet, we were forced to watch as other states benefited from economy-revolutionizing investments, jobs and chip factories while Maryland got nothing. It was all because our elected voices were disregarded yet again.

This tragic outcome leads to my second campaign-promise-related-request — Marylanders need you to break from predictable party allegiance. A consequential national-level voice that benefits our great state will only come when your vote isn’t assured in every situation. I could almost see you processing this important truth in real time during the debate, but you couldn’t bring yourself to say it when electoral votes were on the line.

We need you to acknowledge it now and act upon it with your senatorial voice and votes.

As a member of Congress’ upper chamber, we also need you to be careful about the arguments you make and the verbiage you use. During the campaign, you definitively and unequivocally stated that you supported ending the senatorial filibuster and advocated for packing the Supreme Court. With a Republican in the White House and a Republican majority in the Senate, I strongly suspect that you no longer support such radical policies or problematic procedural changes. The pitfall, however, is that your words belie a steadiness that we need from the mature members of our nation’s legislative body that provides for sustainability, reliability and respectability. Using institution-eroding hyperbole that would change fundamental rules to benefit a fleeting majority is dangerous and reckless.

These intellectual and rhetorical inconsistencies lead to my final campaign-promise-related-request — we need you to be more thoughtful and deliberate in the words you use and the policies you promote. Feckless talking points and radical institutional restructuring may stir up the base on the campaign trail, but they do not contribute to restoring the functionality of our federal government. They are techniques fitting for a politician but are incompatible with the characteristics of a reliable leader.

Senator Alsobrooks, you have a promising six-year term ahead of you with the possibility of more electoral victories on the horizon that would lengthen your senatorial tenure. Marylanders need you to succeed in ways that your colleagues from our great state have not. Yet, to do so we need you to turn away from your campaign promises and rhetoric, and instead embrace truthful, independent and steady leadership. We are rooting for you!

John Teichert is a retired brigadier general and the former commander of Joint Base Andrews. He ran in the Republican primary for Maryland’s U.S. Senate seat in 2024.