Skip to main content

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.”

 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Blumenthal Burisma Connection

Steve Hilton , a Fox News commentator who over the weekend had connected some Burisma corruption dots, had this to say about Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s association with the tangled knot of corruption in Ukraine: “We cross-referenced the Senate co-sponsors of Ed Markey's Ukraine gas bill with the list of Democrats whom Burisma lobbyist, David Leiter, routinely gave money to and found another one -- one of the most sanctimonious of them all, actually -- Sen. Richard Blumenthal."

Obamagod!

My guess is that Barack Obama is a bit too modest to consider himself a Christ figure , but artist will be artists. And over at “ To Wit ,” a blog run by professional blogger, journalist, radio commentator and ex-Hartford Courant religious writer Colin McEnroe, chocolateers will be chocolateers. Nice to have all this attention paid to Christ so near to Easter.

Did Chris Murphy Engage in Private Diplomacy?

Murphy after Zarif blowup -- Getty Images Connecticut U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, up for reelection this year, had “a secret meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif during the Munich Security Conference” in February 2020, according to a posting written by Mollie Hemingway , the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. Was Murphy commissioned by proper authorities to participate in the meeting, or was he freelancing? If the former, there is no problem. If the latter, Murphy was courting political disaster. “Such a meeting,” Hemingway wrote at the time, “would mean Murphy had done the type of secret coordination with foreign leaders to potentially undermine the U.S. government that he accused Trump officials of doing as they prepared for Trump’s administration. In February 2017, Murphy demanded investigations of National Security Advisor Mike Flynn because he had a phone call with his counterpart-to-be in Russia. “’Any effort to undermine our nation’s foreign policy – e