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| Robyn Porter |
Very soon Governor Ned Lamont and the Democrat majority in the state’s General Assembly will find themselves pressed between two large grindstones – public worker unions on the one hand and hard-pressed middle class workers and taxpayers only now starting to shake off with varying degrees of success the battering they have endured from the first state-ordered business shutdown in Connecticut’s history. The whole point of an unnecessary extension of gubernatorial plenary power is to delay the clash as long as possible.
Two recent rallies at the state Capitol building in Hartford – a murder row city, if one compares current murder and mayhem statistics with earlier data – shine a bright light on the struggle for what has often been called “the soul of the Democrat Party.” That struggle has been ongoing for decades, but at long last progressives in Connecticut appear to have captured the party’s heights. Nationally, Schumer, Pelosi, Biden and the leading lights of the Democrat Party appear to be on-board along with progressive state caucus leaders pulling hard at the oars. The tax-the-rich-crowd and state worker unions appear to be in a commanding position.
And don’t they know it!
Here is president of the state’s
largest health care workers’ union, SEIU 1199 New England, Rob Baril firing up the crowd attending the union rally: “We are tired of
being told to do more with less, we are tired of working year after year and
seeing our benefits reduced and seeing our wages flattened at the same time we
know that the wealthiest among us are doing better than ever.”
And behold union rabble-rouser Lyle
Scruggs, a political science professor at UConn, touching with a blow torch the
hearts and minds of other union pedagogues at the rally: “While lower taxes on
the wealthy in Connecticut — and residents like Gov. Lamont and his family —
certainly make it easier for them to pay for prep schools and private
universities, cuts in state support make it harder for the state’s working
families to afford a degree at a premier public institution.”
The average salary of a UConn
professor, according to Data Chronicle, is $150,000 per
year. To be sure, the salary is far less than the combined yearly salary of
millionaires Lamont and his wife, Annie Lamont, “a venture capitalist investing
in transformative companies and entrepreneurs,” according to her biography in
the Office of the Governor’s Official State Website. Annie
Lamont brings far more to the family supper table than the governor, whose
average salary is $150,000. While running for governor in 2018, Lamont
publicly released some tax information showing an “average adjusted gross
income of $3.6 million in each of the past five years, primarily in
investment income,” according to CTMirror. But Ned Lamont’s salary
ain’t peanuts either.
Rob Baril’s total compensation was $118,772
in 2019, according to Union Facts.com. The average salary for a far less privileged fast food attendant
is $48,000 per year. No one in the Democrat Party is proposing to make these
salary and benefit differentials more equitable by, for example, reducing the
take home pay and benefits of union administrators and progressive party
honchoes. When Saint Francis started his order, he appeared naked before his
bishop as an indication that he personally had accepted the renunciation of
goods that early became a distinguishing mark of the Franciscans.
There are no saints in Connecticut
politics. But there are ambitious autocrats such as “King Ned” and the usual whips
in the Democrat dominated General Assembly, which once again decided on
Wednesday – a day that will not, but should, live in infamy – to reinvest “King
Ned” with plenary powers, just in case someone in the cowardly Democrat caucus
should catch the sniffles and suppose they will die from a new strain of
Coronavirus.
Among the 9 Democrats in the House and 4 in the Senate who broke with their party on the question of extending the governor's emergency powers at a time when the emergency had past was Representative Robyn Porter of New Haven, who heroically arose from a lock-step Democrat bunch of bananas on Wednesday.
Tired of being whipped by caucus leaders
of her party, Porter said – publicly! -- “There was a time when I feel this
executive order power for the governor was in order and appropriate, however I
do not currently feel that way. I know that some of us who have decided to vote
no are being told that there will be ramifications from the governor’s office.
I want to put that on the record, because I am voting no today and will not be
bullied, I will not be threatened, I will not be intimidated and I take offense
– tremendous offense – to the act of even putting that in the atmosphere.”
So then, we have one outspoken St.
Francis tucked in a partisan swamp of arrogant pretenders. Perhaps there may be a slender chance yet for
representative democracy. No one should doubt that Porter will in the future pay for
her courageous independence. And Connecticut just now is rich in federal money that may be used, temporarily, to stuff the usual deep pockets of union leaders, always indispensable to Democrats in the coming campaign season.
The more things change, the French say, the more they remain the same.
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