U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal is not just your run of the mill
senator. Mr. Blumenthal entered the U.S. Senate a little over three years ago
after having spent twenty one years as Connecticut’s Attorney General.
The new Senator has had some difficulty shedding his
attorney general’s skin. Some critics in
Connecticut – there are not many – occasionally refer to him teasingly as the
nation’s first consumer protection congressman.
As Attorney General of Connecticut, Mr. Blumenthal often
seemed to be a consumer protection firebrand armed with subpoena power. The
statutory obligations of the Attorney General’s Office have little to do with
suits brought on behalf of consumers such as Big Tobacco. The Connecticut
Attorney General is charged principally with representing Connecticut in legal
matters involving state agencies, duties and responsibilities of the office that
are detailed in the Connecticut General Statutes, Section 3-125 as follows:
“The Attorney General shall have
general supervision over all legal matters in which the state is an interested
party, except those legal matters over which prosecuting officers have
direction. He shall appear for the state, the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor,
the Secretary, the Treasurer and the Comptroller, and for all heads of
departments and state boards, commissioners, agents, inspectors, committees,
auditors, chemists, directors, harbor masters, and institutions and for the
State Librarian in all suits and other civil proceedings, except upon criminal
recognizances and bail bonds, in which the state is a party or is interested,
or in which the official acts and doings of said officers are called in
question, and for all members of the state House of Representatives and the
state Senate in all suits and other civil proceedings brought against them
involving their official acts and doings in the discharge of their duties.”
The transformation of the Attorney General’s office,
engineered by Senators Lieberman and Blumenthal, from a sleepy constitutional
operation representing state agencies in legal matters into a big-bite consumer
protection watchdog, cast considerable glitter on both politicians. The
lionization of the attorney general as the “people’s lawyer,” which began with
Mr. Lieberman, became embarrassingly cloying during Mr. Blumenthal’s long and
much publicized reign; so much so that it was often said of the ambitious
Blumenthal that the most dangerous spot in Connecticut was between the attorney
general and a television camera. Both former Attorneys General successfully
launched their senate careers from their publicity rich springboard.
When Mr. Blumenthal joined the U.S. Congress as
Connecticut’s “senior senator,” the tug of his former shtick proved
irresistible. Most recently, Mr. Blumenthal has turned his efforts toward the
regulation of electronic cigarettes. E-Cigs, as they are sometimes called, are
non-carcinogenic, nicotine injection systems. Unlike real cigarettes, they are
neither heavily taxed nor heavily regulated, and the electronic variant has
moved many cigarette smokers away from a medically costly, often demonized
product. To the extent that E-Cigs have weaned cigarette smokers off the weed,
the unregulated product also has reduced federal and state revenue. Mr.
Blumenthal’s intervention will for this reason be welcomed by tax gobbling
legislators. Revenues lost from a product widely denounced as cancer causing
must be replaced somehow: Why not tax E-Cigs as if they were coffin nails –
even if they are not?
Ideally, one wants an official moving from the Attorney
General’s office into the U.S. Senate to carry with him into his new position
all his previous virtues, while leaving behind his grosser vices.
As a U.S. Senator with more than twenty years investigatory
and prosecutorial experience, Mr. Blumenthal certainly is better able than
other senators to defend the honor of the Congress when persons summoned by the
U.S. House to offer testimony either mislead or deny to investigation
committees the data congressmen need to discharge their responsibilities.
Which brings us to Lois Lerner, the head honcho of the
Internal Revenue Service (IRS) at a time when the IRS was effectively
preventing conservative groups from exercising their constitutional rights to
assemble for the purpose of engaging in political activity by subjecting such
groups to extraordinary scrutiny.
Called upon by a congressional committee to give needed
testimony, Ms. Lerner pronounced herself innocent of any wrongdoing and then,
on the advice of counsel, proceeded to take the 5th, thus denying
Congress the data it needed to accomplish the committee’s purposes and
violating both the spirit and the letter of the 5th amendment, which
does not allow testifiers to both proclaim their innocence and refuse to
disgorge testimony on the grounds that doing so would tend to incriminate them.
After the IRS Inspector General reported that the once
impartial Internal Revenue Service had targeted 248 conservative Tea Party
organizations for extra scrutiny, Mr. Blumenthal issued a ritualistic
denunciation of the agency, but he has been mum ever since, an unusual posture for the media-seeking Blumenthal. One can only imagine the rhetoric that would
have flowed from Attorney General Blumenthal had any witness he summoned for
interrogation publically announced their innocence of wrongdoing and then
retreated behind the 5th amendment.
When Mr. Blumenthal was given an opportunity to vote in
favor of an amendment that would have declared it “unlawful for any officer of
the Internal Revenue Service to, regardless of whether the officer or employee
is acting under the color of law, willfully act with the intent to injure,
oppress, threaten, intimidate or single out and subject to undue scrutiny for
purposes of harassment any person or organization of any state – (1) based
solely or primarily on the political, economic or social positions held or
expressed by the person or organization; or 2) because the person or
organization has expressed a particular political, economic, or social position
using any words of writing allowed by law” the senator’s starched scruples gave
way, and he voted, along with eight other Democratic Senators, none of whom
were up for election in 2014, to kill the amendment.
In any contest between scruples and party loyalty, the usual
congressman would not hesitate to bury his scruples. Mr. Blumenthal, it was
sometimes thought, was above party flackdom.
Not anymore.
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