Malloy’s Lieutenant Governor Nancy Wyman, pleading
grandchildren, has decided not to run. Malloy’s Comptroller, Kevin Lembo,
earlier decided he did not want to be governor. Attorney General George Jepsen,
who easily might have held his position as long as his predecessor, Dick
Blumenthal, decided to call it a day after only six years – hopefully setting an
unalterable precedent. And Jepsen did not announce for governor. Blumenthal was
Attorney General for two decades and might still have been there, a scourge of Connecticut
businesses, had not then U.S. Senator Chris Dodd left the Senate for Hollywood,
turning over his two decades old sinecure to St. Dick.
Suddenly doors are open: three important offices --
governor, attorney general and treasurer – have become available, almost as if
the state had instituted term limits. Present State Treasurer Denise Nappier
has abandoned ship after eighteen years, perhaps because, like Drew’s campaign,
the state has run out of money.
John “Cactus Jack” Garner, Franklin Roosevelt’s Vice
President, a most un-Blumenthal-like character, retired from his job after only
eight years, Roosevelt having served as president for a total of twelve years,
after which the presidency was wisely term-limited. Someone asked Garner what
he thought of the vice president’s office, and he replied, disarmingly, that it
“wasn’t worth a warm bucket of s**t,” a good old Middle English word the use of
which in private discourse made public has recently got President Donald Trump
into a boatload of trouble. They still make politicians that way in Texas.
The down-and-out state that Malloy has left to his successors ain’t worth a boatload of trouble, and
THAT is why the governorship can’t be sold for a penny to any first-string
Democratic politician in Connecticut. No one yet has asked Blumenthal whether
he wants to be governor; nor has anyone asked the other worthy Democrats that
hold every position in Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation. If the
state had term limits, there would be no need to ask.
While Drew was running for governor, a local dust-up was
occurring in his own bailiwick. A slate of progressives replaced a longstanding
Democratic Town Committee group prepared to support Drew’s gubernatorial bid.
Having lost the support of a committee that selects delegates to the state
nominating convention, and broke after having shuttled $88,000 in consulting
fees to the Vinci Group where, CTPost noted,
“Drew’s ousted mayoral chief of staff Geoff Luxenberg had once been a partner,”
Drew threw in the sponge and withdrew from the race. Recently entering the opened door are Susan Bysiewicz and Ned Lamont, who, some years ago, had successfully challenged then Senator Joe
Lieberman in a Democrat primary but lost to the senator in the following
general election.
All the scrambling for seats on the Titanic, quickly
approaching the iceberg, casts a veil over the real political issues in
Connecticut. Do we continue on the state’s failing progressive course, or do we
reverse engines and re-plot a course in an opposite direction? Should Connecticut,
which has transferred to the state’s most politically effective special
interest a control over budgets constitutionally assigned to legislators, dissever
contractual ties with unions in the near future? The predominant constitutional
budget making authority in Connecticut rests with the General Assembly – not with
an executive department that finds in a mutually beneficial alignment with
grasping unions a certain path to reelection. Pressed by artfully arranged
extensions of contracts, should the state achieve cost savings by privatizing
all possible state functions? Should a besieged legislature pass “right to work
laws” in Connecticut, a union oppressed state that still has not recovered from
a national recession that ended elsewhere in the nation more than eight years
ago? Should the income tax, volatile and unpredictable, be replaced in due
course with consumption taxes? How will the state deal with its “fixed costs,”
which are crowding out discretionary costs? Answer: unfix them. Should
Connecticut adopt recall and ballot initiatives to counter anti-constitutional
and anti-republican (note the small “r”) court decisions? And what should we do
about appellate courts, mini-legislatures that regularly breech
constitutionally necessary walls of separation? In a well ordered
constitutional republic, should Connecticut’s Malloy-packed Supreme Court be
allowed to override the collective will of elected legislative representatives,
as it had done recently in its absurd capital punishment revocation? The
answers to these questions will determine the future of Connecticut. All
the palavering about balanced budgets is a progressive blind to insure
repetitive and self-destructive tax increases and, of course, equally ruinous
spending increases.
These are questions of moment that ought to be ventilated in
election before Connecticut collides with the iceberg.
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