Keeping The Republic In Connecticut

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” republicans thought had been decided once and forever by the convention that gave us a constitutional republic.

Ranking member on the Public Health Committee Rep. William Petit of Plainville said, while he had “no qualms” approving Lamont’s emergency powers in March, he would now vote against extending them. Moving forward, Petit said, “we need collaboration between the executive branch and the legislative branch equally.”

No contentious legislator should willingly sacrifice a constitutional republic for rule, enlightened or nor, by a presumed omnicompetent chief executive because 1) our own history has taught us that governors are on occasion dangerously incompetent, and 2) we prefer our homey, little, sometime confusing and inefficient republic, to a re-imposition of the kind of monarchical, colonial governance the country shook off, once and for all, when Franklin emerged from the Constitutional Convention  and told his interrogator that she had a republic -- if she could keep it.

This is not an historical or academic point. The Continental Congress once and for all settled a wholly practical question: Who should rule, the people being ruled through their elected representatives or a detached chief executive allied with a detached legislature that has rented out its constitutional obligations to an unelected administrative state ruling, perhaps unconstitutionally, athwart the will of the people?

Asked by the Associated Press a question regarding the coming elapse of his emergency powers on September 9, Lamont replied, suppressing a yawn, he supposed the legislature would call a brief session and decide what to do.

“My instinct,” said the governor, “is that we probably ask the legislature,” quiescent since March 1, “to continue the emergency powers a little bit longer, with the necessary checks and balances.”

Lamont, who later proposed extending his emergency powers for 5 additional months until February 9, did not pause to explain how he would determine when it was possible for the legislature to reconvene to perform its normal constituent duties, nor precisely how the legislature was to exercise in full its “check and balance” on a governor who had been behaving for the past half-year as King Charles 1 of Merry England once did after he dissolved Parliament and said to its members, “Gentlemen, go home.” Later tried for treason, the king was beheaded on account of his presumption and misadministration of the kingdom.

Barely noticing the clanging disjunctions, Lamont’s Chief of Staff, Paul Mounds, added, “If you just take into account what these emergency orders do, they’re allowing our state to safely operate while we’re in this time of COVID. Whether it’s our nursing homes, whether it’s our day cares, whether it’s going to be schools, whether it’s the businesses and business practices that are happening across the state, when September 9^th does arrive if those emergency powers are not re-upped in some way, we go back to the world how it was on March first. And, let’s be honest, it’s going to be hard for us as a state to function as it was on March first, understanding that we’re still in the world of an epidemic.”

No one will ever know whether the pretty speech delivered by Mounds was underwritten by Speaker of the House Joe Arsimowicz or President of the Senate Martin Looney, both of whom have so far escaped the executioner's axe. How Lamont’s Chief of Staff could have mentioned the state’s nursing homes without gagging is a continuing mystery. Sixty to seventy percent of all deaths of Coronavirus in The Un-Constitution State occurred in nursing homes, while Lamont was leading Connecticut through the tortuous “world of an epidemic.”

State Senator Rob Samson’s reaction to all this was refreshingly Franklin-ish and foundational. Samson found it shocking “that the Governor and legislative Democrats - not to mention most of the news media in our state - can pretend this makes any sense at all.

“They are planning on the legislature coming in for a special session possibly on the exact same day that Lamont will argue that it is too dangerous for the legislature to meet so he must continue to rule by executive order!!!!!

“It is obvious what is happening. Hartford Democrats love this situation. Their Governor gets to do as he pleases. Democrat legislators are off the hook for hard choices about the looming budget deficit, business closures, forcing landlords to go into bankruptcy, nursing home visits, and a million other REAL problems that should be addressed.”

As always in a pit of despair, there are some hopeful signs in both the legislature and the state’s woke media, the Yankee Institute for instance, that Sampson may NOT be a majority of one.