Skip to main content

Caruso Sings The Blues

At the end of the “do nothing” legislative session, Rep. Chris Caruso and Senator Diana Urban, the co-chairs of the Government Administration and Elections Committee, had a press conference the subject of which was ethics reform, but another senator, Edward Meyer, unexpectedly showed up, commandeered the microphone and rained on their propaganda parade.

“I want to state a different opinion,” Meyer said as reporters recorded the interruption of an otherwise placid media opportunity.

According to a report in the Journal Inquirer, “The Guilford lawmaker then charged his two House colleagues on the GAEC panel with producing a ‘watered down’ pension sanctions plan designed to shield unionized state employees, questioning their resolve to affect a linchpin of the Democratic base. ‘It looks self-serving,’ Meyer said. ‘It looks union-biased.’”

The king was stripped naked of his trappings and the two co-chairs of GAEC gasped with astonishment. Of course, it didn’t take Caruso long to recover the use of his tongue.

"That was just bush league," Caruso said. "I have never had a colleague do that."

A suitable punishment for Mayer’s bad taste in exercising his right to criticize Caruso in a public forum might be to deprive him of his parking space at the Capitol.

The two co-chairs of the GAEC panel had come together to resolve a difficulty caused mostly by Caruso. At first, Caruso had insisted that pension revocation for corrupt government officials should be made retroactive, the better to seize the ill gotten gains of former Gov. John Rowland, one among other government officials who actually did time for having used their offices corruptly for personal gain. Rowland -- along with former Mayor of Bridgeport Joe Ganim, child molester and former mayor of Waterbury Phil Giordano, the sweet talking state senator Ernie Newton, and a handful of others –spent some time in the clinker reflecting on their misdeeds.

Everybody who was anybody warned Caruso that retroactive punishments were unconstitutional. A law cannot be written to punish activities that were legal at the time they were performed: First comes the law defining a breach of legality, then follows the breach, then follows the punishment, except for the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, those who think laws were intended to punish pre-illegal rather than post-illegal acts – and Caruso.

Caruso relented on the point but soon drilled a hole in the ethics reform boat that for the moment sunk the bill.

On the Orwellian theory that all animals in the political barnyard are equal except the pigs -- who are more equal -- Caruso favored a system of pension revocation in which everyone but unionized employees of the state would have their pensions revoked upon the commission of an illegal act.

When the legislature reconvenes for a special session, it will restore an elapsing tax cut and once again consider ethics reform. Apart from increasing taxes, no one is betting much else will get done.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The PURA soap opera continues in Connecticut: Business eyeing the exit signs

The trouble at PURA and the two energy companies it oversees began – ages ago, it now seems – with the elevation of Marissa Gillett to the chairpersonship of Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulation Authority.   Connecticut Commentary has previously weighed in on the controversy: PURA Pulls The Plug on November 20, 2019; The High Cost of Energy, Three Strikes and You’re Out? on December 21, 2024; PURA Head Butts the Economic Marketplace on January 3, 2025; Lamont Surprised at Suit Brought Against PURA on February 3, 2025; and Lamont’s Pillow Talk on February 22, 2025:   The melodrama full of pratfalls continues to unfold awkwardly.   It should come as no surprise that Gillett has changed the nature and practice of the state agency. She has targeted two of Connecticut’s energy facilitators – Eversource and Avangrid -- as having in the past overcharged the state for services rendered. Thanks to the Democrat controlled General Assembly, Connecticut is no l...

The Murphy Thingy

It’s the New York Post, and so there are pictures. One shows Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy canoodling with “Courier Newsroom publisher Tara McGowan, 39, last Monday by the bar at the Red Hen, located just one mile north of Capitol Hill.”   The canoodle occurred one day or night prior to Murphy’s well-advertised absence from President Donald Trump’s recent Joint Address to Congress.   Murphy has said attendance at what was essentially a “campaign rally” involving the whole U.S. Congress – though Democrat congresspersons signaled their displeasure at the event by stonily sitting on their hands during the applause lines – was inconsistent with his dignity as a significant part of the permanent opposition to Trump.   Reaching for his moral Glock Murphy recently told the Hartford Courant that Democrat Party opposition to President Donald Trump should be unrelenting and unforgiving: “I think people won’t trust you if you run a campaign saying that if Donald Trump is ...

Lamont Surprised at Suit Brought Against PURA

Marissa P. Gillett, the state's chief utility regulator, watches Gov. Ned Lamont field questions about a new approach to regulation in April 2023. Credit: MARK PAZNIOKAS / CTMIRROR.ORG Concerning a suit brought by Eversource and Avangrid, Connecticut’s energy delivery agents, against Connecticut’s Public Utility Regulatory Agency (PURA), Governor Ned Lamont surprised most of the state’s political watchers by affecting surprise.   “Look,” Lamont told a Hartford Courant reporter shortly after the suit was filed, “I think it is incredibly unhelpful,” Lamont said. “Everyone is getting mad at the umpires.   Eversource is not getting everything they want and they are bringing suit. It was a surprise to me. Nobody notified me. I think we have to do a better job of working together.”   Lamont’s claim is far less plausible than the legal claim made by Eversource and Avangrid. The contretemps between Connecticut’s energy distributors and Marissa Gillett , Gov. Ned Lamont’s ...