Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Schumer, Blumenthal and Murphy Last Saturday, U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal tweeted, “I will refuse to treat this process,” the elevation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court, “as legitimate & will not meet with Judge Amy Coney Barrett.” This is what snooty rich people in Blumenthal’s circle would call a slight. One expects to find this sort of thing in an exclusive British club, or a golf course that has perversely refused to admit Jews. The story concerning Blumenthal’s oh so significant public slight, was featured in CTMirror under the title “ Trump slams Barrett critic Blumenthal, says senator should be ‘impeached’ ” As the title and emphasis of the story suggests, President Donald Trump has returned slight for slight. Trump, on cue, reacted almost immediately to Blumenthal’s intentionally offensive manners by recalling in yet another tweet that Blumenthal had several times in different formats strongly suggested he had served in the Vietnam War, a boast ...

St. Lamont While Connecticut’s Democrat dominated General Assembly was napping, Raytheon, formerly United Technologies (UTC), announced it was cutting 15,000 commercial aerospace jobs. The cuts will affect Pratt&Whitney and Collins Aerospace, according to a recent story in a Hartford paper. Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes, who moved UTC’s headquarters to the Boson area following UTC’s merger with Raytheon, figures it will take at least three years for the air travel business to recover. According to the report, Raytheon had seen “aircraft and pentagon orders surging” before the move. The company said it had “planned to hire 35,000 workers over five years.” And now? Raytheon’s defense sector, Hayes said, is still strong – owing to Trump military procurements. However, “as of September 4, commercial air traffic is down about 45% globally. To save costs, airlines are “deferring maintenance,” which adversely affects Pratt&Whitney in East Hartford, Congressman John Larson’s bailiwick. T...

Judge Amy Coney Barrett No doubt Democrat U.S. Senate opposition researchers (AKA “dirt diggers”) have for some time been combing through Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s pristine past in search of some errant behavior they might use to derail her possible appointment by President Donald Trump to the U.S. Supreme Court. Before the curtain rings down on her U.S. Senate hearing, the real Barrett will likely be buried beneath mounds of rhetorical rubble as the Democrat Javerts on the Judicial Committee proceed with the dismantling work at hand. The most notorious wrecking job in recent Senate hearings involved present Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, although   Supreme Court appointees Robert Bork, from whom the term “Borking” is derived, and Clarence Thomas were earlier publicly defamed by Democrats anxious to preserve a presumed liberal presence on the Court. Kavanaugh was accused by a witness at first unwilling to come forward, professor of psychology Christine Blasey Ford, of s...

  Ruth Bader Gingburg The death from cancer of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg certainly came as no surprise. Cancer is a relentless foe. Democrats, it must be supposed, were preparing for her departure long before she expired last Friday. It did not take long for  Mother Jones   to issue marching orders to Democrats : “It will be bare-knuckles politics from the right. Do or die. By any means necessary. To replace Ginsburg with a young right-wing extremist. And for the Democrats to have a chance of thwarting them, they must realize that this fight is not only a matter of persuasion. They will not win by writing well-reasoned op-eds. Cable host tirades will be of little use. Panel discussions will be irrelevant. Clever ads highlighting GOP hypocrisy won’t do the trick. Angry editorials in the  New York Times  won’t help. Not even a freckin’ David Brooks column (“ conservatives should realize they have an interest in preserving democratic norm s ! “) will do them ...

According to a story in a Hartford paper, “ About a dozen Connecticut schools have closed so far due to coronavirus cases; Gov. Ned Lamont says they shouldn’t shut down over a single case ”. Superintendents of schools across the state are understandably confused about Governor Ned Lamont’s edicts concerning school openings because the edicts are lawless in three important senses: 1) they set no statewide standards applicable to all schools that would allow superintendents to uniformly enforce the confusing edicts, 2) the Governor’s authority to close schools, set monetary penalties for people who decline to wear masks in public, and otherwise force citizens of the state to abide by his 70 executive orders, may not be constitutionally kosher, and 3) sanctions, which mark the difference between gubernatorial recommendations and enforceable regulations, have been applied according to a calculus that is indifferent to uniform standards. Lamont’s authority to govern by edict in the abse...

The New York Times, the old grey lady of eastern seaboard journalism, has published a blockbuster story, “ Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be ,”  that should be widely reported in other media formats. So far, the substance of the story has remained pretty much on the media shelf. The Times has discovered that the easily corrected, most often used calibration for Coronavirus testing is not useful for "containing the spread of the virus.” According to the Times, “In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found. “On Thursday [8/10/.2020], the United States recorded 45,604 new Coronavirus cases, according to a database maintained by The Times. If the rates of contagiousness in Massachusetts and New York were to apply nationwide, then perhaps only 4,500 of those people may actually need to...

Part 2 in a Series of Self-Interviews: On the Conservative Option Q: Donald Trump has been President for nearly a full term. When people are not trying to impeach him, or send him up on tax charges, they are chattering about him. CNN seems to be weirdly obsessed, but you have been as strangely silent. Why? A: I doubt I could add anything useful to the general brutish clamor, and I’m writing mostly about Connecticut politics. Q: But national and state politics intersect. A: They do. Q: In one of your pieces, you wrote that state Republicans stumbled badly in 2018 because they did not defend Trump when possible. You said Trump was not on the ballot, that he had come under withering fire from Democrats and anti-Trumpists in Connecticut’s media, that the silence of the loyal opposition always signifies assent, and that Democrats had stolen a march on Republicans that year, during a non-presidential election, resulting in a good number of Republican seats lost in the General Assembl...

  Part 1 In A Series Of Self Interviews: On Connecticut Commentary   Q: Reading over your blog, “ Connecticut Commentary: Red Note From A Blue State ”, I don’t see many “I’s”. A: Modesty. Q: No really, why? A: Political commentators fall into two categories: those who write about themselves, and those who write about others and ideas. This last group tends to dispense with “I’s”.  Q: Well, we’ll see if we can remedy that lapse here. You have quoted Chris Powell, for many years both the Managing Editor and the Editorial Page Editor of the Journal Inquirer, on his motivation. You said to him once – correct me if I’m wrong – that he had been writing opinion pieces longer than you, and you have been working in the commentary vineyard for more than forty years. You complimented him. His opinion pieces were perceptive, well written and necessary, a tonic for what ails the state, you said. Yet, politicians at the state Capitol who decide Connecticut’s destiny did not appear to b...

Lamont Coronavirus, we have been told countless times, has knocked “government as we know it” into a cocked hat. Purely as a practical matter, we in Connecticut have no fully operative legislature or judiciary. This means that our usual three legged governmental stool – legislative, judicial and executive branches of government – is lacking two legs. Only the executive department, in the person of Governor Ned Lamont, is operating on all cylinders and at, some would say, excessive speed. A statute that gives the governor near plenipotentiary powers during emergencies, repurposed when Coronavirus slammed into Connecticut via communist China and Mayor Bill de Blasio’s New York City, has been operative in Connecticut for six months. A dominant Democrat legislature has recently extended the governor’s extraordinary powers yet another five months. This extension of powers, this sundering of the separation of powers, some believe, may be unconstitutional and, at the very least, raises ...

Murphy Dick Blumenthal, Chris Murphy and Rand Paul are all US Senators. There has been a long-lived tradition in Congress that, though senators may hail from different parties, they are not to be treated as mortal enemies, and this tradition produces a sort of social camaraderie. Some forms of affection – one thinks of C.S. Lewis’ Four Loves , affection, friendship, erotic love, and the love of God -- simply MUST be larger than politics. Maintaining what national politicians might call the concord of the Senate has, in our modern period of intense bifurcation, been challenging, largely because politics, like all fierce overarching pursuits, is a sword of sundering. It is awkward if not impossible to maintain a cordial political relationship with someone who persistently describes you, directly or indirectly, as an enemy of the Republic and Right Reason, as happens frequently in modern national politics. Twitter, a platform that allows bilious people to string together...

Lamont, King Charles 1? When Ben Franklin emerged from the Constitutional Convention at its close, he was accosted by a woman on the street who asked him, “Well, sir, what have you given us?” “A republic,” Franklin answered, “ if you can keep it.” The question before us in Connecticut is a simple one: Are we to have a republic, or not? The state legislature, controlled by Democrats, is now poised to expand the “emergency powers” of Governor Ned Lamont that will terminate on September 9. Small “r” republicans across the state, remembering Franklin’s “if”, do not think that an open-ended extension of borderless gubernatorial powers is wise, prudent or practical. The General Assembly should not approve an extension of executive powers in which the legislature does not, as a co-equal body, affirm every emergency decision made the governor. Without such affirmations, here can be no check and balance upon an impudent and audacious chief executive. This is a question that, small “r” r...