Mayor of Hartford Luke Bronin, once Governor Dannel Malloy’s
Chief Counsel, has declared war on the National Rifle Association (NRA).
Democrats running for high office in the upcoming elections will likely follow
suit, mostly because they dare not defend the rapacious policies of Governor
Dannel Malloy, the nominal head of the state Democratic Party, and they need a
distraction sufficient to beguile a public that already has voted against
Malloy’s policies with its feet. The national anti-NRA campaign script,
widely vetted in the northeast and California, reached Connecticut politicians
early on. In fact, they had a hand in its construction.
Only recently Malloy condemned the NRA in what might be
termed politically pornographic terms. The NRA has become in essence, Malloy
said, “a
terrorist organization."
Unable to defend Malloy’s ruinous eight years in office,
Connecticut Democrats yearning to be governor are anxiously scouring the
premises for villains. Bronin, who recently received from his
political patron forty million dollars in tax funds to bail
out the state’s Capitol City, which has been directed for the last half century
by Connecticut’s hegemonic Democrat Party, is anxious to ensure that
Connecticut's government has no connection with the NRA.
Connecticut’s statutes require those applying for gun
permits to take safety training courses certified by the NRA, an affront
apparently to anyone who wishes to be instructed in the proper and safe use of
firearms. Bronin wants to be certain that the state is not “inadvertently
legitimizing or supporting or endorsing the NRA in any way,” according
to a recent NBC Connecticut report. To this end, Bronin has written a
letter to Malloy and legislators imploring them to dissever any statutory
connection between Connecticut and the much demonized NRA. The leadership of
the NRA, Bronin intoned, “serves as lobbyists for the gun industry and the NRA
is the single biggest obstacle to common-sense reforms.”
Lobbyists in
the United States spent $3.34 billion in 2017 seeking to shape
legislation. NRA’s portion was $5,122,000. The lawyer’s lobby ponied up
$19,323,598. Bronin and Malloy are lawyers.
Bronin has not yet told people who might be voting for him
as governor with what instrumentality he would replace the instruction
functions now performed by the NRA, but then solutions to agonizing problems
have never been a strong suit for Democrat mayors of Hartford who collectively
have reduced the Capital City to penury. Before he received a bailout from
padroni Malloy, Bronin was on the point of declaring Hartford bankrupt -- which
it is, whether or not the city, under the thumb of Democrats for decades, has
made a formal declaration.
It cannot come as shocking news that Bronin, who has opened a
gubernatorial exploratory run for governor having served only two years in his
four year term, may also be bailing out of Hartford. He is following in the
footsteps of his patron, Malloy, who imposed on Connecticut the largest and
second largest tax increases in the state's history, and now has decided to
call it quits. Malloy’s approval rating, remarkably consistent, is among the
lowest in the nation, but the barrel scraping rating did not prevent the
Democrat National Governor’s Association from choosing Malloy as its chief
honcho, a political lobbying position.
In politics, as in life, when the subject is distasteful,
the best recourse is to change the subject. Nearly everyone in Connecticut –
with the exception of Democrat politicians certain that it is always possible
to fool most of the people most of the time – senses that the state is now on
life support. Recently, the usual save the state commission returned
a report on the patient that prescribed a mixed bag of recuperative measures:
replace the state income tax with revenue neutral consumption taxes; raise the
gas tax, thus relieving the pressure of legislators to institute long-term,
permanent spending cuts; allow municipalities to levy a half percent sales tax,
a cherry on the top of already burdensome property taxes; modify but do not
eliminate binding arbitration; and increase Connecticut’s minimum wage by 50 percent from $10.10 to $15per hour. “Nothing
recommended by the commission,” political
columnist Chris Powell wrote, “would get state government out of its
projected short-term deficits in the billions of dollars, much less its
projected long-term deficits in the tens of billions.”
“The more things change,” the French say, “the more they
remain the same.” Far from an agent of change, Bronin is more
Malloy-like than any other Democrat gubernatorial candidate in the
running. Some signs suggest a weary state may turn its eyes to Republicans in
the next gubernatorial election, but Republicans have shown themselves to be
notoriously pallid campaigners. For instance, no Republican candidate for
governor has yet accused his opposite number on the Democrat side of having
conducted “economic terrorism.”
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