Skip to main content

Government By Suit

Connecticut’s Attorney General's Office long ago overflowed its statutory and historic banks. The office, one of the oldest in the state, evolved from what had been known in the colonial period as the king’s lawyer. Leaving aside for the moment the recently accrued kingly powers of Governor Dannel Malloy – the inability of the Democrat dominated General Assembly to cobble together a budget within the prescribed time period has bestowed on Malloy plenary powers once associated with royalty – the Attorney General’s Office was, before the advent of Attorney General Joe Lieberman, a relatively modest affair.

“Under Connecticut General Statute 3-125,” The Connecticut Law Tribune tells us, “the Attorney General has the duty to appear for all constitutional officers and all heads of departments and State boards…in all suits and other civil proceedings…in which the official acts or doings of said officers are called in question.” In short, the office is supposed to represent the governor and state agencies in legal matters. Attorney General George Jepsen is still, to deploy a euphemism, the king’s lawyer – plus.

It is the plus that is disconcerting. The authorizing statute mentions nothing about suing Presidents.

“Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen” a recent Hartford Courant story advises, “has filed or joined a growing number of lawsuits against the Trump Administration. In just seven months, Connecticut has filed twice as many legal actions challenging federal agencies under President Donald Trump as it did during the previous three years combined under the Obama administration.”

It comes as no surprise to learn that U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, for two decades Connecticut’s Attorney General, is pulling at the same oar. Recently, Blumenthal filed a suit against President Donald Trump for having overstepped constitutional boundaries. Blumenthal’s nuisance suit claims that Trump has recklessly overleapt the emolument clause of the U.S. Constitution.

As Attorney General, Blumenthal, some would argue, overstepped his own statutory obligations by turning his office into a consumer protection operation outrigged with subpoena powers. Authorized by statute to represent the state in suits brought against it, Blumenthal earned political chits – and rave reviews from Connecticut’s media – by flipping the statute. Under Blumenthal’s regime, suing or threatening to sue businesses on behalf of consumers became the prime directive of the office, a far cry from representing the governor and state agencies in legal actions brought against the state.

Naturally, difficulties arose along the way. When he assumed office following Blumenthal’s lengthy career as the state’s premier consumer protection lawyer, Jepsen quickly dismissed hundreds of cases left on his plate by Blumenthal, who had hit upon a novel method of jurisprudence.  Blumenthal quickly learned that low asset targets could be forced to make plea bargains favorable to the state by tying up their business assets and holding them by the toe until they had become amenable to plea bargains. The legal bullying was remunerative. Money “earned” by Blumenthal made its way into the state treasury; Blumenthal was able to burnish his growing reputation as Connecticut’s white-hatted consumer protector; and the only losers were some small time business thugs- at least, that is how they were represented by Blumenthal in his sometimes daily media releases.

Martha Dean made an issue of Blumenthal’s overreach during her campaign for Attorney General. Jepsen, once Connecticut’s Democratic Party Chairman, vowed to keep a lower profile and sop-up Blumenthal’s spilled milk once he achieved office. And he did so, dismissing hundreds of so called “whistle blower” cases without stopping to explain how his office was supposed to represent both whistleblowers and the agencies against which they were blowing their whistles; a prosecutor would have to twist himself into a pretzel to be able justly to represent both the accuser and the accused in a fair trial, a posture neither Blumenthal nor Jepsen found ridiculous.  

The urge to overflow statutory and constitutional bounds within the Attorney General’s office will be irresistible for men and women motivated by political ambition.

“If men were angels,” said Alexander Hamilton, Broadway’s newest star, “no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

There’s the rub. How do you oblige presidents and governors and legislators and judges and attorneys general to control themselves when statutes and constitutional boundaries are so easily surmounted by political ambition and politicians on the hunt for status, public acclaim and votes?


You do it, always and everywhere, by insisting that constitutional and statutory boundaries defining offices are not violated with impunity, however beneficial the violation might be to politicians who have become media stars.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Blumenthal Burisma Connection

Steve Hilton , a Fox News commentator who over the weekend had connected some Burisma corruption dots, had this to say about Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s association with the tangled knot of corruption in Ukraine: “We cross-referenced the Senate co-sponsors of Ed Markey's Ukraine gas bill with the list of Democrats whom Burisma lobbyist, David Leiter, routinely gave money to and found another one -- one of the most sanctimonious of them all, actually -- Sen. Richard Blumenthal."

Powell, the JI, And Economic literacy

Powell, Pesci Substack The Journal Inquirer (JI), one of the last independent newspapers in Connecticut, is now a part of the Hearst Media chain. Hearst has been growing by leaps and bounds in the state during the last decade. At the same time, many newspapers in Connecticut have shrunk in size, the result, some people seem to think, of ad revenue smaller newspapers have lost to internet sites and a declining newspaper reading public. Surviving papers are now seeking to recover the lost revenue by erecting “pay walls.” Like most besieged businesses, newspapers also are attempting to recoup lost revenue through staff reductions, reductions in the size of the product – both candy bars and newspapers are much smaller than they had been in the past – and sell-offs to larger chains that operate according to the social Darwinian principles of monopolistic “red in tooth and claw” giant corporations. The first principle of the successful mega-firm is: Buy out your predator before he swallows

Down The Rabbit Hole, A Book Review

Down the Rabbit Hole How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime by Brent McCall & Michael Liebowitz Available at Amazon Price: $12.95/softcover, 337 pages   “ Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime ,” a penological eye-opener, is written by two Connecticut prisoners, Brent McCall and Michael Liebowitz. Their book is an analytical work, not merely a page-turner prison drama, and it provides serious answers to the question: Why is reoffending a more likely outcome than rehabilitation in the wake of a prison sentence? The multiple answers to this central question are not at all obvious. Before picking up the book, the reader would be well advised to shed his preconceptions and also slough off the highly misleading claims of prison officials concerning the efficacy of programs developed by dusty old experts who have never had an honest discussion with a real convict. Some of the experts are more convincing cons than the cons, p