Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The cunning, canned response issuing from the seven Democratic members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation is:  The Obama/Kerry/Khamenei deal may be flawed, but there is no better alternative. The acknowledgment of “flaws” in the deal concocted by President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and Supreme Leader of Iran Ali Khamenei, the ostensible purpose of which is to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear device, is a campaign breastplate. No one among Connecticut’s all Democratic U.S.Congressional Delegation   has unreservedly embraced the “flawed” deal. Never-the-less, they will vote for the deal, flaws and all, for the greater glory of their President and party. Among lockstep Democrats in the Northeast, Senator Schumer of New York stands out as a notable exception. If the deal should in the future give birth to horrific consequences, those now voting for it may always point to their breastplate reservations.

Apart from being friendly to each other in the past, what do Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic Party presidential candidate, and Donald Trump, Hillary’s counterpart in the Republican Party, have in common? Both are leading in the polls, and both are flawed candidates; Mr. Trump because he’s a shallow thinker, however entertaining, and Mrs. Clinton because both her distant and recent past are pockmarked with irregularities.

Early in February, the faculty of Connecticut’s four state universities – Connecticut Central State University (CCSU), Eastern Connecticut State University (ECSU), Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) and Western Connecticut State University (WCSU) – wrote a letter to the relevant chairs and co-chairs of the General Assembly’s education committees critical of Gregory Gray’s attempt by pedagogical fiat to “change the way we teach and deliver education to our students.” Mr. Gray is the President of Connecticut’s State University system. “Many education pundits,” the educators wrote, “now suggest the teacher is no longer the center of learning, and that students learn more from one another than from the faculty. . .this re-alignment means faculty must become ‘facilitators’ of learning. It's imperative that WE. . .[change] our pedagogical approach immediately.”

“I don't give reasons. I give orders!” -- Captain Ahab, Moby Dick It seems only yesterday that Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey was threatening to hold a net on the borders of Connecticut and catch companies as they fled a tax prone Democratic Governor and majority Democrats in the state’s General Assembly. Governor Malloy derided the notion. Christie, a blustery Republican, was an easy punching bag. Not so Governor Andrew Cuomo, who recently met with CEO of General Electric Jeff Immelt to discuss moving GE business from Connecticut to New York.

In 2012, the Democrat majority in the General Assembly abolished Connecticut’s death penalty while leaving the penalty operative for the 11 convicted murderers on death row, thus demolishing all their moral arguments against capital punishment. If the death penalty is cruel, unusual and morally indefensible, would it not be doubly inappropriate for convicted death row inmates? Hours before the bill was passed, this writer remarked : “The inevitable passage of the bill will unleash a flood of appeals that will at a minimum further delay the executions of Connecticut’s 11 death row inmates. It is almost certain that at some point in the future a Democratic dominated legislature supported by a Democratic governor, all of whom will have been instrumental in abolishing the death penalty, would be morally derelict in resisting the commutation of the death sentences of the 11 prisoners now awaiting execution on death row. The death penalty having been abolished for prospectiv...

“Abortion rights” – which is to say unrestricted abortion – figures prominently in U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s utopia. A bill introduced by Mr. Blumenthal, The  Women’s Health Protection Act of 2013, would affirm unrestricted abortion by making it impossible for states to regulate abortion providers, chiefly Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the United States. To Blumenthal watchers, a bill preventing various actors in the abortion drama, including states and the federal government, from propounding any rules governing abortion at any stage of the birth process for any reason would seem to be out of character for Mr. Blumenthal, who spent much of his two decades as Attorney General in Connecticut suing businesses for having violated regulations while proposing bills to Connecticut’s General Assembly that would further hobble a Connecticut economy already gagging on needless regulations.

As New York Senator Chuck Schumer goes, so goes… Blumenthal? Mr. Schumer’s forceful decision not to approve the Iran/Putin/Obama deal has been called a “break in the dike.” Democrats in the recent past have tended to march in lockstep with President Barack Obama. Mr. Schumer is a threatening crack in Democratic foreign policy obduracy. It is just through such cracks in the political asphalt, said Alexander Solzhenitsyn, that lonely flowers bloom.

Many Trump critics, most scornfully Kevin Williamson in National Review, find Donald Trump abhorrent because he is a Republican In Name Only (RINO). Mr. Trump seems to gravitate between the parties as circumstances dictate. Mr. Williamson notes  that Mr. Trump is “a tax-happy crony capitalist who is hostile to free trade but very enthusiastic about using state violence to homejack private citizens — he backed the Kelo decision '100 percent' and has tried to use eminent domain in the service of his own empire of vulgarity — and generally has about as much command of the issues as the average sophomore at a not especially good college, which is what he was (sorry, Fordham) until his family connections got him into Penn.”

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth” – George Orwell, 1984 The “constant sniping and cherry-picking bad news from the good” has given Connecticut Speaker of the House of Representatives Brendan Sharkey heart palpitations. In a Hartford Courant column , Mr. Sharkey writes: “Rather than attempt to establish themselves as credible participants in our state's democratic process, the Republicans will say or do anything in an attempt to gain a political advantage, no matter how harsh or misleading, and without regard to the negative effects their behavior has on Connecticut's economy or its future.

Hartford, Connecticut’s capital city, has been a one-horse town since 1971, when the last Republican Mayor, Ann Uccello, was recruited by then President Richard Nixon to serve in the U.S. Department of Transportation. Since that time, more than 44 years, Hartford has languished in the grip of the Democratic Party hegemon. Hegemony always has and always will produce aberrant and corrupt government, largely because in one-party systems there are no political checks and balances, the administrative state is captive to an easily manipulable single party, and there are fewer eyes looking through the windows.