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Nothing is written in stone yet, the Associated Press cautioned the morning after Vote Day, but:
“For weeks, Republicans predicted a ‘red wave’ would carry
them to power in Congress, as voters repudiated majority Democrats for failing
to tame skyrocketing inflation and address worries about rising crime.
“The reality appeared far different early
Wednesday.
“Rather than a wholesale rejection of President Joe Biden
and his party, the results were far more mixed as returns
from Tuesday’s midterms trickled in.”
This is good news for Democrats, although Republicans appear
to have captured the US House of Representatives, a troublesome acquisition at
a time when partisan U.S. Congressional activity has been used to bruise
Republicans before elections.
In Connecticut, the
results were not quite as “mixed.” Democrats secured their majority position in
the General Assembly, retained all their seats in Connecticut’s U.S.
Congressional Delegation, and there were no changes in the Democrat dominated
Constitutional Offices.
CTMirror reported: “The race was called in favor of Lamont by both ABC News
and Fox News, leading the governor to take to the stage in Hartford shortly
after 11:30 p.m. to declare victory. The Associated Press called it for Lamont
just before 1 a.m.”
Governor Ned Lamont, full of his usual eupeptic uplift, was
quoted: “Now we all come together. We work together as one, because that’s what
Connecticut always does. That’s the Connecticut difference right?”
Wrong.
The Democrat hegemony in Connecticut, ever since the
elevation to the governor’s office of Dannel – please don’t call him “Dan” –
Malloy, has consistently rebuffed Republicans in the General Assembly.
For one brief shining moment a few years back, parity in one
chamber of the General Assembly forced the Democrat leadership in both chambers
to “work together as one” with Republicans, and a budget cap that required the
hegemony to dump a portion of future budget surpluses into a Rainy Day Fund
produced a large budget surplus.
Democrats have now reasserted a nearly veto-proof majority
in both chambers. The enforcers of the
Democrat hegemony are President Pro Tem of the Senate Martin Looney and Speaker
of the House Matt Ritter, both progressives, neither of whom are inclined to share
power or influence with moderate Republicans because – they don’t have to.
Looney and Ritter need not march to the tune of Republican drummers.
The election returns, in the absence of a contrarian media,
point to a continuance of the Democrat Party hegemony. The hegemony must simply
pretend to include Republicans in their deliberations, but on all important
points Connecticut’s progressive Anschluss will continue unobstructed. The election returns mean – if election
returns mean anything at all – that progressive legislators in Connecticut have
a mandate to march forward.
And they will, even
if they must step over the prostrate bodies of Lamont and a handful of
Democrats who privately, one supposes from Lamont’s post-election remark, long
for the days of a vibrant two party system pulling at the oars and pushing
Connecticut forward toward personal liberty and prosperity.
The election was a
solid win for Lamont, who defeated his Republican rival, Bob Stefanowski, by
double digit numbers. As expected, Democrats routed Republicans in the state’s
large cities and in the wealthy inflation proof and guilt ridden suburbs of
Fairfield County; nothing new there.
A preponderance of
the media in Connecticut believes Lamont is a Democrat centrist at a time when
the moderate center of the state “cannot hold,” to quote William Butler Yeats:
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate
intensity.”
In a post-election
remark, Lamont struck a note of gentle resistance to the leftward
drift of his own party: “I said probably 200 times, ‘I don’t want more taxes,
but I don’t mind more taxpayers.’ And I hope everybody got my message on that.
And when I say more taxpayers, that means growth and opportunity. Everything I
do is gonna be looking through that lens of growth and opportunity.”
But the Democrat
Party in Connecticut, driven by a progressive afflatus, believes mostly in the
growth of state government and has in the past looked askance at all attempts
to control spending. Connecticut’s budget has tripled since the non-income tax
days of Democrat Governors Ella Grasso and Bill O’Neil. Former Governor Lowell
Weicker’s income tax produced swollen budgets and progressively diminishing
surpluses, which soon went up in smoke.
Some years after he
had retired from politics, Weicker was heard to moan, “Where did it all go?”
In the very near
future, Lamont had better do more than caution gently, “I don’t want more
taxes, but I don’t mind more taxpayers.”
He’d better sharpen
his veto pen.
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