A vote by the Electoral College on December 14 settled the question: Who will occupy the White House in January? The occupants will be President Joe Biden and President-in-Waiting Vice President Kamala Harris.
Other questions also have been settled. Since Trump is in the process of being supplanted, the thorny question often asked of Republicans in Connecticut during the presidential campaign – “Why have you not yet condemned the usurper Trump, and when do you plan to do so?” – are now moot. Connecticut Republicans no longer will be compelled to denounce the titular head of the Republican Party who, be it noted, beefed up President Barack Obama's flagging military, introduced the Supreme Court to rational reading of the Constitution by means of three new appointments, moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, moved some Arab states closer to Israel, greatly disappointing Iran, a leading exporter of terrorism in the Middle East, assassinated Islamic terrorist Qasem Soleimani , pretty much the same way President Barack Obama before him assassinated Osama bin Laden, and hastened the production of a vaccine for Coronavirus, which the president modestly did not insist should be named after him – “The Trump Vaccine.”
During the 2020 elections, Connecticut Republicans managed successfully to duck behind “moderate” flower pots, without mentioning the points indicated above, and their silence, when the subject was broached by state Democrats, spoke volumes. In law and politics, silence signifies assent -- also debilitating cowardice. Republicans mourning their losses in the General Assembly needn’t wonder why many Republicans and many traditional Democrats turned tail on them during the 2020 elections.
Some open questions relating to Coronavirus have now been closed. Humans are learning and adaptable animals. The pandemic has been with us now for about nine months, during which period of time the members of Connecticut’s General Assembly remained in their bunkers, and Governor Ned Lamont was adorned by no-show legislators, a vast majority of whom were Democrats, with plenary powers not seen in Connecticut since its last colonial governor, William Pitkin, gave up the ghost in East Hartford.
Following the Constitutional Convention, American revolutionaries divided the government into three separate but, within their own spheres, co-equal branches of government – legislative, executive and judiciary – each of which was to stand as a firewall preventing a resumption of autocratic government.
A glance at the State of Connecticut Judicial Branch page shows the debilitating effect of the breakdown in constitutional governance within the state’s judiciary. Virtual Justice is no justice. A General Assembly that does not meet as a deliberative body at an appointed spot to discuss and vote on measures affecting the public weal is not a legislature. And legislation promulgated by Lamont is, by definition, unconstitutional. The state legislature is NEVER justified in renting its constitutional prerogatives to any governor, Democrat or Republican, who then rents out a usurped legislative authority to unelected sectors of the administrative state.
If the State Supreme Court, most of whose members were appointed by former Governor Dannel Malloy, cannot rule intelligently and authoritatively on such constitutional questions, while leaving in the public mind no doubt that our essential constitutional liberties are not to be put at auction, it would be better if the state’s judicial branch, now severed from the trunk of liberty, were to remain in permanent hibernation.
Recent changes in the constitutional architecture of the state and nation, hearkening back to pre-revolutionary days, are not merely academic questions, but practical assaults on imprescriptible liberties affirmed by state and federal constitutions. And it should not take a declaration of bankruptcy to move academic institutions in the state such as Yale and UConn to protest the retrogression.
Nearly a year after Coronavirus arrived in the United States from China, we know: 1) that the science of Coronavirus was never a “science” in the true sense of the word; 2) that political prescriptions to end the pandemic have not ended the pandemic because such prescriptions – mask wearing, forced isolation, widespread testing, the closing of businesses and schools in Connecticut -- were prophylactics only and not curative measures; 3) that a preponderance of Coronavirus related deaths in Connecticut and the northeast occurred in nursing homes ill prepared to handle the pandemic; 4) that Coronavirus political prescriptions and the state’s sinking economy are inseparably connected; and 5) that herd immunity created by the swift distribution of various vaccines is curative and, as yet, highly experimental, because the vaccines producers have leap-frogged over animal experimentation.
Lamont, out-rigged with extraordinary pre-constitutional powers, has yet to include state representatives in the General Assembly among other “necessary” state workers that will be among the first to receive the new vaccines. Vaccinated, members of the General Assembly and the Judicial Departments may quickly resume their constitutional duties and recover from King Ned their constitutional obligations.
It was Thomas Paine, one of the archangels of the American
Revolution, who said, “Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must,
like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.” Paine also warned, “Character
is much easier kept than recovered.” Once lost, the character of the American
Republic, intimately bound up with the doctrine of the separation of powers – legislative,
judicial and executive – cannot be easily restored. In a state in which
everything has been turned on its head, the way forward is the way back to
sanity and constitutional governance.
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