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| Sam Adams, journalist |
“It ain’t over till it’s over,” Yogi Berra once said about baseball games. But even as he said it, Berra knew when the game was up. Baseball games, like President Joe Biden’s disastrous approach to ending the long-war in Afghanistan, are time sensitive. After the ninth inning, the players most often return to the locker rooms, unless the game extends to extra innings.
The unanswered question before us now in Connecticut is:
What do you do when an emergency is no longer emergent? And the answer seems
obvious: You end extraordinary measures and return to a pre-emergency status
quo. Legislatively, a return to normalcy would involve a resumption of full legislative
and judicial activity, in accordance with constitutional prescriptions.
Everyone in Connecticut – including state legislators, a
majority of whom are Democrats – will unhesitatingly agree with the above
proposition. Indeed, some draconian measures thought necessary when Coronavirus
first hit these shores by way of China, are no longer necessary. A little more
than one year into an emergency in which most businesses were shuttered by plenary
orders of Governor Ned Lamont, most businesses in the state have now been unshuttered,
subject to far less severe limitations. No one will seriously doubt that economic
decision making power has returned to proper decision makers after Coronavirus was, wittingly or not, exported from a Chinese lab.
When the emergency is over, in the Berra sense, life may
resume its normal course. When the fire has been doused, the fire engines may
return to home base. When the flood waters have abated, life at the shoreline,
mightily disturbed by Mother Nature, may resume its pre-flood rhythm. Normalcy then
heals our wounds, life stirs once again, fears are put aside. The patient has
come home from a political hospice to take up the tattered ends of his life.
Right from the beginning of Coronavirus, everyone expected
that when herd immunity had taken hold, life would resume its normal course.
A full year after the Coronavirus vaccine had been widely administered, the
public reasonably expected that extraordinary emergency powers would diminish
in proportion to the number of people who developed herd immunity as a result
of vaccine inoculations or – more effective still, according to a major Israeli
study – natural immunity acquired by people unvaccinated who had survived
serious Coronavirus.
Indeed, people in Connecticut were being urged to take the
vaccine because by doing so they would become immune to infection. A recent
story in a Hartford Paper, “Lamont calls off [National] Guard
replacements,” bears a stunning subtitle, “With 93% compliant, governor
pledges to give ‘a couple of days’ before placing state employees on unpaid
leave.”
The 93% compliant figure – the percentage of state employees
who have received the Coronavirus vaccine – is, among state workers, far above
what any reasonable scientist would designate as “herd immunity.”
Danger, we know, never passes entirely, but the frightening
emergency of the year past has devolved. While the shadow of Coronavirus may
continue to darken some prospects, the fearsome bulk of the raving beast has
been reduced to a shadow of its former self.
And yet –AND YET! – our political institutions are still in
hospice. The Democrat dominated state legislature has been mummified for more
than a year, the state’s judiciary as well. Legislative business has for more
than a year been conducted by State House Speaker Matt Ritter and President Pro
Tem of the Senate Martin Looney, the whips of the state Democrat caucus, and Democrat
Governor Ned Lamont, whose plenary powers have been extended by dominant Democrats a sixth
time to February 15, 2022.
When will plenary government in Connecticut end? When will the engines of
small “r” republican governance, a fully operative legislature and an
independent judiciary, resume? How long can the state of Connecticut – the
“Constitution State”, no less – operate with one rather than three fully
operative branches of government? Does the Constitutional architecture of the
founders of our republic matter at all to the state’s largely progressive
legislators? And why are such troubling questions regarded by Connecticut’s
alternative government – two Democrat legislative leaders in collusion with a
governor – as academic only, rather than practical questions? At this point in a diminishing pandemic, are we burning
down our constitutional house to catch a mouse?
These are not questions that have not been answered because
they have not been asked. They have not been answered by Connecticut’s triumvirate
– Looney, Ritter and Lamont – because honest answers to such questions bears on
a sore political point. Democrats have given up on constituent representation
and thrown off the guiding principle of all republics – that republican governance
is legitimate only upon the assent of the governed – because they do not want
to be held responsible by an engaged citizenry and can best avoid true
republican governance by means of an outworn authoritarian, anti-Democratic, Ceasarism.
Reporters, editors and commentators should examine their
own consciences and shuck off the chains that weigh lightly upon them, bearing
in mind always Sam Adam’s contumacious curse: “If ye love wealth better than
liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of freedom, go
home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel or your arms. Crouch down and
lick the hand that feeds you; may your chains set lightly upon you, and may
posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!"
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