Maryland Proposal Warns: Political Favors Are a House of Cards

The producers of House of Cards are learning what a house of cards they’ve built for themselves.

As part of financing its Netflix series about a less-than-idealistic politician, Media Rights Capital used Maryland tax credits targeted to the film and video industry. This year, while planning the show’s third season, MRC wrote to Maryland officials threatening to leave the state if the legislature didn’t budget enough money for tax credits for films.

Now, trying lawfully to keep your money out of the government’s claws is generally a good thing. But MRC hasn’t just been using the tax code as it found it, nor (so far as I’ve seen) has it argued that taxes should be low for everyone on principle. Rather, it has sought tax credits as special favors, by such methods as bringing star Kevin Spacey to drink with lawmakers and giving the state House speaker’s wife the chance to appear in the show. And it has argued for tax credits on the ground of public benefit, pointing to the revenue it brings to the state treasury.

But once you accept favoritism as a governing principle, what can you say if those in power turn against you? And once you accept that the law shouldn’t be applied evenly to all, but should give some people different treatment in order to benefit the state treasury, what can you say if the state thinks it can make more money treating you worse than others instead of better?

Delegate William Frick, Democrat of Montgomery County (in the D.C. suburbs), responded to MRC’s aggressive lobbying with an aggressive move of his own: threatening to seize the sets of House of Cards by eminent domain. Strictly speaking, that would be an injustice: MRC owns its sets, tax credits notwithstanding. And yet it would be a striking act of poetic justice: MRC tried to rely on special favors and the whims of politicians, instead of on principles of rights and equally applied laws, and now the whim may have turned against it, blowing on its house of cards.

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