Cloutless Connecticut

Seniority equals clout in the U.S. Congress. New senators and congressmen entering the portals of the U.S. Capitol are expected to be seen and not heard for their first year in office. Both Connecticut’s U.S. Senators are new arrivals.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, who appears to be having a problem shedding his past as Connecticut’s Attorney General and the state’s chief consumer advocate, has passed his first year blinking as the world slid by. After a couple of years in the Senate, he may now be prepared to open his beak and sing a song. Political watchers in Connecticut are hoping the melody will not be freighted with bills he wished he had been able to enact as attorney general. Connecticut’s senior senator, now that both Joe Lieberman and Chris Dodd have left the premises, has not favored his favorite newspapers back in Connecticut with his exhaustive opinions on a raft of recent nettlesome issues, including the destruction of the U.S. embassy in Benghazi and the murder of Libyan Ambassador Chris Stevens and other Americans, the growing U.S. deficit, the recent bombing by Israel of Hamas military emplacements in Gaza and other issues much in the media. Perhaps after his year of sequestration the state’s senior senator will be more forthcoming on, to mention just one sore pressure point, the economic collapse of Europe.

On the EuroZone dead zone, Reuters reports: “Those two quarters of contraction put the euro zone's 9.4 trillion euro ($12 trillion) economy back into recession, although Italy and Spain have been contracting for a year already and Greece is suffering an outright depression.”

Connecticut’s newest U.S. Senator, progressive Chris Murphy, maybe forced by protocol to bite his cloutless tongue for about a year; after that, the world will doubtless be his oyster.

Ron Schurin, a political science professor at the University of Connecticut, remarks in CTMirror:

“In the next Congress, the senior senator will be Democrat Richard Blumenthal, elected to the Senate only two years ago.

“And its junior senator, also a Democrat, will be Chris Murphy, who is newly elected to the Senate.

"’It's the least senior Senate delegation of any state,’ Schurin said.”

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