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| Lamont |
But I have promises to keep –
Robert Frost
In a recent
CTMirror story, “In third year, still an uncertain
relationship for Lamont and legislators”, reporter Mark Pazniokas harvests the following quote from Governor Ned
Lamont:
“Gov. Ned Lamont
has had two very different years in office. During the first, he had to contend
with the Connecticut General Assembly, but not COVID-19. During the second, he
faced COVID, but not lawmakers.
“Any guess which he
found easier?
“’Obviously, this
last year has been very different. I mean, the legislature went home. That was
amazing. We got a lot done,’ Lamont said recently. Then laughing, he added,
‘You know, I kind of liked it.’
“A joke, perhaps.”
The joke, perhaps,
may have been intended to raise a chuckle among Connecticut’s legacy media but,
if the present Coronavirus trajectory holds true, Lamont will soon find that
he must negotiate with a reinvigorated General Assembly, a
body controlled by progressives on the hunt for new taxes. That the General
Assembly is controlled by progressives is, some commentators in the state are
beginning to relize, no joke.
The state
legislature, we all know, has not assembled for about a year, and recently the
General Assembly, one of the oldest political bodies in the
nation, has voted, virtually of course, to extend Lamont’s ill
defined “emergency powers” another three or four months. The Democrat dominated
General Assembly voted, in other words, to continue to make itself irrelevant for
a few additional months. The open-ended extension benefits two political bodies
– the state’s Democrat governor and the long recessed Democrat dominated
General Assembly that has easily escaped voter accountability for the last
year.
The autocratic
powers presently wielded by Lamont simply dispense with what we here in the
“Constitution State” used to call representative democracy. Lamont has for more
than a year been given the opportunity to play Caesar with Connecticut’s budget
and its once free economic marketplace. Even Caesar, Rome’s first important
imperator, left Rome’s burgeoning marketplace relatively free of autocratic
control.
Caesarism has
always been a less troublesome mode of governing for chief executives than
constitutional republicanism, which tends to be rather raucous, transparent and
messy, involving as it does the consent of the governed by means of
proportional representation. But even during the Rome of Julius Caesar,
republicanism was always churning under the surface, and it’s doubtful that the
republican afflatus, operative in Connecticut ever since revolutionary
republicans of 1776 threw off the British monarchy, has been effectively
extinguished during the plague year.
As herd-immunity
increases and Coronavirus disappears, republican government in all its pristine
glory once again looms like a giant over the horizon. There are some political
leaders in Connecticut, as well as some thoughtless and timid members of
Connecticut’s legacy media, captives of incumbency, who suspect that Lamont
will not be up to the job of negotiating successfully with a legislature
dominated by progressives, whose chief ambition just now is to increase state
revenue, again, by dunning millionaires, instituting new road based taxes and
extending, once again, the borders of state spending. The more they get, the
more they want. The more they want, the better they feel. So, eat millionaires
at every meal.
Historically, most
progressive taxes – the federal income tax began as a one-percent tax on wealth
accumulation to pay off Civil War debt – trickle down to the broad middle
class. A quick glance at pay stubs will convince even accomplished masters of
progressive propaganda that a progressive tax, once levied, becomes less
progressive as it descends more broadly to the middle class, thus temporarily
satiating the ravenous appetite of special interests dear to progressives and
relieving legislators facing mounting debts of the necessity to cut
spending.
As the Coronavirus
plague recedes at some point in the near future, everyone in the state who
regards facemasks, however useful, as a sign of subordination to an
unrepresentative and overreaching chief executive and a useless legislature may
be inspired to create on the Capitol lawn an auto-de-fé in which
their masks may be publicly burned – oh happy day! -- much in the way bras were
burned in the 1960s by feminists liberating themselves from oppressive social
norms.
None of us in The
Constitution State should emerge from Hell with empty hands. Constitutions are
the indispensable foundations of republican, representative government. And the
further unmoored politicians become from their foundations, the more piratical
they will be.
In this the winter
of our discontent…
The woods are
lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises
to keep,
And miles to go
before I sleep,
And miles to go
before I sleep.
Frost’s promises
that must be kept, he makes clear in other of his poems, are the hitching posts
of the American Republic.
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