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| Duff |
The whole aim of
practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be
led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them
imaginary -- H. L. Mencken
The disjunctions grate on our sensibilities. A front page,
above the fold story that appeared in a Hartford
paper the day after majority Democrats in the General Assembly voted to
extend Governor Ned Lamont’s emergency powers was jarring.
We know from this and other media accounts that Coronavirus
is on the wane in Connecticut. If the emergency is largely over in the state,
what is the purpose of extending emergency powers first granted to Lamont
during a true emergency, now hobbling off the political stage?
Initially, the emergency power trigger was pulled by
legislators who supposed, when Coronavirus moved from Wuhan, China through New
York to Connecticut, that hospitals would be overrun by afflicted patients, in
which case hospitals would be unable to provide ordinary care to patients in
need of care. That fear has been removed for a long time. Governor Andrew Cuomo’s emergency powers have been removed, much too late of course.
A short time ago, Lamont was encouraging people in
Connecticut to get back to work.
The vote to extend for a fifth time Lamont’s emergency
powers, first executed in March of 2020, was highly partisan. Indeed, most
activity in a General Assembly that has during the administration of two
Democrat governors frozen Republicans out of participatory budget negotiations can
only be described by a remnant of objective reporters in the state as partisan.
All Republicans in the General Assembly opposed the emergency
powers extension. Nearly all Democrats, but for 9 House members and 4 Senate
members, voted to extend Lamont’s plenary powers two additional months through September.
The final partisan vote in the House was 73 Democrats in
favor, 56 Republicans voting no; in the Senate, 19 Democrats favored the
measure, 15 Republicans voted no. At least 13 Democrats thought the extension
of emergency powers was unnecessary, and their position aligns with reality
based facts.
It is intellectually jarring to be told that schools should
be open, the experiment in virtual education having failed most conspicuously
in cities, that restaurants may forgo prior crippling restrictions, that
facemasks are no longer necessary outside, that Connecticut has been for some
while re-opened for business -- and yet the extraordinary plenary powers that
occasioned the first large-scale business shutdown in Connecticut’s history, with
an almost certain 10 year recession to follow, must be extended because …
According to some Democrat leaders, the extension of powers
will facilitate the receipt of federal funds. This is true only in the sense
that autocrats move more quickly than legislatures. Caesar, Stalin, Hitler and
Mao, autocrats all, were certainly efficient – and all powerful.
However, in a republican (small “r”) form of government,
there is nothing a governor may do alone that he cannot do with the
participation of a legislature, especially one that is dominated by members of
his own party. Most particularly in Connecticut, it is not true that
representative government will make the receipt of federal funds impossible.
We are, for good or ill, a one party state. This has been
the case for decades in Connecticut cities, breeding and harvesting grounds for
Democrat campaign votes. Connecticut’s one party cities are, most of them, economic
and cultural basket cases. Just ask any Mom in Connecticut’s larger cities
whose children have been lethally assaulted by other children whether one party
rule has ushered in the economic and social Eden they expected when they voted
Democrat instinctively during the last few decades.
Leading Democrats in the General Assembly acknowledge that
the pandemic’s fangs have been pulled. “It’s
almost like it’s back to normal times two with the traffic,’ said Democrat Senate
majority leader Bob Duff of Norwalk: “Has anybody been to a store or the
beaches? They’re packed. The restaurants are open. Stores are open. Beaches are
crowded.” And he adds, jarringly, “We’re here because we still want to make
sure we’re keeping people healthy and safe. ... We are putting federal funding
in jeopardy if we don’t do this resolution [extending the plenary powers of the
governor] today ... $32 million a month for food for people of this state. We
don’t want to leave over $2 million a month for housing from FEMA.”
Behold Duff’s hobgoblin: FEMA will shut down federal funding for
housing if the state legislature is unwilling to surrender its NORMAL
constitutional obligations to an autocratic governor who can, because the
legislature has erected insufficient borders on emergency powers, issue as many diktats
as he likes for the next two months and beyond. If a governor may reduce his
autocratic diktats from 300 to 11, why may he not add to the 11 any diktat he
thinks necessary, however loosely his executive order is related to “keeping
people healthy and safe”?
When, if ever, will some courageous reporter remind Duff: 1)
that the people of Connecticut want HIM to oversee gubernatorial overreach
BEFORE diktats are issued; 2) that he IS the legislature, the law making body
of Connecticut; 3) that the governor is supposed to execute the laws Duff makes;
and 4) that legislators are not supposed to defer supinely to laws the
governor choses to execute by diktat.
Majority Democrat legislators are singularly uninterested in
exercising their constitutional and NECESSARY powers because …
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