I recently read Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s May 6 newsletter update, “Fighting to Protect Marylanders and Our Constitution.” “While I appreciate his passionate defense of the Constitution and efforts to address high-profile cases like that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, I was struck by what was missing — any meaningful acknowledgment of the daily challenges facing working-class Marylanders.

The letter emphasizes federal workers, university faculty and students, deportation cases and big institutions such as NASA. Although these groups matter, they are only a portion of Maryland’s population. Those who count him as their senator also include retail clerks, tradespeople, small business owners, home health aides, truck drivers, child care workers and single moms, who earn median wages or lower, do not have job security and are barely scratching by every day to afford their groceries, child care, gas and rent.

These Marylanders are often ignored in national political stories. They’re not in press releases. It’s not heard from the Senate floor. But they keep communities going — working long hours, figuring out how to cope with broken public services and seeing costs go through the roof while paychecks don’t keep pace. When a senator spends thousands of words about academic and legal institutions, yet struggles to mention a paragraph or two aside to the working poor in Hagerstown, Salisbury or Dundalk — it’s a troubling message: The political fights must matter more than the working economy of everyday people.

This gap is acutely felt in areas like Cumberland, Waldorf and Prince Frederick. Cashiers, delivery workers, day care employees do not seek any privilege — only acknowledgement and affirmation. They want cheap food, work, safe homes and essential services. Their stories are not as headline-grabbing as Supreme Court decisions or international legal rifts, and yet their stakes are just as real, perhaps even higher.

The siting of these communities would be much different if the same focus was given to them. Many of these workers simply don’t have the time to coordinate and attend town halls. They have no lobbyists or press coverage or university platforms. Their silence is not apathy — it is exhaustion. But they pay taxes, raise children and also do some of the most necessary, and too often thankless, work there is. They deserve a voice and an advocate just as much as people who have institutional power or political presence.

Throughout Maryland — especially in rural and working-class communities — families struggle with housing that is unaffordable, utility bills that keep climbing and jobs that may not be there tomorrow. These are not abstractions of policy; these are matters of urgent survival. People in Denton or Brunswick are deciding between food and medicine. In Easton and La Plata, renters are being priced out of housing. Too many are one emergency from financial collapse. But the political spotlight is instead shining on court battles in the corridors of power in Washington and the country’s most elite universities, far from this daily grind.

To get right to the point: The senator’s letter sounds like it is concerned not with those who most need his concern, but rather with those who are already closest, either literally or figuratively, to positions of power and privilege: federal workers with job protections, university students and administrators, and well to do members of the legal profession.

They are well-financed, well-known and well-connected. Meanwhile, the people who kept Maryland afloat in the pandemic — line cooks, aides and grocery clerks — barely get a mention.

This is more than just a rhetorical lapse. It is a real difference of focus as well. Centering our political energies on high-profile appeals and ignoring the quiet crises of everyday families produces a corrosive perception: that government is more responsive to the well-connected than to the hard-working. That’s not representation — it’s exclusion. And it’s exactly the kind of disjunction that fuels disillusionment and distrust with our political system.

As the senator correctly notes, it’s important to defend the Constitution, but that defense cannot be limited to the court of law or to press conferences. It has to be about policies that allow people to do more than survive, that enable Marylanders to live decent, dignified lives. The Constitution is in a mother in Anne Arundel being able to afford child care, or a worker who has lost a job having a chance to retrain for a new career without going into debt. It’s not just about legal rights, but about economic security and opportunity.

I urge Sen. Van Hollen to expand his focus to the lifeblood of our state. They pay taxes and contribute to communities every day. They deserve to be seen, heard and fought for with the energy and passion that are sometimes brought to any constitutional or national cause.

Christine Lightfoot is a retired veteran who grew up in Maryland.