Stefanowski and pals |
Hartford Courant columnist Kevin Rennie, along with a posse of other non-partisan Connecticut reporters and commentators, have noted a slip-up made by Republican gubernatorial hopeful Bob Stefanowski.
Stefanowski told Hearst and WFSB that he supported a woman’s
right to abortion “in the first trimester” of the birth process and then a day
later corrected himself. Connecticut law allows abortion until the fetus is
“viable.”
Stefanowski said, “I misspoke last night, and anybody who
has been following this campaign closely knows it. Nothing about may campaign
has changed… I’ve said for months that
Connecticut’s law won’t change when I’m governor – and it won’t. Period. Full
Stop.”
Not enough, Rennie commented. “Stefanowski
appeared not to have understood the magnitude of his blunder.” Perhaps, Rennie speculated, “the former
payday executive has never been fluent in the law of the reproductive rights in
Connecticut.
Worse, “Robert of Arabia used the conclusion of his
statement to repudiate the tone he struck a few paragraphs before. Stefanowski
blames Democrat [Governor Ned] Lamont for the attention paid to the former loan
shark’s confusion on the state of reproductive law. Stefanowski says the
abortion fiasco is a diversion from Lamont’s support [of] the police
accountability bill that the Republican has been highlighting in the frantic
final days of the campaign. Just don’t ask him to explain it.”
Only Democrats, it would appear, in Rennie's universe are
permitted to amend misspeaks -- they rarely do, because oversight among
Connecticut’s commentariate is lacking.
Is anyone at the Harford Courant keeping a count of
President Joe Biden’s frequent misspeaks or U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s
grand misspeaks at a communist gathering in New Haven, or his serial misspeaks
concerning his military service in Vietnam? Blumenthal is up for re-election in
the 2022 contest.
Stefanowski’s position on abortion in Connecticut has been hashed
and rehashed. The Supreme Court has ruled that state legislatures, not judges,
not the federal government, not governors, not progressive leaning political
commentators -- but legislatures-- must determine the legal boundaries of
abortion in the various states.
The boundaries on abortion in Connecticut were set in
statutes decades ago when the Democrat dominated General Assembly produced legislation
that folded Roe v Wade into
Connecticut’s law. By affirming that state legislators should decide the parameters
of abortion, the Supreme Court, at the same time, removed legal opposition to
abortion from anyone but state legislators.
People on the left for whom abortion rights are nearly an
article of faith approaching a religious doctrine continue to suggest that the
Supreme Court, in its Dobbs v. Jackson
Women’s Health Organization decision, has abolished abortion. Only state
legislators may abolish or regulate abortion. The Supreme Court did NOT rule
that Connecticut’s General Assembly may not determine the boundaries of
abortion in Connecticut. In fact, just the opposite is true.
Connecticut governors, not excepting Stefanowski and Lamont,
are constitutionally obligated to execute laws passed by the state’s General
Assembly. That is why we call governors “chief executives.” Their primary
constitutional obligation is faithfully to “execute” congressional law.
Rennie knows this, Lamont knows this, Stefanowski knows
this, the vanishing Editorial Board at the Hartford Courant knows this, the
head of Planned Parenthood in Connecticut knows this, and all the angels and
saints in Heaven know this.
The mute protests of aborted fetuses in Connecticut will
have been rendered pointless shortly after the last breath of the pre-born is
drawn. Fetal defense among progressives is practically non-existent in
Connecticut. Courts, in past awkward decisions, have agilely moved past the
“science” of birth, which holds that a fetus, at any stage of pregnancy, is
qualitatively and biologically different than other “parts of a woman’s body,”
yet another unexploded political myth. A fetus is in no sense “like” other “parts
of a woman’s body” – a removable appendix, say, or a decayed tooth.
Indeed, when natural birth is not aborted, the born fetus
may possibly, 30 years following birth, win a U.S. Congressional seat and
proceed to argue awkwardly, as U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal has done, that Big Abortion
should alone be the only exception to the Blumenthal rule that any large and
profitable business enterprise may not escape reasonable legislative
regulation.
Stefanowski need not retreat in any of his remarks from the
plain findings of science or political philosophy or religious presuppositions
when he insists that, as a practical and Constitutional matter, governors
cannot do other than execute the laws of the state.
The recent Supreme Court decision ratifies and reinforces
Connecticut’s abortion statue. Constitutional provisions require Stefanowski to
faithfully execute laws passed by the General Assembly.
But Stefanowski’s often repeated pledge that he would not –
because he cannot – change Connecticut’s laws, and his insistence that
frail human beings sometimes make verbal errors, apparently are not persuasive
enough for former Republican state assemblypersons like Rennie, a lawyer whose
acquaintance with statutory and Constitutional law has in the past led him
towards right reason and non-partisan judgment.
So then, what would be persuasive enough for the abortion
rights grand inquisitors? Nothing less than a public whipping in the upcoming
gubernatorial battle with Lamont would suffice. Even then, a public auto-da-fé
might more adequately purify the public conscience.
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