I Was Wrong About Manis Canning
The distributors lost the House and kept the Senate. I mistook a collapsing power structure for a collapsing firm. Here is the firm through the truth-and-kindness lens.
On January 13 of this year I published a piece headlined “THE MARYLAND ALCOHOL REGIME IS COLLAPSING.” The subtitle read “Doom & Gloom for Manis Canning & Associates.”
I was half right. And in this business, half right is wrong.
The half I got right: the alcohol distributors’ House fortress really did fall. In a single cycle they lost Speaker Adrienne Jones, Ways and Means chair Vanessa Atterbeary, Business Regulation chair CT Wilson, and Dereck Davis — the strongest friend the distributors ever had in the House — to the Treasurer’s office, a constitutional post with zero say over alcohol policy. Joseline Peña-Melnyk’s elevation gave them a Speaker with no ties to the old regime and no sentimental attachment to the way things have always been done.
The half I got wrong: I framed it as the firm’s doom. Then the 2026 session arrived, the Alcoholic Beverages Modernization Act — supermarket beer and wine, with a Senate version sponsored by Antonio Hayes himself — died the way it always dies. The distributors walked out of April alive. The Senate, which my own piece identified as their insurance policy, paid the claim.
I have been telling people lately that what I do here is government-relations reporting based in truth and kindness. So this morning I am going to apply that lens to the firm I got wrong — and show you what the lens actually does.
