How Will We Know When It Is Over?

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? What can the governor do alone that he cannot also do with the full participation of a suitably masked representative state legislature? The U.S. Congress, in full throttle, is not cowering behind imagined future variants of Coronavirus. 

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!"