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| Wooden and Lamont |
What do State Treasurer Shawn Wooden and State Attorney
General William Tong have in common? Both are Democrats, and both have
politicized the offices to which they have been elected.
Of the two, Wooden at least has a relevant and strong
background in functions relating to the State Treasurer’s office.
Wooden entered politics fresh from the college crib. He worked for Hartford Mayor Carrie Saxon Perry, also having served as Connecticut State Director for Project VOTE. Enhancing his political curricula vita, Wooden also worked for the AFL-CIO's Office of Investment in Washington, D.C. He was elected to the Hartford City Council in 2011. Narrowly losing a bid for the second district seat in the State Senate, Wooden chose not to seek reelection in 2015. Before his hitch as State Treasurer, Wooden worked for 21 years as an investment lawyer and led Day Pitney’s public pension fund investment practice. Wooden has been serving as Connecticut’s State Treasurer since January 2019, a brief 11 months.
Steeped in politics, both Wooden and Tong have carried their
political virtues and vices with them into their recently occupied offices.
U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, who served as State Attorney General for a little
more than two decades, has been viewed by his infrequent critics as
Connecticut’s first consumer protection senator, and this writer has referred
to him as “the senator from Planned Parenthood,” the only national and
international business Blumenthal is disinclined to burden with consumer
protection regulations. Tong, Blumenthal’s successor, also has carried his
largely progressive politics with him into the Attorney General’s office.
NBC Connecticut
recently reported that Wooden “made a big statement, announcing a
‘responsible gun policy’ for Connecticut’s pension investments and financial
business, which includes selling off stocks of some gun manufacturers.” Under
Wooden’s direction, the Treasurer’s Office “will divest, or sell, $30 million
in companies that own civilian gun manufacturing operations: Northrop Grumman,
Olin Corporation, Clarus Corporation, Daicel Corporation, and Vista Outdoor.”
Wooden hastened to add, “They’re not being punished. This is just a free
marketplace at work. We have a concern with your product, its profitability,
and as an investor, I choose to put the state’s money elsewhere,” even as he
was using the Treasurer’s office to sanction companies that ran afoul of his politics.
Wooden did not disclose in his media statement which other companies, aside
from gun manufacturers, he planned "not to punish" by dropping them from his
investment list.
Other companies whose policies dove-tail with Wooden’s on
the matter of “gun safety” are to be richly rewarded by the State Treasurer. “For
example,” NBC reports, “the state just hired Citibank to conduct the state’s
next bond offering. Citibank has a new policy requiring weapon retailers that
want to do business with the bank have universal background checks, an age
requirement for gun purchases, and a ban on the sale of bump stocks and high
capacity magazines.”
Wooden was spurred to action, NBC reported, owing to “Washington’s
inability to provide comprehensive reforms in the wake of gun violence… And, he
said, he was “spurred to act in part because he lost a loved one in a shooting
in Hartford in 2012.” Details concerning the shooting in Hartford were not
provided in multiple news reports. And, in the absence of details, even a
sympathetic reader cannot determine whether the disinvestment course initiated
by Wooden might have saved the life of his loved one – or not.
It likely is not the practice of Wooden’s former employer,
Day Pitney, to encumber the investments of its clients with provisions such as
Wooden has adopted as treasurer. The whole point of the treasurer’s office is
to wisely invest tax dollars in entities that yield the best return on
investments. The politicization of the State Treasure’s statutory mandate is
not the best use that can be made of tax dollars. Once the prime directive of
the office is overthrown, the State Treasurer may with impunity disinvest from
companies for any political reason at all. None of the news reports point to a
reasonable standard that might be applied equitably to any company other than
gun manufacturers whose product is loosely connected with casualties such as,
for instance, car manufacturers or the makers of assault knives, here defined
as any knife misused in an assault on persons.
Tong was mainlined directly from partisan politics into the
office of Attorney General, one of the oldest offices in Connecticut. The
office evolved from what was known in colonial days as “the king’s lawyer,” and
so long as the genie was kept in the bottle, hedged about by constitutional
provisions and statutes that confined the functions of the office to the
representation in court cases of the executive branch and its too numerous agencies,
all was well. The office now has devolved into a mini-monarchy. All statutory mandates
have been swept side and the borderless office has been put at the service of
partisan politics. The Attorney General’s office is the worse spot for a hack
politician who a) uses the office to elevate himself politically, as Blumenthal
and former Senator Joe Lieberman have done, or b) leaps beyond the statutory
bounds of the office to sue presidents of the United States.
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