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| Ritter and Unions |
In politics, power is golden. Indeed, power, not riches, is the coin of the political realm. In Connecticut, the Ritters, a power family, are the closest we have come to political royalty.
Courant journalist Chris Keating lays out the political
lineage of the Ritter clan in a piece titled “Hartford’s Ritter Family extends influence.”
“The Ritters,” Keating notes in the lede to his story, “a
Hartford family whose public service spans more than five decades, have arrived
at a level of political prominence and influence unseen in recent Connecticut
political history.
“The family has sent four members — a grandfather, two sons,
and a grandson — to the state Capitol as Democratic representatives in the
state legislature. Ritter family members now control powerful positions in the
General Assembly, state Supreme Court and among special-interest lobbyists.”
Matt Ritter, the incoming Democrat House Speaker, will be
herding progressive cats when the General Assembly session convenes on January
6, 2021 and adjourns 6 months later in June. Ritter replaces state employee
union factotum Joe Arsimowicz who, along with two leading Republicans, Senator
Len Fasano and Representative Themis Klarides, are leaving the General Assembly
at session’s end.
Ritter and his counterpart in the state Senate, President Pro Tem Martin Looney, may, if he
wishes, rule the roost without Republican support in the House or Senate. This
was former Governor Dannel Malloy’s preference, but Malloy’s heavy hand took a
toll on his popularity. And when he threw in the gubernatorial towel at the end
of his second term and accepted a position as Chancellor of the University of
Maine system, Malloy’s popularity was a burning wreck.
Democrat numbers in the General Assembly – a majority of 98-63
in the House and 24-12 in the Senate following the 2020 elections -- now allow
the party to run roughshod over Republican sensibilities. Democrats, it had not
been noticed by media savants in Connecticut, triumphed over Republicans by
means of a magician’s trick; they ran against the President Donald Trump, who
was not on the ballot in 2018 and who in 2020 was responsible for none of the
shutdown regulations imposed by the Democrat governor and the Democrat legislature.
However, the sticking point in Connecticut are the
progressive cats and, difficult as it may be to accept, some journalists in Connecticut’s left of center media
afflicted with an institutional memory who may not be willing to accept without
modest resistance the continuing deterioration of the state’s economy in the
post-Coronavirus era.
Ritter himself, a man of the House, may not be willing to
sell his family’s long service on behalf of Connecticut for a mess of
progressive-union pottage – which means he may be more willing than Arsimowicz
or Looney, a thoroughgoing progressive, to make common cause with Republicans
on matters that promote the prosperity of his state and the honor of the
General Assembly.
In days gone by, when Ritter’s grandfather, George Ritter,
was serving on the Hartford City Council, thereafter “spending 12 years at the
legislature starting in 1969,” as the Courant puts it, such solicitude for the
honor and prosperity of the state was brashly called patriotic. And the state
patriotism that burned in the heart of the grandfather may, as sometimes
happens, still light the darkness enshrouding the grandson.
Why should raw politics, the pursuit of power for power’s
sake, always be the victor in political battles? Honor in politics -- a genuine
love and solicitude for the state of Connecticut as such -- is more than
half the battle that must daily be fought. It is the whole battle,
always and everywhere; for politics without honor, a foresight that sees beyond
battles of the moment, is tyranny writ large or small.
The honor of the House demands that the House should convene
as usual and, as usual, do the public’s business. The legislature, House and
Senate together, a co-equal branch of government along with the chief executive
and the judiciary, represents the voice of the people, and that voice should be
heard loudly above the clamor of partisan divisions. The General Assembly must
not operate longer as a Coronavirus victim, metaphorically afraid of its own
shadow. The welfare of Connecticut depends upon the courage and patriotism of
members of the state legislature, and this body cannot function properly as an
agency that rents its constitutional prerogatives to governors or committee
chairmen or union representatives.
Likewise, the judiciary is not, nor was meant to be, the
servant of the governor; it is the servant of the law, and cannot perform its
proper function hiding behind Coronavirus flower pots.
To be a representative body, the House over which Ritter
will preside must first be, and Ritter's first and most difficult duty will be to
restore the republican (small “r”) character of the House. Lincoln said rightly
“a house divided against itself cannot stand.” But an Outhouse -- simply an instrument
of power politics -- pretending to be a House should not be permitted to stand
at all.
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