I’d like to thank Bob Hurd for inviting me here so that we
might have a chat together. I’d also like to congratulate Dan Champagne for wining a slot
in the General Assembly. He will be stepping into state Senator Tony Guglielmo large shoes, but there
is no doubt he will be able to fashion his own foot print.
Welcome to the viper pit, Dan. You may want to stomp on a
rumor that’s been floating around. It’s being said in some quarters that you
ran for the state Senate because you missed butting heads with Mike Winkler.
Michael is at a safe remove from Dan over in the House, but legislators
sometimes bump into each other in the elevators and corridors of the General
Assembly, not to mention its intersectional bathrooms.
Dan’s district, the 35th, represents the
following towns: Ashford, Chaplin, Coventry, Eastford, Ellington, Hampton,
Pomfret, Stafford, Tolland, Union, Vernon, Willington, and Woodstock, a fairly large
sized political pie. Vernon, it should surprise no one, has been a town
considerably longer than President Pro Tem Martin Looney has been a senator. Looney, as
we know, has represented for more than a quarter century – much too long – a
district that includes the eastern half of New Haven, as well as part
of Hamden, a vassal town of New Haven. US Rep Rosa DeLauro, in public
office since 1991 – much too long – hails from the same area. These two are
peas in the same progressive pod.
Looney and DeLauro might easily be tagged as radical, extremist,
EXTREMIST! progressives – if the
Republican propaganda machine were as fearless as the Democrat propaganda
instrument. The Democrats, at least nationally have never been fearful of
putting forward idiot propositions. US Senator Dick Blumenthal thinks that
anyone who presumes to write into law reasonable restrictions on, say,
late-term abortion is IMMORAL.
That’s right, any attempt to
dissuade those who avail themselves of the bloody activities of Planned
Parenthood is IMMORAL. Blumenthal, who
appears to be working from a different set of Ten Commandments than the rest of
us, is not unfriendly to restrictions. As Attorney General for two decades, he restricted
pretty much every business whose activities were reported to him by the
Consumer Protection Department.
Virtually all Democrat office holders in Connecticut’s
larger cities are progressives; of that there can be no doubt. In fact, I would
say – and have said numerous times -- that the preponderance of Connecticut Democrat
office holders is made up of progressives.
Moderate Democrats have been washed overboard in the Democrat Party. Our new
Lieutenant Governor, Susan Bysiewicz, wrote a book about a notable centrist
Democrat, Governor Ella Grasso, before her lengthy political job search
deposited her in her present position.
One trembles to think that Bysiewicz may not be comfortable
in her current office, a discomfort she may share with our new Governor Ned
Lamont, who, some have suggested, may become a vassal governor controlled by
arch progressives in the General Assembly such as Looney and Speaker of the
Democrat dominated state House Joe Aresimowitz, a union coordinator employed by
AFSCME Council 4. In his real job, Aresimowitz represents union members who
have filed grievances against the state; which is to say, his union
responsibilities require him to represent formally union members with
grievances against him.
The political tectonic plates in Connecticut have shifted – has
anyone noticed? Grasso, a centrist politician – a bitter foe of the income tax
– could not get elected dog-catcher in the current Democrat Party. Bysiewicz,
by the way, disagrees with Grasso’s vigorous opposition to the income tax. Ella
Grasso’s son, Jim Grasso, who apparently knew his mother a little better than
Bysiewicz, became a Republicans because he disagrees with Bysiewicz and agrees
with Mom. There no longer is a cool or hot center to the Democrat Party in
Connecticut. Within that party, all are progressives now. George Orwell says in
his novel “Animal Farm” that the pigs are equal to all the other animals. However,
the pigs are more equal than the other animals. So with progressives in
Connecticut’s Democrat Party: they are much more progressive than the centrist
Democrat Party residue.
So then, let’s attack the question head on and ask – what do
Connecticut progressives want?
The right answer is deceptively simple. They want MORE –
more taxes, more spending, more favorable notices in the media, even though
they are showered daily with editorial encomiums, and more government
regulation, provided an impermeable wall can be constructed around the murder
of late-term babies in the womb.
The only thing Connecticut progressives don’t want more of
is less spending. They want to break down the barriers that stand between their
revolutionary ambition to re-invent Connecticut as they consolidate power the
way they have proposed to consolidate school districts, by eliminating the influences
of what G., K. Chesterton once called “the little platoons of democracy,”
mediating institutions such as town governments, churches, voluntary
associations and the like. A famous caricaturist summed up the ethos of
progressivism when he said, “What is the point of having absolute power, if you
are not prepared to abuse it?”
This visionary lurch towards an omni-present and
omni-incompetent state is not a
description of the politics of Grasso. Bysiewicz is no Ella Grasso, a vanished
species in the current Democrat Party. Grasso was a liberal Democrat at a time
when the connection between liberty and liberalism was well understood and
properly practiced. Progressives are not liberals. They are not the good
government party. They are the MORE government party, bewitched by the illusion
that since government is good, more of it must be better. And they don’t care
two cents about small “d” democrat rule from below; they intend to rule from
above, as have other infamous historical autocrats – some of them, like Benito
Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, socialists.
For the most part, Republicans tend to win the age old
quarrel with Democrats on vital economic issues. If you crush creative
entrepreneurial activity, you end up as Venezuela. President John Kennedy was
right when he told a gathering at the New York Economic Club that reducing
marginal tax rates would boost revenue. He did so and magically the overtaxed,
stagnant economy of his day revived, producing the additional revenue that his
successor, President Lyndon Johnson, used to finance his Great Society
Programs. Reality, however, does not figure greatly in the progressive view of
things, and Democrats tend to win campaigns on what they call “social issues.”
Indeed, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the newest heartthrob among far left
Democrats, won her seat in New York as a proto-socialist. Every time Senator
Elizabeth Warren opens her mouth, she sounds like Lenin plotting the
assassination of the Romanov family. Bernie Sanders, the Leon Trotsky of the
Democrat Party, frustrated during the last presidential election by Hilary
Clinton, now awaits his hour on the presidential stage.
Socialism is the logical and inevitable answer to the “social
issues” fronting most Democrat
campaigns, and socialist prescriptions sell well in the media and in the
various intersectional camps that Obama brought together to win two of his elections.
You cannot have a socialist state in the absence of a smothering, servile,
unelected administrative apparatus. And socialism, as even amateur historians
well know, does not do well by the electorate; unintended consequences can be fatal
to both state and nation. That is the enduring lesson of Venezuela: First you
restrict liberty and, somewhere down the line, you run out of toilet paper and
are forced to eat your pets for lunch.
Coventry Republicans have produced a partial list of Connecticut
Democrats’ political ambitions for 2019, not all of which will find its way
into legislation, at least not immediately: They include the implementation of
82 tolling gantries across the state’s highway system; transforming Connecticut
into a sanctuary state – that is a state than practices nullification of
federal laws established by the US Congress; the implementation of a series of
taxes on food, vehicles, plastic and paper, a new tax on the selling of
property, a 50% tax on ammunition sales, an increase in the state sales tax
rate, a tax on vaping products; the regionalization of municipal school
districts; forcing employers to pay maternity and paternity leave; the
elimination of carbon fuels; the teaching in elementary schools of a state
mandated version of civics; eliminating tax deductions for more than 500
college savings programs; restoring voting rights to paroled felons;
implementing alternative gender identities on all ubiquitous state forms; including
jailed criminals when designing legislative districts; prohibiting landlords
from making inquiries concerning a prospective tenant’s criminal history; establishing requirements for genderless
bathrooms; eliminating the cash bail system; duplicating New York laws on
abortion and late term birth infanticide – I’ll stop here because the prospects
of progressive mischief in a regime that discounts secondary consequences are
infinite, and I am running out of breath.
This is the face of modern progressivism in the Northeast.
It smiles at the poor, bares its teeth at the rich and lumbers through a
utopian field of dreams like one of those fearsome, obtuse giants we meet in
fairy tales. Barry Goldwater – the author of “The Conscience of a
Conservative,” co-written by L. Brent Bosell Jr., Bill Buckley’s conservative confederate
and brother-in-law – used to say: If you lop off California and New England,
you’ve got a pretty good country.
Early in February, Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo, who
had just finished celebrating a bill that winks at infanticide, was in agony
when he learned – big surprise! – that New York was facing a $2.3 billion
revenue shortfall. We in Connecticut are used to shortfalls, which arrive on
our progressive doorsteps after math geniuses in the Office of Policy and Management
have overestimated receipts, and underestimated governmental costs --
conveniently, just before elections. State revenue, those of us who are not
obtuse progressive giants well know, tends to diminish as punishing taxes drive
wealth creation to less confiscatory states.
It did not take Cuomo long to produce a devil. Everyone in
this room can guess who it was.
Cuomo,” Yahoo tells
us, “blamed the loss of tax revenue, the scale of which was unpredicted by
state officials, on a provision in the Republican-led tax reform package that
capped state and local [SALT] tax deductions at $10,000, depriving the
wealthiest New Yorkers of a significant tax break that defrayed the high state
taxes imposed by Albany.”
So, Trump’s deduction cap does two things: It encourages
states to lower punishing taxes, and it deprives rich people – the sort of
redundant millionaires whom Democrat Party socialists-in-waiting would like to
eat for breakfast – of deductions that allow them to escape taxation, unlike
the poor in Connecticut, who live under bridges and cannot afford to buy
special favors from politicians. One would suppose that progressives would vote
in favor of the deduction reduction. We all recall how affronted progressives
were when multi-billionaire Warren Buffet told us that he paid less in taxes
than his secretary.
But Cuomo, who believes in sanctuary cities but not the sanctuary
of the womb, improbably warned his socialist compatriots that the loss of
revenue could not be recovered by continuing to tax the wealthiest New Yorkers —
the top 1 percent of whom already contribute 46 percent of all government
revenue — at increasingly higher rates. “God forbid,” he said, “if the rich
leave.”
They won’t be coming
to Connecticut. All the chatter in the Democrat dominated General Assembly is
about creating new revenue streams and reinventing the state. So then, here is
the ideologically twisted progressive view on progressive taxation: You cannot
eliminate tax credits for the very wealthy among us because, if you do so, tax
receipts will be markedly reduced and we progressive will have less expropriated
money to distribute to our pampered special interests. That may make political
sense; but it is a form of insane economic reasoning.
Let me now try to bring all this home and reach for some
tentative conclusions. Some years ago, I was amused to discover that the
editorial page writers at the Hartford Courant had discovered, much to their
dismay, that Connecticut was not suffering a revenue problem; it was suffering
a spending problem.
This was a stunning turn-about, a Damascus Road thunderbolt
– because, the Courant had always argued that budget deficits should properly
be discharged through tax increases. In the post-income tax period, within the
space of four governors, spending in the state has increased threefold. And of
course, taxation runs in the rut of spending. The more you get, the more you
spend. During the Weicker, Rowland and Rell years, the state had not yet, in
the often repeated formulation of British Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher, “run
out of other people’s money.” But after two massive tax increases by Malloy,
Connecticut found itself running out of other people’s money.
After years of being overwhelmed by massive majorities in
the state legislature, Republicans had achieved parity with Democrats in the
Senate, 18-18, and they were coming perilously close to parity in the House.
Some conservative Republicans took courage and lightly touched Connecticut’s
political third-rail.
Look, they said, the state does have a spending
problem. After years of contractual arrangements made between state-employee-dependent
governors and union representatives, the cost of state employee labor in
Connecticut is now driving the whole state toward a cliff’s edge from which
there can be no happy retreat. Since our constitution vests getting and
spending powers in the General Assembly, why have we, over the course of many
years, rented out our constitutional obligations to unelected union officials
and governors who consistently have formulated union-favorable contracts
mechanically approved by legislators in full retreat from their democratic
obligation to set the price of salaries and pensions? If we were to remove
salaries and pensions from negotiated union contracts, we would then be able to
exert direct control over state spending. And because state officials are
elected -- unlike union negotiators and judges and state arbiters – we will be affirming
true democratic imperatives. People disappointed with the decisions of elected
officials can vote them out of office. But unelected judges, the final arbiters
of legal contracts, and state arbiters are not answerable to the people for the
decisions they make. Their decisions, fraught with sometime disastrous
unintended consequences, are not correctable through democratic means.
Here, Here, Here is the problem with our state government: The
state legislature, which should be the primary republican organ of our
government, is renting out its constitutional prerogatives to unelected,
permanent organs of the administrative state. We are quickly moving away from a
government of, by and for the people towards an unelected administrative
apparat untouched by the remediation of traditional democratic government.
When the Constitutional Convention had finished its work, Ben
Franklin was accosted by a woman, Mrs. Powel, and asked, “Well sir, what have you given us?”
He replied – “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Every day we must ask ourselves – have we kept the promise
of republican government? There are always two questions hovering menacingly
over all governments. The first is a question put by Lenin in his first major
publication: What is to be done? And the second question, from which the first
hangs by a slender thread, is: Who decides what is to be done? These are not
mere theoretical questions; they are intensely practical questions in their
consequences. The second question upon which our republic depends is answered
by Constitutional provisions, common and natural law, the grand traditions of
the republic, the morality of its people and their most uncommon common sense.
I’d like to end here and invite questions.
END
Comments