Blumenthal, Murphy And Trump

U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal has not told us in his wanderings within Connecticut whether he believes the general run of citizens in his state feel safer or less safe with the presence in Connecticut of sanctuary cities. There are, at last count, three sanctuary cities in Connecticut: Hartford, New Haven and Willimantic. However, some state politicians have grand aspirations. State Representative Edwin Vargas of Hartford  put forward last January proposed bill 6709,  which would “amend state statutes to prevent the state police from demanding information concerning citizenship from individuals with whom they interact," in effect making the whole of Connecticut a sanctuary state, according to a story in the Hartford Courant.  And indeed, why not? If sanctuary is good for the people of Hartford, New Haven and Willimantic, how can it possibly be bad for the people of New Canaan?

The term “sanctuary city” has fallen into disuse lately. As is usual in politics, the thing is embraced, even as the word that best describes it is shunned. Some commentators have been howling that sanctuary, when it occurs anywhere but in a church, is a form of nullification, a practice infamously deployed by the Southern states during and after the Civil War to keep African Americans in bondage. This hubbub has caused a certain terminological retrenchment. Governor Dannel Malloy and some mayors now insist, sanctuary cities being illegal, that they are simply providing a “welcoming environment” for the wretched of the earth who have not bothered to observe immigration niceties. The advocates of sanctuary sometimes speak as if they wished they could drive an underground railroad from Mexico to New England and points north, legal immigration be damned.

When Mr. Blumenthal or his confederate in the U.S. Senate, Chris Murphy, fails to make the necessary distinction between illegal and legal immigrants during one of their Town Hall jaunts, they are rarely questioned on the point. Both bankers and bank robbers operate within banks, yet the distinction between the two is sometimes useful in assigning punishments to bank robbers.

Since Donald Trump surprised most Democrats and Republicans by besting Hillary Clinton in the general election last November, Democratic sappers have been hard at work attempting to undermine his presidency, some have suggested, because beaten progressive Democrats are unwilling to acknowledge a) that Mrs. Clinton ran a poor campaign, and b) that Mr. Trump’s victory in some sense signals a revolutionary change in the temperature of the political ocean – a strong aversion to Mr. Obama’s authoritarian progressive policies, if not to Mr. Obama himself, who continues out of office to garner approval ratings much higher than those of, say, Mr. Malloy, the U.S. Congress and the nation’s journalists.

Though their best was not good enough, Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Murphy have done their best to torpedo Mr. Trump’s cabinet appointments. Not a single member of Connecticut’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional delegation sent up a cheer when the newly elected president vowed to add three, not two, submarines to the arsenal of democracy. Second District U.S. Representative Joe Courtney identified himself as “two-sub Joe” during his successful defense of his seat in the last election. Two years hence, Courtney will be able to run for re-election as “three-sub Joe, thanks to a president who has vowed to beef up a military severely depleted during Mr. Obama’s administration. The investment market has shown steady improvement since Mr. Obama vacated the White House, and Connecticut’s depleted revenue bank is, as everyone knows, over-reliant on the financial sector. Despite these uplifting changes, all the Democratic members of the state’s U.S. Congressional Delegation, reading from the same campaign playbook, continue to harass the ill-tempered Mr. Trump, though he might well be the president whose low tax, low regulatory policies lifts Connecticut up by its bootstraps.

The appointment of Betsy DeVos as Mr. Trump’s United State Secretary of Education caused much frothing among union-reliant Democrats Blumenthal and Murphy. Mrs. DeVos is, like Milton Freeman before her, a free-marketer and a passionate supporter of alternative education schools.

Both senators seem to be unaware of such successful charter schools as the Amistad Academy in New Haven, whose co-founder, Dacia Toll, now heads a battery of successful Achievement First  charter schools, some of them in Connecticut, that routinely route inner city graduates to such colleges as Harvard, Yale, John Hopkins and other prestigious U.S. universities.

Though wildly successful in providing a path to prosperity for students in inner cities, Achievement First will not be expanding its operations in Connecticut because the General Assembly underfunded such successful educational institutions in the state by about 17 percent when it wrote the statute creating charter schools.  Achievement First will instead be expanding in New York and Rhode Island, but not in the state that was the nursery bed of what may be the most successful charter school in the nation. And while Mrs. DeVos may shed copious tears for inner city children thus deprived of a bridge to success, union allied politicians such as Mr. Blumenthal or Mr. Murphy remain frigidly untouched by young people under-serviced by failing public schools. Nor will it matter in the least to them that such children are native born citizens, legal immigrants or the children of illegal aliens.