“A budget deal that closely resembles the 2011 budget agreement,”
will be good for what ails Connecticut, said Martin Looney, the President Pro
Tem in the Connecticut Senate, according to an NBC Connecticut story.
“A budget deal that closely resembles the 2011 budget agreement might be needed
in 2017,” said Mr. Looney.
What ails Connecticut is excessive spending, pretty much
everyone in the state now agrees – even Governor Dannel Malloy, who is
responsible for both the largest and the second largest tax increases in state
history. The first of Mr. Malloy’s tax increases was a not inconsiderable part
of the 2011 budget deal that Mr. Looney would apply as a curative to
Connecticut’s continuing ailments. Connecticut’s three major tax increases, the
first promulgated during the administration of Governor Lowell Weicker, father
of Connecticut’s income tax, served as political balm to union friendly
governors and legislators. The tax increases relieved politicians of the
necessity of making permanent cuts in spending which, to no one’s surprise, has
increased in tandem with the tax increases. The two go together like the
proverbial horse and carriage. So long as Connecticut’s budget carriage carried
surpluses, the road was straight and carefree.
Mr. Looney does not mention that the 2011 budget agreement
was an arrangement concocted between Mr. Malloy, the unions whose contracts he
was affirming, and progressive, tax happy Democrat legislators in the General
Assembly – but not Republican legislators, who were pretty much told by
Democrats to go take a hike.
During this period Brendan Sharkey served as House Speaker
and Don William served as President Pro Tem of the Senate; both have since left
the General Assembly. Mr. Looney has assumed the Senate President position, and
Joe Aresimowicz, education coordinator with AFSCME,
an influential public-employee union, is now House Speaker. When all the
confabbing had ended, no Republican fingerprints were found on the final budget
products. Politically, the Malloy/Sharkey/Williams/SEBAC budgets proved to be
poison pills for Democrats. Owning the gubernatorial office for the first time
since 1991 and having dominated the General Assembly for a half century,
Democrats owned their product, and their budgets gave way to repetitive
deficits, business flight and the economic degradation of Connecticut, which
has yet to fully recover jobs lost in a recession that officially ended more
than seven years ago. The tax increases likely prolonged Connecticut’s recovery
from the recession and signaled to businesses in and out of state that
Connecticut -- chronically unable to control spending and employee union
pensions, salaries and benefits – was no longer prime real estate for business
expansion.
Nor has Mr. Looney acknowledged that the General Assembly in
2011 abdicated its fiduciary responsibilities by bestowing on Mr. Malloy what
amounted to a plenipotentiary power to readjust a budget AFTER had been
approved without resubmitting it to the legislature for final approval.
“During his first term in office,” Connecticut Commentary noted,
“the General Assembly granted to Mr. Malloy what Chris Powell, the Managing
Editor of the Journal Inquirer, called a ‘plenipotentiary power’ to negotiate contracts with unions,
Connecticut’s fourth branch of government, represented by SEBAC.
In essence, the cowardly Democratic dominated General Assembly approved a
preliminary budget, permitted the Governor to revise long-term contracts with
unions that materially affected the bottom line of the approved budget and,
crucially and fatally, the General Assembly did not, as it is constitutionally
obliged to do, approve and sanction the final budget-busting product of the
secret negotiations. In other words, the cowardly and duty-fleeing General
Assembly simply transferred to Mr. Malloy its own imprescriptible
constitutional powers, after Mr. Malloy told Democratic leaders in the General
Assembly he would take the pre-election political bullet for them.”
Legislative changes in the General Assembly – Republicans have
made major gains in the House and the Senate is evenly balanced for the first
time in decades – along with Mr. Malloy’s abysmally low approval ratings should
signal to Democrat leaders that it ain’t 2011 no more.
A study undertaken by the Yankee Institute points to a “stark difference between Connecticut’s labor laws and that of 46
other states.” Pension funding in Connecticut is not governed by statute but by
contract negotiations hammered out in back rooms between its governor and labor
union leaders. To put it plainly, leaders in the General Assembly like Mr.
Looney – they are legion – have abdicated their fiduciary responsibilities to unelected
union representatives. While it is true that the legislature may vote down such
agreements, this seldom happens because there is a coward’s clause in the
statute that allows such agreements to take effect if the General Assembly does
not vote on the redrafted contractual agreements within 30 days. These statutory
provisions should be repealed, and state government should reclaim control over
its budgets by a statutory re-design that would replicate provisions operative
in 46 other states.
If the state budget were controlled by statutory law rather
than contractual law, necessary adjustments in budgets could more quickly and efficiently be determined by
legislators rather than judges, and deficits could be discharged by a General Assembly
that is not a maid-servant to powerful state employee unions. The change would
restore a supremacy in budget negotiations insisted upon by Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, no enemy to unions.
Roosevelt refused to allow public employees to unionize at
all because, he said, “The very nature and purposes of Government make it
impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the
employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations… The
employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws
enacted by their representatives in Congress (emphasis mine).
Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and
guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies,
procedures, or rules in personnel matters."
The laws enacted by the people’s representatives in
Connecticut would have much greater force if they were changed to allow the
state to adjust budgets through statutory authorization rather than through
negotiated long term changes in contracts. And if Mr. Looney and other
Democrats in the General Assembly appreciated the “nature and purposes of
Government” as understood by FDR, they would make these necessary statutory
changes to reclaim budgetary authority from THEIR employees.
But they won’t -- because the cowards in the General Assembly are afraid to govern.
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