Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Mark Pazniokas of CTMirror notes in a recent story -- Larson lost to a younger challenger. Could Blumenthal face a similar test? – that U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal is getting on in years. The seventh oldest U.S. Senator, Blumenthal is now 80 and, Pazniokas reminds us, other Democrat political anchorites have recently lost elections in primaries to a new generation of politicians weary of patiently waiting their turn in the political queue.   “Blumenthal is up for reelection in 2028 when he will be 82,” Pazniokas tells us. “He hasn’t confirmed what he’ll do in two years, but he said he’s taking the steps to prepare for another campaign — in the event he runs again.”   “Taking the steps” involves taking in political contributions for an, as yet, unannounced senatorial campaign. This may be politically expedient, and it is perfectly legal, but some political pecksniffs tell us that the practice is immoral, little more than a clever deception. Democrats in politic...

  Roger Sherman Roger Sherman, students of American History will know, was a Connecticut patriot, the only Founding Father of the United States to have signed all four major U.S. founding documents.   Sherman served in the Connecticut House of Representatives. He was a justice of the Superior Court of Connecticut and a treasurer of Yale College. An early supporter of American independence, he represented Connecticut in the Continental Congress, where he signed the Declaration of Independence and helped draft the Articles of Confederation.   Sherman is best known, even among journalists who have not cracked a book on the American founding since their college years, as the author of “The Connecticut Compromise.” The Constitutional Convention was hopelessly deadlocked on a question that had bedeviled patriots since the Roman Republic had been crushed first by Caesar and later by barbarian hoards from the north: In a true Republic, who should decide what should be d...

Not everyone in Connecticut is content with a new bill -- HB 5001, signed into law by Governor Ned Lamont last May -- that prohibits, according to Livi Stanford of the Hartford Courant , “law enforcement from being within 250 feet of an election site without permission from state election officials, except in specific narrow exceptions.”   The new law, we are told, “is causing frustration among some police chiefs and lawmakers. Non-compliance with the law is now classified as a Class C felony.” The bill was approved, according to Stanford, “in a straight party line vote with no Republicans voting for the bill.”   Rep. Greg Howard, a Stonington Republican who opposed the bill said, “This is a direct shot at law enforcement officers. It’s a direct effect on the municipality because it creates a real problem for police officers to do their job in these locations. Departments across Connecticut can’t fill their ranks, and   some police officials strenuously objected t...

L'État, c'est moi (English:"I am the state") – attributed to King Louis XIV   Some Democrats are beginning to pin the Socialist tail on the donkey. Democrat Party fixture James Carville has threatened to leave the party if it does not soon begin to organize an effective resistance to a rampant socialism. “ Hasan Piker and James Carville are not going to be in the same political party,” Carville fumed recently. “One of us is going to leave. It might even be me. If he becomes a voice in the Democratic Party, I’m out. I have no intention of ever being in the same political party with that guy.” Democrat U.S. Senator John Fetterman, who appears increasingly to be a party of one, has publicaly protested the American Democratic Socialists (ADA) as a threat to democracy. The party’s official manifesto warmly embraces such eventualities as open borders, the abolition of the US Senate, the popular election of US Supreme Court Justices. One hopes, perhaps in vain, that...

Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal has blackened U.S. Senator Rand Paul with an imputed charge of McCarthyism.   Katherine Pugh, a reporter for Just the News , writes:   “A Democratic senator accused the GOP committee chair of employing similar tactics to former Sen. Joseph McCarthy, known for leading aggressive anti-communist investigations, at a contentious hearing with former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci on Tuesday … Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., cited two X posts by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., from December of 2024 and 2025 that were mentioned in a statement by Fauci's attorney, David Schertler, after being thrown out of the Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing for trying to make a statement as his client repeatedly invoked the 5th Amendment to avoid answering questions … Paul's posts read: ‘the power of some of us must be used for good, like putting Fauci in jail,’ and ‘I want to give him a subpoena and a ...

An attempt by Connecticut state government to stick the nose of a regulatory camel into the state’s home schooling tent has been vigorously resisted for months by hundreds of homeschooling parents in open hearings -- to no avail. The Democrat dominated General Assembly – no doubt with the connivance of politically powerful educational union heads – successfully fashioned a bill, PA 26-37, that allows the regulation of homeschooling in Connecticut.   Livy Stanford of the Hartford Courant reported on July 23, “The nation's largest homeschool advocacy organization is calling on the U.S. Department of Education to investigate a new state law that provides oversight of homeschooling families, alleging that it violates the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, protecting the privacy of student education records ... Will Estrada, senior counsel at the Home School Legal Defense Association, told the Courant … ‘There's not a single state in the nation that says before ...