The senators and congresspersons in Connecticut’s all-Democratic
U.S. Congressional Delegation have bigger fish to fry. In the post-Sandy Hook
period, U.S. Senators Murphy and Blumenthal are consumed with preventing the
National Rifle Association (NRA) from unduly influencing the U.S. Congress. They are
far less interested in preventing state employee unions from unduly influencing
Connecticut’s General Assembly.
Others have been elected to guard and oversee Connecticut’s
castle. The members of the state’s U.S. Congressional Delegation have larger
and, dare it be said? – more important responsibilities. This rigidly observed
division of labor rule is waved somewhat during elections, when national
politicians return home, full of vim and vigor, to take credit, like
Chanticleer, for the rising and setting of the sun. Though Connecticut’s
economy is chugging along in last place, the national economy likely will
improve under the stewardship – Senators Chuck Schumer and House Minority
Leader Nancy Pelosi permitting – of a resurgent GOP, which in the recently
concluded elections captured the White
House and held in its grip both Houses of Congress. Caught between a rock, an
irreducible progressive resurgence led by Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders and
Wall Street scourge Elizabeth Warren, and a hard place, any rational defense of
moderation among Democrats becomes a lonely and thankless pursuit. Mrs. Pelosi, who occasionally finds it necessary
to defend capitalism against new-wave progressives, is now being challenged by anti-capitalists
smitten with the Bernie bug.
In February 2017, the Observer reports, Mrs. Pelosi “revealed her disdain
for progressives, telling a millennial Sanders' supporter who asked if
the Democratic Party would embrace Sanders’ populist message: ‘Well,
I thank you for your question, but I have to say we’re capitalists—that’s just
the way it is.’ Pelosi then embarked on a tone-deaf rant, arguing that the
solution was to make billionaires and millionaires more
empathetic. ‘We have to change the thinking of people,’ she said. ‘The
free market is a place that can do good things.’”
Progressives to Pelosi: Surrender or be besieged. Moderation
in the pursuit of progressivism is no virtue; extremism in the pursuit of
progressivism is no vice. And never mind that the progressive-socialist
experiments in both Venezuela and Connecticut have conspicuously failed. Under
a socialist regime, Venezuela has run out of toilet paper; and in Connecticut,
under a progressive regime, Mr. Malloy has run out of revenue resources – save
for some hedge fund millionaires huddled together in Connecticut’s shrinking
“Gold Coast,” whose assets progressives in the General Assembly wish to
appropriate, the better to lubricate special interests that reflexively vote
Democrat. So plundered, these revenue resources in time will become rare as
toilet paper and opposition parties in Venezuela. Even Mr. Malloy, the most
progressive state governor since Wilbur Cross, fears that excessive taxation
might throw HIS hedge fund managers into the arms of Democratic Governor Andrew
Cuomo of New York or Republican Governor Charlie Baker of Massachusetts.
As the feeder streams of Connecticut’s revenue river
continue to diminish – the state’s biennial deficit is now approaching (please
sit down) $5 billion – the concerns of Mr. Murphy and Mr. Blumenthal seem even
more remote from the cares and distresses of their belabored constituents.
The political lives of Connecticut's seven Congressional
Delegation Democrats float like transcendent clouds of unknowing above such parochial
state concerns as rising deficits. There are five states that separate
Connecticut from the Washington Beltway, buffer enough – and moats are
everywhere. The largest moat is a political convention, now a tradition,
according to which partisan members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional
Delegation are reluctant to comment on the trials and tribulations in their
home states.
If President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines rather than Mr. Malloy were the
Democratic governor of Connecticut, no commentator in the state would dare
approach Mr. Murphy or Mr. Blumenthal with a question concerning Mr. Duterte penchant
for cannibalism from fear the governor, in retaliation, would eat their livers.
Mr. Malloy is a lame duck, not Hannibal Duarte. And in the case of Connecticut’s
U.S. Congressional Delegation, nothing stands between the state’s media and a cleansing
interrogatory but a paper thin and pointless tradition.
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