Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

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...

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...

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...

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...

Here’s a question no one seems willing to discuss: How often do legislative committees – the Ethics Committee, no less – start “investigations” on groups that are exercising their constitutional rights on the Capitol lawn? Once, that I can think of -- here: The state’s Ethics Committee is now “investigating” the Catholic Church with a view to determining whether the Diocese of Bridgeport, which paid for some buses to transport people to a rally on the Capitol lawn, is in violation of lobbying ordinances. The Catholic Church is suing the state to secure its constitutional rights. There is some danger here that watchful citizens may lose sight of the trees because they are too close to the forest. The Catholic Church has been under successful attack for some time by its natural enemies in the legislature, but one recent sally by the church’s opponents in the legislature has been beaten back by the church. Some people are keeping score, obviously. The Judiciary Committee, hea...

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.

Serious questions have been raised concerning the language of Raised Bill 1098. This is a bill that essentially compels a re-formation of Catholic Church authority, which now resides in its bishops, archbishops and the pope, considered to be the head of the Catholic Church. The bill establishes a church board that would direct the finances of the church and at the same time makes bishops and arch bishops powerless witnesses to the actions of the board. According to the bill, “The corporation, shall have a board of directors consisting of not less than seven nor more than thirteen lay members. The archbishop or bishop of the diocese or his designee shall serve as an ex-officio member of the board of directors without the right to vote .” The stated purpose of the bill is “To revise the corporate governance provisions applicable to the Roman Catholic Church and provide for the investigation of the misappropriation of funds by religious corporations.” The powers of the board, enumerated i...

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.

Rep. Michael Lawlor, co-chairman along with Sen. Andrew McDonald of Connecticut’s Judiciary Committee, has indicated he might resurrect House Bill 5473 in the new session. HB 5473, which bordered on a bill of attainder, was defeated in the legislature during the last term, and even Mr. McDonald, who tends to march in lockstep with co-confederate Lawlor, voted against the measure. Bills of attainder, legislation carefully crafted to apply narrowly to specific targets, and ex post facto laws are proscribed by the U.S. Constitution. There will always be occasions for violations of the letter or spirit of the Constitution, and the occasion that launched HB 5473 was particularly horrendous. A doctor who had practiced out of St. Francis Hospital in Hartford was accused of having molested young children in the 1960s. His deeds came to light when the wall of a house in which the doctor had lived, then under reconstruction, was torn down and a cache of pictures and films of young children ...

No doubt about it, the antics of the co-chairmen of the Judiciary Committee, Rep. Michael Lawlor and Sen. Andrew McDonald, are enough to drive a saint to drink or, at the very least, to intemperate language. Radio host and blogger Hal Turner clearly went over the edge when he said about the two, "It is our intent to foment direct action against these individuals personally. These beastly government officials should be made an example of as a warning to others in government: Obey the Constitution or die." Exclamation point! "Or die?" a Hartford paper remarks in an editorial. "Turner defends his passionate beliefs not with a copy of the Constitution, but with the promise of ‘bullets.’” “That would be wrong at any time, but especially now, when hate speech, mostly from the far right, and incitements to violence are so prevalent.” To these reasonable objections, one can only reply "Here, here" -- and then proceed to quibble with some minor reservations. T...

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.

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...

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...

The state Judiciary Committee, headed by co-chairs Andrew McDonald and Michael Lawlor, seems to be unwilling or unable to accommodate religious proscriptions. The panel recently rejected an amendment to a technical bill drafted to reshape laws allowing court-ordered same sex marriages. The amendment to the enabling legislation, offered by Democratic Rep. Bruce Morris, would have insured that religious organizations would not be forced by law to participate in activities prohibited by some churches. While the enabling legislation passed the committee on a 30-10 vote, the amendment that, according to one news account , would have “specified that organizations affiliated with religious groups wouldn’t be compelled to take actions that contradicted their religious convictions” was defeated by the Judiciary Committee. A few weeks ago, the panel put forth a bill that would have reformed the apostolic nature of the Catholic Church. The two co-chairmen of the Judiciary Committee, both of whom ...

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...

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...

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 ...

Connecticut has a new Victims Advocate in the person of Garvin Ambrose, formerly a prosecutor and political operative in Cook County, Illinois. Chicago, murder capital if the United States, falls in the middle of Cook County facing windswept Lake Michigan, arguably the most politically corrupt county in the United States.   There was nothing wrong with the state’s previous Victims Advocate, Michele Cruz, whose job was put on the sale block after she had strenuously – and, more importantly for media conscious Governor Dannel Malloy and his Malloyalists, publically – opposed the state’s new early prisoner release program,   the brainchild of undersecretary for criminal justice policy Mike Lawlor. Both Mr. Malloy and Mr. Lawlor were prosecutors before they began to dabble in politics.

In 2012, the Democrat majority in the General Assembly abolished Connecticut’s death penalty while leaving the penalty operative for the 11 convicted murderers on death row, thus demolishing all their moral arguments against capital punishment. If the death penalty is cruel, unusual and morally indefensible, would it not be doubly inappropriate for convicted death row inmates? Hours before the bill was passed, this writer remarked : “The inevitable passage of the bill will unleash a flood of appeals that will at a minimum further delay the executions of Connecticut’s 11 death row inmates. It is almost certain that at some point in the future a Democratic dominated legislature supported by a Democratic governor, all of whom will have been instrumental in abolishing the death penalty, would be morally derelict in resisting the commutation of the death sentences of the 11 prisoners now awaiting execution on death row. The death penalty having been abolished for prospectiv...

The Malloyalist tree has lost some leaves along the way as the governor approaches the end of his first term in office. The latest to depart is senior advisor Roy Occhiogrosso, said to be Governor Dannel Malloy’s “ closest confidant.” Mr. Occhiogrosso’s own reaction to his departure was uncharacteristically understated, almost blasé: “I personally think people tend to stay in these jobs too long some times. I had a great time. It's time to do something else." Sometime last January, Mr. Malloy opened the exit door a crack. He told his staff that those who did not want to remain with him as he served out the next two years of his term in office should leave then, but Mr. Occhigrosso agreed to remain for yet another year.