Dems Crush Republicans in Connecticut – Again

Looney, Lamont, Duff and Ritter, the Four Horsemen

“Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force” – Lord Acton

Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans in Connecticut by a ratio of two to one, and unaffiliateds have a slight edge over Democrats. All in all, that is a steep hill for Republicans to climb in any state campaign.

During the 2020 campaign, Democrats “solidified” their majority in the state’s General Assembly. Democrats now outnumber Republicans in both the upper and lower chambers by about two to one, surprising no one. In politics, numbers are destiny. Democrats have had the jump on Republicans for decades and, a bit like absentee landlords, they have owned major cities in Connecticut, nearly all of them crumbling to dust, for the last half century.

The day after ballot numbers began to pour in, one Democrat leader, breathing a huge sigh of relief, noted the Democrat majority in both houses of the General Assembly was refreshingly massive.

“If Democrats wind up gaining two seats once all the vote tallies are finalized,” a Hartford paper trilled, “they will have enough votes to override a gubernatorial veto, provided the party votes as a block.

When, ever, has the Democrat party caucus not voted as a block?

“That could give fresh momentum to efforts by progressives to raise taxes on the state’s wealthiest residents. Supporters point to New Jersey, which last month approved a “millionaire’s tax” to address pandemic-related budget shortfalls. The measure was approved by the state’s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, a former Goldman Sachs executive.”

Since the beginning of his gubernatorial term, the politics of New Jersey and New York has been the political mirror in which Democrat Governor Ned Lamont has seen himself every morning. When Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo in particular has held up a political hoop-before Lamont, he has joyfully jumped through it.

The media in the northeast has gotten in the bad habit of accusing President Donald Trump of murdering old folk through neglect and inattention to Coronavirus, but those corpses are better laid at the feet of governors inattentive to the needs of nursing homes; fully 70 percent of Coronavirus related deaths in Connecticut occurred in nursing homes under the eye of Lamont and other leading Democrats in the state who now, unpunished by voters or the state’s somnolent media, have handily won re-election to office.

It goes without saying that the left of center media in Connecticut is impervious to analysis critical of leading Democrats. Combining state and local taxation, Turbo Tax in 2019 rated Connecticut as the second highest taxed state in the nation. Sagging under the burden of extreme debt, about $68 billion, the Coronavirus hobgoblin and one party rule – indeed, one man rule -- Connecticut is not well positioned for a recovery once the Coronavirus angel of death passes its door sometime in the unforeseeable future. The state’s precarious future is misted over with doubt because Connecticut’s longstanding one party government is incompetent, dangerously self-centered, and blissfully unconcerned with the ruinous effects its policies will have on real working people in Connecticut. One would never guess that is the case from a close examination of media commentary entrails.

Progressives in the largely quiescent General Assembly may have a veto proof majority in the Senate, and they are three votes shy of a veto proof majority in the House. This means that Lamont’s distaste for a confiscatory tax on entrepreneurial capital may more easily be overridden by eat-the-rich progressives who now make up about half of the Democrat Party legislative caucus.

The social programs of the progressives have always been ruinous towards the underclass in cities whose real interests elite Democrats, for some reason, continually overlook. It should come as no surprise that the underclass wants to join the middle class. We are far beyond Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s warning that state welfare has destroyed the black family. Progressives are now in the process of herding urban blacks into welfare buckets, and installing Planned Parenthood abortion factories near ruined urban plantations, but not before commandeering the black and Hispanic vote with gold-gilded platitudes short enough to fit on Progressive bumper stickers. If Malcolm X were alive at this moment, he would be a registered, gun-toting, anti-abortion Republican.

The Republican Party is quickly disappearing. Former Governor Dannel Malloy used to bar them from the budget bargaining table. Democrat leaders in the General Assembly can afford to be more magnanimous. With veto proof majorities in both chambers, a governor who cribs his political polices from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and a critical averse media, Democrats may once again open their legislative doors to a Republican Party from which its three most promising leaders – minority leader in the House Themis Klarides, minority leader in the Senate Len Fasano and Republican Party Chairman J.R. Romano - have fled with their pants on fire certain that Republican contributions will not make it to the General Assembly floor, assuming, that is, that the General Assembly actually assembles, as constitutionally required, to consider and vote on bills hammered out by a largely progressive Democrat caucus.