Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The good news is that State Senator Gary Winfield’s bill eliminating qualified immunity for all police departments across the state is not due to go into effect until July 2021, well past election day this coming November. The bad news is that the predictable consequences of the bill – a decrease in police recruitment, an increase in retirements, and an increase in insurance premiums paid by municipalities – will arrive much before July 2021.It is not only ideas that have consequences; policies produce consequences as well. And bad policies produce bad consequences. The consequences of state policies fall, like the gentle rain, on the just and the unjust, on the poor and the rich. It is not likely that a wealthy, low crime community such as Greenwich, home to millionaire politicians such as Governor It has been suggested by progressive legislators that the likelihood of suits attending a withdrawal of partial immunity is a scare tactic deployed by Trump loving Republicans who are 1) p…

After George Floyd was murdered by a police officer -- while other officers placidly watched as the murder victim pleaded “I can’t breathe” and, six to eight minutes into his death spiral, desperately called out to his mother with nearly his last breath – there were, as might be expected, protests across the nation. In some cases legitimate protests were hijacked by ANTIFA and leftist pseudo-Marxists within the Black Lives Matter movement.One of the results of the roiling agitation is what is being called by most media in Connecticut “the new police reform bill,” the brain child of, among others, Gary Winfield, a Democrat State Senator representing Connecticut’s 10th District.Winfield is a talented politician who has managed to rack up several important wins, pun intended. Freshman senator Winfield was the lead sponsor of a bill abolishing the death penalty. The bill was vetoed by the governor, but the State Supreme Court years later pronounced the death penalty unconstitutional and i…

Push has now come to shove within the Lamont administration. Governor Ned Lamont has ordered superintendents across the state to open public schools in the fall. Teachers unions have presented the administration with several “requests” that bear all the earmarks of non-negotiable demands.A CTMirror piece, “The governor says it’s safe to reopen schools, but will teachers return?” ticks off some of the union demands: 1) teachers who must miss work owing to Coronavirus and who cannot work remotely will receive full pay and cannot be required to use vacation or leave time available to them; 2) classroom size must conform to CDC and state regulations. This requirement will force superintendents to put on more teachers, a costly prospect; 3) someone, likely school districts -- municipalities having become the trap gates of General Assembly detritus -- must provide teachers working remotely with a $50 per week allowance to cover costs; 3) Teachers, who apparently have problems walking and ch…

When you told your mother that you really ought to have a new bike because Tommy next door got one, your pragmatic mother, if she was at all like my mother, responded somewhat as follows:“If Tommy jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you follow him?”This response usually concluded the discussion, and it was unanswerable. You were not Tommy, and his circumstance, you were led to believe, were far plusher than your own. Discussion over. You would have to work, saving up your meager salary for a new bike, or perhaps fortune would smile on the family, a rich uncle would die – there were none – and he would favor the family and you in particular with a bike in his last will and testament.Governor Edward Miner Lamont Jr. – “Ned” to you – white-privileged and brought up in the lap of luxury, likely never had to face such narrow circumstances. Lamont’s gold-platted pedigree is widely available to all curious journalists in Wikipedia.He is the great-grandson of former J. P. Morgan & Co. C…

Following the lead of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont has now unveiled the sanctions he proposes to levy against what a Hartford Paper calls “defiant travelers.”We all know that where there are no sanctions, there is, practically speaking, no law. A law without teeth is a paper-law that easily can be defied, much in the way that ANTIFA-infected Black Lives Matter protests evolve into mini-riots, stretching limbs into every powder-keg urban community in the US – when defiant rioters meet no resistance from those who enforce constitutional laws written by legislators. Police enforce laws. Police are the enforcement arm of legislators rather than governors. Without an enforcement mechanism, all laws are dead laws. And that is why ANTIFA and elements within Black Lives Matter dearly want, with assistance from sympathetic legislators trolling for votes, to defund police departments. When police departments have been disabled, leftist anarchy sits on the thro…

I am taking breakfast in a diner in East Hartford, uncrowded on orders of Governor Ned Lamont. It is Monday, generally not a busy work day but, because of Coronavirus restrictions, far less crowded than usual.Business has suffered, here and in every other restaurant in Connecticut, because the governor has got it into his head that restaurant business should be reduced by half. This restriction has reduced profit-taking, and the halving of profits has led to a proportional decrease in staffing, and an increase in all overhead costs, such as rent. To be sure the rent cost has not changed, but the ability of the diner owner to pay the rent has been halved, on orders of the governor.We are not permitted to know how Lamont, operating in the absence of a legislature and a judiciary, both shuttered because of Coronavirus, reached his decision to cut in half the number of people usually serviced by restaurants across the state Why half, why not a third? Better still, why not allow capacity t…