Democrats are suffering a continuing message problem concerning an extension of Governor Ned Lamont’s extraordinary emergency powers. Those autocratic powers should wax or wane depending upon the severity of the emergency.
At a State Capitol rally on July 13, a number of Republican
legislators protested before a crowd estimated by Capitol Police at 200-250
that Governor Ned Lamont did not need a sixth extension of powers to contain an
outbreak in Connecticut of the disappearing Coronavirus virus.
The Governor’s extraordinary powers were first applied in March
2020, at the start of the COVID-19 crisis, when, as now seems increasingly
likely, Coronavirus escaped from a gain-of-function lab in Wuhan, China.
The emergency at that time was that hospitals in the state
would be overburdened by infected patients. Those conditions, if ever present
in Connecticut, have disappeared over the course of time. At the present time,
speakers at the rally all seemed to agree, the extreme plenary powers of the
Governor are no longer necessary to contain a caged virus.
Worse than this, the extraordinary powers invested by the
General Assembly on Lamont, have seriously disturbed the ordinary process of
representative government in Connecticut. For more than a year, government in
Connecticut has been, owing to the closure of the General Assembly and
Connecticut’s court system, conducted in closed door sessions by a rump parliament,
a Democrat leadership caucus, politically aligned with the Lamont
administration.
Fairfield Republican State Representative Laura Devlin, who
had earlier voted in favor of festooning Lamont with necessary emergency
powers, noting that the pandemic had abated, put the matter plainly this way: “Enough
is enough,’' she said in a story printed a day following the rally in a Hartford paper. Lamont, she noted, “has
enjoyed having that control but it is time to get your legislators back at
work.”
A negative vote against an extension of extremist plenary
powers is a vote in favor of constitutional, representative government – that
is to say, ordinary governance. Lamont insists that he has pared down 300
gubernatorial edicts to a slender 11.
There is no reason why the General Assembly cannot execute an open, recorded vote on the edits Lamont
wishes to retain.
A vote to end plenary powers -- which has no shut-off valve
and can be resumed at any time and for any reason by an autocratic governor – is a vote
in favor of a resumption of representative government at the tail end of a
receding pandemic, Republican legislators insisted at the rally. The crowd
at the rally repeatedly burst into applause whenever it was suggested by any
of the speakers that individual members of the General Assembly unwilling to
execute their constitutional obligations should do their jobs – vote
transparently and publicly on all measure affecting their constituents – or
retire from the legislature.
No one in Connecticut ever voted to send to the General
Assembly partisan Democrat legislators who clandestinely and inadvisably defer
to a Governor of their own party swollen with plenary powers.
Partisan Majority Leader of the State Senate Bob Duff from
Norwalk begged to differ. And the state’s media should have noticed that it was
in his political interest to do so. Invisible votes cannot figure in the public’s
election year calculus.
“The pandemic is not over and the reason it’s not over is
because of people at the rally,” said Duff. “If the very people at that rally
would listen to science and would wear a mask when asked, we may not need some
of these continued emergency powers, but because they don’t believe in health
and science and they are doing everything possible to thwart any kind of common
sense, a lot of this still becomes necessary.”
No one at the rally was wearing a mask because the nominal
head of Duff’s Party told everyone in Connecticut it was no longer necessary to
wear masks outside at fresh air rallies. The same Governor – at the time of the
rally, vacationing at his ancestral estate in Maine – also vigorously
encouraged Connecticut workers to get back to work, presumably because the
pandemic had abated. Scientists were
telling him so; data compilers were telling him so; and perhaps his politically
battered conscience was telling him so.
The Republican minority, both at the rally and in the
General Assembly, who are demanding that Duff and other Democrat legislators publicly
vote up or down measures that usurp their own constitutional powers, are the
problem, Duff hinted, because they have not followed the disturbingly
contradictory political messaging of Dr. Anthony Fauci on mask wearing.
Duff is a little behind the times. It will be difficult in
the near future – for anyone who genuinely has been following the “science” – not
to imagine bats flying out of Fauci’s mouth when next he opens it at his too
frequent media availabilities.
In a Republic, as opposed to an autocracy, every political decision involves two components: 1) what shall be done about a problem? and 2) who shall decide what shall be done? In the American Republic, the answer to 2) has ever been the same: political decisions must be made openly by the legislative branch, executed by the executive branch, and reviewed when necessary by the judicial branch. This is normative, republican (small "r") governance. Plenary governance by a chief executive, however he may have come by his powers, is a repudiation of our Republic.
President of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy Carol
Platt Liebau, perhaps anticipating the reactions of legislators who would
rather run than rule, put a perfect period on the rally: “We the people of
Connecticut did our part to beat COVID. We locked down when we were told to do
it because we didn’t know better. We wore masks, we followed government
directives. But the emergency’s over … we know that and frankly, the governor
knows it, too. Being ruled by edict is a recipe for disaster … as free people,
we should claim for ourselves as many decisions as possible rather than meekly
bowing our heads to government demands.”
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