The Blumenthal Ascension, Inflation, And Other Irritants

Columnist and former Editor of the Journal Inquirer Chris Powell has noted: “Prompting suspicion that he seeks to follow in his father's footsteps, state Rep. Matt Blumenthal, D-Stamford -- son of U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, formerly Connecticut's attorney general -- proposes amending the state law that purports to require the attorney general to have 10 years of experience in the "active practice" of law.

“Presumably Matt Blumenthal will have only nine years of ‘active practice’ in 2026, when the next election for attorney general will be held and the current occupant of the office, William Tong, is expected to run for governor instead. So Blumenthal's legislation would reduce the ‘active practice’ requirement to six years.”

The legislation is unnecessary, Powell adds: “For the restrictive legislation he seeks to amend is plainly invalid.

“Connecticut's Constitution says: ‘Every elector who has attained the age of 21 years shall be eligible to any office in the state, but no person who has not attained the age of 21 shall be eligible therefor, except in cases provided for in this constitution.’

“The Constitution imposes no other requirements for holding the attorney general's office. There is nothing about being a lawyer or having particular experience as one.”

God, and the powers that be in Connecticut, certainly has smiled on the Blumenthals, father and son.

Current U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal occupied the Attorney General’s office for nearly two decades. He was shoehorned out of the office when U.S. Senator Chris Dodd moved from the Senate to Tinseltown, where Dodd, previously poor and abstemious, began to pull in millions as Chairman and Chief Lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA); this after “repeatedly and categorically insisting that he would not work as a lobbyist,” according to Glen Greenwald, a political white lie routinely tolerated by Connecticut’s pro-Democrat media.

We are here witnessing a shifting of pawns and knights and bishops on the usual Connecticut Party chess board.

All the members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation, including U.S Senators Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, and all the members of Connecticut’s Constitutional Offices, including present Attorney General William Tong, are Democrats. The Attorney General’s unbesieged castle has been held by Democrats for 64 years. In 1959, when the last Republican Attorney General left office, the 77 year old Blumenthal was 13 and, one may imagine, plotting in his heart to become Attorney General for two decades, afterward moving effortlessly into the U.S. Senate.

One may be certain of this: In one-party states, there are no unanticipated consequences – only unanswered supposals. If the Attorney General’s spot is to be made available to Matt Blumenthal in 2026, it must be vacated by Tong, who will be moving … where? Perhaps into the U.S. Senate, an office to be vacated at some point in the near future by Dick Blumenthal, the father and progenitor of Connecticut’s newest prospective political clan, political sinecures thereafter to be handed down from office holder to office holder in the manner of the Kennedy clan of Massachusetts.

These prospective political chits depend upon which party is to dominate in the upcoming 2026 presidential election. A presidential win by Republicans could cause a political mudslide, even here in reliably blue Connecticut. Robert Burns’ “wee mousie” has taught us that “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men/Gang aft agley,/ An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,/For promis’d joy!”

What Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin used to call “the correlation of political forces” are, here in the United States and in the world, undergoing rapid change. An assault on once basic and reliable institutions – what Edmund Burke and  G.K. Chesterton used to call “the little platoons of democracy” -- has been underway for the past few decades, and the left has all but captured several important platoons.

China’s President Xi Jinping has successfully used American power to subvert American power; President Joe Biden, in an effort to make America non-Trumpian again, has undermined the U.S. energy sector and thrown open the southern border to illegal infiltration; and inflation, a monstrous hidden tax, has devalued our currency.

Way back in 1919, John Maynard Keynes noted in his essay The Economic Consequences of the Peace:  “Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.”

Some if not all of these chickens may come home to roost well before 2026. Even now people in Connecticut are beginning to feel the pinch of the cost of a dozen eggs. They also know that whenever the rate of inflation, impossibly high already, exceeds salary increases, they are poorer because of cultural and politically caused inequities in the free market.

And by what alchemy, some middle class workers are beginning to ask, do we reduce inflation by inflating the money supply to pay for exorbitant spending, blithely passing on our insupportable debts to our children and our children’s children?