Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The question has been asked: Should Governor Dannel Malloy’s appointment of Supreme Court Justice Andrew McDonald as Connecticut’s Chief Justice be rejected because McDonald is gay? The answer is no, and it is highly unlikely in Connecticut’s Democratic top-heavy General Assembly that the nomination would be rejected for such a reason. The flip side of the question is: Should the General Assembly approve Malloy’s nomination because McDonald is gay? The answer is no. On the gay question, it should be noted, Republican legislators have been accommodating. Connecticut legislators in 2009 agreed to replace all statutory references to marriage with gender-neutral language, a variant of a bill sponsored by McDonald and his Judiciary Committee co-chair in the House, Mike Lawlor, who, like McDonald, also is openly gay. The General Assembly voted to approve the measure – 100-44 in the House and 28-7 in the Senate. At first promising a veto, Republican Governor Jodi Rell signe...

Sen. Andrew McDonald, the co-chair along with Rep. Michael Lawlor of the state judiciary committee, has issued an apology of sorts. In an e-mail, Mr. McDonald writes: "It was never my intent to offend anyone of faith, nor to cast negative attention on the many trustworthy and responsible parish corporations. My only goal was to try my best to represent the concerns of my constituents, some of whom were the victims of fraud. I regret that in my pursuit of their interests, I failed to appreciate and invite into the discussion early on the views of other, equally concerned Catholics." Let’s go through the apology step by step. Mr. McDonald says that he received from parishioners at St. John’s church in Darien a proposal that later morphed, pretty much all by itself, into Raised Bill No. 1098 . “In reality,” McDonald wrote in an earlier statement published in the Journal Inquirer, “this bill was proposed and written by a group of faithful Catholic parishioners from Fairfield Coun...

On Capitol Report , Roy Occhiogrosso, Governor Dannel Malloy’s chief cook and bottle washer during his first term, had this to say about State Supreme Court Associate Justice Andrew McDonald: “I worked with Andrew, as you know for a couple of years.” Before being appointed by Malloy to the Supreme Court, McDonald was the Senate co-chairman, along with House Rep. Mike Lawlor, of the Judiciary Committee. Occhiogrosso continued, “I’ve known him for a long time – very smart, very careful, very conservative in the sense that he observes the bright lines he is supposed to observe.” It is telling that Occhiogrosso, who perhaps knows the mind of Malloy better than most, should be constrained to announce that McDonald is in some approvable fashion conservative. Some legislators, not all of them conservative, might more justly argue that McDonald has rarely seen a bright line he has not ventured to cross.

Governor Dannel Malloy’s Nominee for Chief Justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court, Justice Andrew McDonald, was sent to the General Assembly with a negative recommendation. The nomination  passed in the House by one vote, where Democrats have a six member edge over Republicans, and is now headed towards the Senate, which is split 18-18 among Democrats and Republicans. The Republican leader in the Senate, Len Fasano, said on a radio talk show recently that he is inclined to vote down the nomination.  After viewing all McDonald's opinions -- and also interviewing McDonald -- Fasano feels that McDonald is prone to affirming a possibly flawed decision if the decision contains a partial narrative that supports his apriori views. For instance, McDonald believes that the death penalty may be racist because it falls disproportionately on blacks, a doubtful datum. If a decision to abolish the death penalty supported that view, McDonald would be inclined to support it. That mo...

Shortly after Governor Dannel Malloy nominated his chief counsel Andrew McDonald to Connecticut’s Supreme Court, the Day of New London noted that it was “a testament of how far Connecticut has come that the least controversial fact about Andrew J. McDonald, nominated by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy on Thursday to join the state Supreme Court, is that he is openly gay.” When Mr. Malloy announced awhile back that his administration was the gayest in Connecticut history, no one bated an eyelash. Mr. McDonald was married to Charles Gray in 2009 by then Mayor of Stamford Malloy ; under Secretary for Criminal Justice Policy and Planning Michael Lawlor, the author of the problem ridden Earned Risk Reduction Credits program , is also openly gay.

Objective court watchers may be amused by the notion that Connecticut’s Supreme Court has become politicized, especially since the court for some time has shown itself to be the indentured servant of the left wing of the Democrat dominated General Assembly. As proof of this proposition, one need look no further than Governor Dannel Malloy’s choice for Chief Justice, recently approved by one vote in Connecticut’s House of Representatives. The McDonald nomination now moves to the State Senate, where confirmation is more doubtful. In addition to being gay – a major plus in Connecticut, as witness McDonald’s unimpeded elevation from Director of Legal Affairs for the City of Stamford from 1999 to 2002, to Stamford Representative in the General Assembly from 1991 to 2003, to co-chair of the Judiciary Committee, along with Mike Lawlor, to Justice of the Supreme Court – McDonald has shown himself to be a committed partisan Democrat ideologue whose political attachment to M...

The thousands of Catholics who descended upon the state’s Capitol to protest Raised Bill No. 1098 will be gratified to learn that the whole sorry business was the result, according to a news report in the Journal Inquirer , of a misunderstanding concerning the meaning of the expression “ex-officio.” Those Latin formulations; they get you every time. Sen. Andrew McDonald, who along with Rep. Michael Lawlor in the House is one of the two co-chairmen of the legislature’s Judiciary Committee, received in 2007 a communication from an understandably upset parishioner of St. Catherine of Siena Roman Catholic Church in Greenwich, Mr. Thomas Gallagher. Three years ago, a Stamford detective hired by parishioners of St. John’s Roman Catholic Church to investigate strange goings-on in the rectory of the church had documented that its pastor, the Reverend Michael Jude Fay, had embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars of church money to finance a lavish lifestyle with another man. The Reverend Fay...

Even after the Rowland corruption scandal, life goes on. But sensitive noses have detected the odor of fish in the air, and an amendment to Senate Bill 956 seems to give off a radiant glow, like the proverbial mackerel in moonlight. Two writers at the Hartford Advocate – a paper not known for its conservative leanings; see Alan Bisport’s frequent eruptions on the moronic and possibly traitorous Bush II regime – have zeroed in on the legislation and found it wanting. The amendment, the brainchild of liberal state senators Edith Prague and Senate Deputy Majority Leader Andrew McDonald, is a gerrymandered piece of legislation, slipped surreptitiously into a bill extending compensation for prison workers to account for times when they travel to and from their jobs, and cunningly designed to benefit only one constituent – as well as a law firm that has contributed to the campaigns of both obliging legislators. The genesis of the bill’s subsection, signed into law by a somnambulant Gov. Jodi...

Chief Justice of Connecticut’s Supreme Court Chase Rogers is retiring after 11 years. There are murmurs at the State Capital that Associate Justice Andrew McDonald might fill the vacancy. When all vacancies are filled, Governor Dannel Malloy will have appointed 6 of 7 Justices to the Court. McDonald, the youngest Justice on the court, was the lame-duck Governor's Chief Legal Counsel before he was appointed to  the Court by Malloy in 2013. McDonald had been with the Governor since Malloy’s salad days as Mayor of Stamford. Malloy’s Chief Counsels and political staff have been particularly favored during his administration. Luke Bronin, presently Mayor of Hartford, a city teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and in need of frequent cash transfusions from the state, also had served as Chief Counsel to Malloy.

Thinking perhaps that he was Twitter-in-Chief President Donald Trump, Undersecretary for Criminal Justice Policy and Planning at the Office of Policy and Management Michael Lawlor in late January fired off the following tweet: “ Wow, Connecticut gets its first full-force racist enabler candidate for Attorney General.” According to CTMirror , Lawlor’s target was “Susan Hatfield, a state prosecutor from eastern Connecticut who was a Donald J. Trump delegate in 2016 and once worked in Washington as a young policy aide to former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich…” Hatfield, a Republican, is running for the Attorney General spot soon to be vacated by George Jepsen. For any number of reasons, this was not the brightest tweet in Lawlor’s constellation of tweets. Imputing racism to all Trump delegates smacks of McCarthyism, and Hatfield is a woman who should be able to toss her hat into a political ring without being peppered by politicians operating in the #me-too era who ought to...

A Hartford paper has noted in an editorial  that Governor Dannel Malloy, the chief executive of Connecticut’s one-party state, is packing courts with Democratic appointments.  Of the nominees “to fill vacancies on the Superior Court bench and two judges to serve on the Appellate Court,” Mr. Malloy has chosen from a list presented to him by the Judicial Selection Commission eighteen (18) Democrats and zero (0) Republicans.  In its gently reproving editorial, the paper remarked on the imbalance: “The dramatic partisan imbalance in Mr. Malloy's class of 18 doesn't necessarily mean any of those nominated are unqualified to serve. Each was, in fact, found qualified after an investigation by the Judicial Selection Commission, which prepares a list from which the governor chooses his nominees.”

I attended the Republican inspired informal hearing on Raised Bill 1098 on Thursday, called hastily after McDonald and Lawlor killed the hearing on THEIR bill. Only a three days notice was allowed before the MacDonald/Lawlor hearing, and the bill was verbally disguised. Only later did legislators discover what was in the bill. By that time roof tiles were raining down on the heads of the judiciary committee members. It’s pretty clear they had hoped to reduce controversy at their hearing. The bill itself, invidiously targeted at Catholics, assumes there is no connection between finances and the mandate of the Catholic Church. Everyone agrees that the bill is unconstitutional. In follow-up reports, Lawlor and McDonald imputed the content of the bill to some parishioners at St. John’s in Darien. That lie was barely out of their mouths when it began to fall apart. The news reports in the Journal Inquirer showing some parishioners repudiating the bill were splendid. Who knows what th...

It’s a mouthful from “ Red Five ,” a commentator on Connecticut Local Politics, but well worth heeding: “So far the committee hearings themselves have appeared bipartisan. “But someone is feeding a steady stream of “dirt” on Downey to the panel, and the media, and it makes you wonder who that might be … and why they’re doing it. “Anyone who actually reads the Downey transcript on (Strom) Thurmond can see he (1) condemned Thurmond’s bigoted past and (2) spoke as someone with a personal relationship to the senator, not as a fan of his politics. “Lawlor and McDonald - and please note here that Chris Healy was as wrong about this as he could have been - said as much themselves. “Yet the damage was done. “Then there’s the “questions” about his comments concerning immigration status. Even the lawyer for the party in question calls the comments innocuous - an intellectual exercise. “Yet more damage was done. “Come today and the committee is forced to delay action due to “surprise” new issues ...

It is not likely that Joshua Komisarjevsky, one of the two alleged murderers in the Pettit case, need fear a cell invasion. But the lawyers for his partner in mayhem, Steven Hayes, who along with Komisarjevsky is accused of invading Dr. William Petit’s home and murdering his wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit, and her two daughters, Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11, now are seeking an arrest warrant for Komisarjevsky. Hayes’ lawyers claim that Komisarjevsky has committed “criminal contempt of court” for having disregarded a judge’s gag order. Principles in the case are under a judge’s instruction not to chat it up before trial for fear the court may not be able to empanel a dispassionate jury. It is supposed by some defense attorneys that if a jury member has read about the events at issue in trial, the juror will be “tainted” and thus unable to render a just verdict. Good judges dispose of the worry by instructing jurors that in their deliberations they may only consider evidence pres...

The old saw has it that “exceptions prove the rule.” They prove the rule precisely because they are exceptions. In Connecticut’s politicized Supreme Court, exceptions have BECOME the rule. That is what happened when Justice Richard Palmer constructed his decision on the Constitutionality of Connecticut’s death penalty on a dissent in Glossip v. Gross , a case in which a challenge to the death penalty on Constitutional grounds had been denied by the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol. The decision was a narrow one, but Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg managed in their dissent to import larger issues.

The reaction to Raised Bill No. 1098 has been intense in some quarters, though many commentators in the state, ordinarily quickened by blatant attacks on First Amendment rights, appear to have fallen asleep at their keyboards. Carl Anderson, the Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic organization based in New Haven, compares the proponents of Raised Bill No. 1098, a piece of legislation that radically undermines the way the Catholic Church is financed, to the No-Nothings of Abraham Lincoln’s day. The Know-Nothings and Nativists of the time were fiercely anti-Catholic and anti-Negro. The favored means of attacking the Catholic Church in the days of the No-Nothings and Nativists was through “trusteeships,” a plan very much like that now being shepherded through the state’s judiciary committee by co-chairs Andrew McDonald and Michael Lawlor. Not for nothing does historian Arthur Schlesinger remind us that anti-Catholic prejudice is one of the most virulent forms of big...

Gov. Jodi Rell is being played for a sucker yet again. Last time around, the governor refused to sign a budget that she could not in good conscience support, chiefly because the budget contained a progressive income tax feature long opposed by Republicans. Republican leaders at the time argued that a progressive income tax was regressive on the revenue side. Working its way through a malingering recession, the state had experienced a sharp fall off in revenue because a) despite the absence of a progressive feature in the income tax, the bulk of revenue pouring into the state treasury was “contributed” by the state’s wealthier citizens, and b) revenue held by this group had been severely diminished by the recession, c) resulting in a net loss of revenue to the state. One Democratic stalwart, nodding affirmatively to the analysis, suggested that only a broad based income tax could make the state solvent. This was George Jepsen, once Chairman of the Democratic Party, out of office ...

When bright-eyed reformists of the early 1900’s were making a stab at political reform, George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall gave an interview with news reporter William Riordan and, making what he thought was a necessary distinction between “honest graft” and the usual garden variety, spilled the beans , as they say in the now smokeless filled rooms where political friends still scratch each other’s backs. “Everybody is talkin' these days about Tammany men growin' rich on graft, but nobody thinks of drawin' the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft. There's all the difference in the world between the two. Yes, many of our men have grown rich in politics. I have myself. I've made a big fortune out of the game, and I'm gettin' richer every day, but I've not gone in for dishonest graft--blackmailin' gamblers, saloon‑keepers, disorderly people, etc.--and neither has any of the men who have made big fortunes in politics. “There...

Monday, March 23, 2009 1:37:56 Dear Mr. Pesci, I write regarding a gross factual error in your recent column in the Greenwich Citizen on a proposed bill concerning the finances of the Roman Catholic Church. Your column completely misstates and misrepresents my position on this proposal. In fact, the position you attribute to me is the exact opposite of the one I have taken. Neither I nor my office played any role in drafting or introducing this legislation, nor were we consulted before it was submitted or raised for a hearing in the General Assembly. When asked about the proposal, I have stated consistently and repeatedly that it appears to violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing freedom of religion. Far from seeking the powers or role such a proposal might authorize, I have explicitly rejected them. Fortunately, the proposal now appears to be dead, its supporters having effectively withdrawn it. I respectfully request that you issue a correction and edit an...

The co-chairs of the state's judiciary committee, Andrew McDonald and Michael Lawlor, have killed the hearing during which Raised Bill No. 1098 was to be discussed, leaving behind in their wake a series of questions not yet answered. There are jarring conflicting reports concerning the writing of Raised Bill No. 1098, which strips bishops and archbishops of their rights under canon law to direct the financial affairs of their parishes. The Journal Inquirer quoted from a statement written by Lawlor, co-chair of the judiciary committee: “’In reality, this bill was proposed and written by a group of faithful Catholic parishioners from Fairfield County who asked the Judiciary Committee to consider giving the subject a public hearing,’ the statement continued. ‘Especially considering the fact that one of the large-scale embezzlements which gave rise to this proposal originated from a parish corporation in Darien, a town that Senator McDonald represents, we decided to give these parishio...