The trouble with voting on a measure that may later on require
you to impose a tax to pay for the measure or, if you are striving to maintain
current spending levels, cut spending to the deserving poor is that voters may
notice the vote. During a campaign, your opponent may bring up your vote to
discredit you. Here in Connecticut, voters have become mighty touchy about multiple
tax increases and cuts to the deserving poor that are now necessary to balance chronically
out of balance budgets.
There is, however, a way to wrap yourself in a cloak of
invisibility so the voting public may not be able to attach a legislator's name to legislative
assent or dissent.
On opening day of the new 2017 legislative session of the
General Assembly, the House voted to elect Representative Joe Aresimowicz
Speaker -- by acclamation,
which makes it impossible for anyone, voters or the media, to know with any
degree of certainty which legislators approved or disapproved of Mr. Aresimowicz’s elevation to the speaker’s
position. Legislators who might have wished to register on record their
disapproval were not permitted to speak against putting a longtime union member
in a gate-keeper position that may frustrate or kill measures displeasing to
unions. Prior to Mr. Aresimowicz’s
elevation to the speaker’s position by acclamation, the state ethics committee
had ruled that it is not illegal – though it may be unethical – to put a union fox in charge of a legislative hen-house.
Mr. Aresimowicz’s unopposable elevation to a key position in
the General Assembly was followed by a measure introduced by Vincent Candelora,
R-North Branford, that would have stripped a cloak of invisibility from
legislators averse to democracy. Had it passed, the measure supported by
Republicans would have assured legislative vote transparency on the approval of
union contracts and pension reform.
One would assume Democrats might eagerly favor a measure requiring
the General Assembly to vote openly on such issues – especially since Governor
Dannel Malloy insisted during his first campaign that his would be an open
government that did not rely on subterfuge in fashioning budgets.
Prior governors and legislators were not above raiding so
called “dedicated funds” to balance budgets. Those days were over, candidate
for governor Malloy announced. There would be no budget trickery under a
straight-shooting Malloy administration. In due course, a lock-box was created
to gradually pay down debt that arose from poorly conceived past contract negotiations
between Mr. Malloy’s predecessors, mostly Republican governors – Governor Lowell
Weicker, the father of Connecticut’s income tax, was neither Republican fish
nor Democratic fowl -- and too union-friendly legislators, mostly Democrats.
In the pre-Malloy era, prior governors and legislatures had
engaged in some pretty tricky maneuvers to balance on paper budgets that were
in fact not balanced at all. It had been common practice, for instance, to move
debt from unbalanced budgets to the future in order to achieve a precarious, momentary
balance that would indicate to voters that the General Assembly had balanced a
budget. The current Malloy budget moves pension debt forward to taxpayers yet
unborn in order to escape the punishing payments that must be made to satisfy
past commitments made in past union contracts.
Operating on the unexceptional proposition that Connecticut
legislators should vote up or down on
every dollar appropriated in taxes by the General Assembly, Republicans proposed
on opening day of the 2017 legislative session that the state should
discontinue a practice of long standing
that union contracts are deemed approved without a vote in the General Assembly
if “within 30 days of their filing with the House and Senate clerk, they have
not been rejected by either chamber,” according to a piece in CTMirror.
This pass-through of union contracts not affirmed by a vote
in the General Assembly is essentially undemocratic. The General Assembly is by
constitutional prescription the body in charge of collecting and expending tax receipts.
A decent respect for the citizens from whom taxes are collected requires an
open and public vote on every dollar expended, so that
citizens will know which legislators approve tax increases or spending
reductions and – VERY IMPORTANT – therefore will be able to exercise their
democratic responsibilities by voting such representatives in or out in general
elections. This is, we’ve been told from time immemorial, how democracy works:
If you like your legislator’s votes, you can vote your legislator in; if you do
not like your legislator’s votes, you can vote your legislator out. But this can only be done when the votes of
particular legislators are attached openly and honestly to specific measures.
Cloaks of invisibility should have no place in representative government.
Mr. Candelora said
he had introduced his measure because at present “The legislature really
doesn’t get an opportunity to scrutinize contracts.” Democrats, according to
CTMirror, “counter that Connecticut has more than a dozen bargaining units in
the Executive Branch alone, and that requiring a vote on all of their
respective contracts would provide lots of ammunition that political opponents
could use to distort a legislator’s position on salaries.”
The Republican measure was not approved by acclamation. Mr. Aresimowicz,
whose elevation as speaker of the house was approved by acclamation, was, according
to the CTMirror report, “noncommittal." The new speaker said, "We’re not sure on the exact language.
We’ll evaluate it when it comes forward, and the members will vote their will.”
If, indeed, they will be permitted to vote on the measure by House Speaker Aresimowicz, part of whose responsibility involves steering measures to
appropriate committees so that democracy and the will of the people may be
better served by the servants of the people.
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