 |
| Looney, Lamont and Duff |
The government of the United States and, derivatively, the government of Connecticut is, we were told by our fifth grade teachers, a three stroke engine containing executive, legislative and judicial departments.
Each of the three branches of government is separate but
equal. The separation is a result of functional differences: the legislature is
constitutionally authorized to make laws governing the state, the executive department
to enact the laws made by the legislature, and the judicial department to exact
just punishment upon law breakers. In addition, state and national appellate
courts, including high courts such as the U.S. Supreme Court and state Supreme
Courts, review laws, striking down those
that are deemed unconstitutional. The three branches of government are equal in
power and moral authority -- provided each operates according to Constitutional
prescriptions.
My fifth grade teacher, Sister Immaculata, knew all this and
passed on to her students the above accurate depiction of the American Way and,
at the time, there was not a single state legislator, governor or judge in Connecticut
who might have found fault with her presentation.
For more than a whole year, the state of Connecticut has
been operating with a one-stroke engine, chugging along as best it can, we are
told, owing mostly to a Coronavirus pandemic. The reaction to that pandemic here
in Connecticut has been, to use correctly a much abused expression, an un-American
reversion to a pre-constitutional order.
We as a nation shed autocratic government when, following a
Continental Congress, the nation was founded somewhere between 1776 and 1788, after
New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the Constitution –
not, as the editors of the New York Times proclaimed in the “1619 Project”,
when the first slaves set foot on the continent.
“One of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare
their independence from Britain,” the historical revisionists of the 1619
Project proclaimed, “was because they wanted to protect the institution of
slavery." Their positioning the “founding” of the United States in 1619,
the authors explained following a barrage of criticism from notable historians,
was “metaphorical.”
Sister Immaculata, who knew what a metaphor was and was not,
might have agreed with the author’s lightheaded, metaphorical emendation.
Senator, now Vice President Kamala Harris, said at the time,
"The 1619 Project is a powerful and necessary reckoning of our history. We
cannot understand and address the problems of today without speaking truth
about how we got here." Andrew Sullivan, by no means a right
winger, noted that the Project’s view of slavery was well worth hearing, but it
had been presented in “a biased way under the guise of objectivity.” The left
did not receive the Project’s revisionism affably. The World Socialist Web Site labeled the
Project a politically motivated "falsification of history" wrongly
centered around racial rather than class conflict, and Adolph L. Reed Jr., a Marxist political
scientist, rudely dismissed the 1619 Project as "the appropriation of the
past in support of whatever kind of 'just-so' stories about the present are
desired.”
Roundly derided, the Project has never-the-less made its way
into America’s cancel culture outposts of higher education, and Connecticut, on
the brink of shaking off the Coronavirus menace, appears to be waddling its way
to an autocracy based purely on legislative cowardice and super-efficient government.
Stalin, one of the two principal bloodstained autocrats of the 20th
century – the other was Chairman Mao of communist China – probably would have
greeted the notion of an American suspension of the doctrine of the separation
of powers as a bridge to the
Marxist-Leninist dystopia.
Now we all know that millionaire Governor Ned Lamont of Connecticut
is no Marxist. But Lamont clearly is not committed to the doctrine of the
separation of powers, which is to Marxist-Leninism and quasi-Marxist-Leninist progressive
utopians what the Coronavirus vaccine is to the expiring pandemic.
Lamont and the progressive Democrat controlled General Assembly,
which has not for a full year formally assembled to conduct in public the
public’s business, like the efficiency of autocracy. So did Julius Ceasar, Czar
Nickolas of Russia, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, and King George of England.
Anti-republican autocrats like pulling regulatory rabbits out of
anti-separation of powers top hats. They dislike the messy public exposure that
is a necessary part of republican government. And they like to conduct the
public’s business in previously smoke filled private caucus chambers. The
clamor of democracy they regard as an impediment to good government, and the
strictures of constitutions they view an impertinence to efficient governance.
Most recently Superior Court Judge Thomas
Moukawsher threw a mud pie at Connecticut politicians comfortable with
Ceasarism, Czarism, Kaisarism and Lamontism, when he wrote in a “Memorandum
of Decision on Summary Judgment” that the “how” of republican government
cannot summarily be dismissed as unimportant. “General Statutes §28-9” the judge ruled, “must include a way for the
General Assembly to disapprove all orders the Governor issues under the
statute,” and “For his orders to date
(emphasis mine), the Governor must submit his orders to the General Assembly to
be ratified or rejected.”
President Pro Tem
of the State Senate Martin Looney was undisturbed by the judge’s ruling. Asked recently to
speculate on whether the state Capitol in Hartford would remain closed to the
public until the legislative session ends on June 6, a phlegmatic Looney told a
Hartford
paper, “It is hard to predict right now.” Lamont’s numerous regulations
are yet to be reviewed by the Democrat dominated General Assembly, but it is
not difficult to predict that Lamont’s constitutionally questionable usurped
powers, due to expire April 20, will be extended by a slothful legislature perhaps
to mid-May. In politics, numbers matter, and Democrats, increasingly
progressive, have sufficient numbers to ride roughshod over minority
Republicans. What really is the point in having absolute power, if you are not
willing to abuse it?
Comments