Brownson Orestes Brownson, (1803-1876), went through the political and religious enthusiasms of his day like a hot knife through butter. His forward motion progress came to an abrupt halt when, friendless afterwards, he formerly joined the Catholic Church. Some scholars theorize that Brownson was in his day America’s Cardinal John Henry Newman, author of The Development of Christian Doctrine and principally responsible, after his own conversion to Catholicism, for founding the influential Oxford Movement in Western Europe. During one of his intellectual meanderings from atheism, through Transcendentalism, to what Hilaire Belloc later would call The Path to Rome, Brownson, the author of The American Republic , would insist that throughout history there were only two political parties: the party of stasis, and the party of forward movement, falsely identified by our current neo-progressives as progressivism. Brownson’s observation remains true today. But how does one...
Lamont The recently proposed omnibus emergency certification bill -- a catch basin for previous legislative measures that had been presented to Connecticut’s General Assembly and, for one reason or another, had not passed muster – has been modified by Governor Ned Lamont’s veto and intervention. No Democrat legislator protested the original measure on process grounds, and the most important question – “Who benefits by stuffing parts of unpassed bills into an omnibus emergency measure?”—was never answered, because the question was never asked. The short answer to this question is, as might be expected – tax thirsty single-party partisan Democrats benefit. Their emergency omnibus bill allows Connecticut’s ruling Democrat Party to skirt normative processes, and it creates one measure from many separate pieces that may be voted into law without confronting the usual inconveniences: public hearings; debates in various relevant committees; legislative process barrie...