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| Ritter and Looney -- CTMirror |
The opposite of democratic government is government by caucus.
The state’s General Assembly has been crowded with Democrats
for the last few decades. The last time Connecticut's Senate and House had
majorities of different political parties was in the 1963 and 1965 sessions, nearly 50
years ago.
Democrats outnumber Republicans in the state by a two to one
margin, and unaffiliateds are slightly more numerous than Democrats. Previous
Democrat governors allied with Democrat caucus leaders have formed budgets and
created laws without effective input from Republican Party leaders, some of
them, such as former Governor Dannel Malloy, boastfully.
Connecticut has been a one-party government for decades.
Jodi Rell, now residing in state income tax free Florida, was the last
Republican governor; the General Assembly has been controlled by Democrats for
nearly half a century; all constitutional offices in the state are held by
Democrats; and the state’s U.S. Congressional Delegation is made up of all
Democrats. In addition, Democrats have been in command of the state’s larger
cities for decades as well.
One party government leads inescapably to government by
caucus, an arrangement in which a handful of party leaders are tasked with
herding partisan legislative cats. The cat-herders in the state’s dominant
Democrat Party are President Pro Tem of the Senate Martin Looney and Speaker of
the House Matt Ritter.
Government by caucus deprives both the minority Republican
Party and Democrat legislators of an effective and independent voice
in state government. Republicans are silenced by a partisan force
majeure, and Democrat legislators are forced to march to the tune of
the cat-herders. This is how democracy dies – not by a thrust of a sword
through the heart, but by a death of a thousand cuts.
Helping to administer the thousand cuts are various
progressive coalitions currently working mightily to steer a way around
Republican inspired spending caps.
CTMirror recently reported, “A massive coalition — consisting of nonprofit
social service agencies, nursing homes, cities and towns, advocates for
education and early childhood development, progressive policy groups and Child
Advocate Sarah Eagan — promised to defend legislators willing to work around
the spending cap to protect key services.
“In a separate announcement, a veteran Hamden lawmaker
announced the formation of a new Tax Equity Caucus, backed by nearly three
dozen representatives committed to redistributing state and municipal tax
burdens.”
“Equity” is simply a means of transferring assets from the
presumed “haves” to the presumed “have nots,” a process as old as the biblical
injunction, “to whom much is given,
much will be required” (Luke 12:48),” or Karl Marx’s adaptation, “From each
according to his ability, to each according to his needs," an injunction that
first appears in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, written in 1875.
Marx theorized that, as the socialist promise reached its fulfillment
in communism, there would be
enough goods and services to satisfy everyone’s needs – but first, the control
of goods and services must be wrested from a free market system and invested in
the Communist Party leadership, a form of monarchical socialism that is both
undemocratic and an affront to anyone who prizes liberty.
Historically, both
communism and fascism spring from the same socialist root. Hitler, Stalin and
Mussolini all emerged from the socialist womb at pretty much the same time.
Purely as a
practical matter, there is little difference between a one party state
administered by a caucus devoted to self-preservation and a socialist structure
in which democracy and small “r” republican government lie prostrate at the
feet of an ideologically driven ruling class.
This is the
correlation of forces that faces any governor of any party who, in a
hyperinflationary period, wishes to control spending, the primary engine of
both inflation and administrative growth. Well intentioned though he may be, Connecticut
Governor Ned Lamont, anxious to swell government coffers by increasing business
growth, is simply holding his finger in a surplus dam that is on the point of
bursting. And the neo-progressive numbers weigh against him.
President Joe Biden, the “moderate” Democrat turned neo-progressive, has added 7 to10 trillion dollars of spending to the national debt. California Governor Gavin Newsom, the Democrats’ default presidential choice, has just waved goodbye to two Nordstrom stores in San Francisco, driven from the City by the Bay, former Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi’s home turf, by gangs of shoplifters and streets filled with tent dwellers.
In the meantime,
ideological drift has pushed the Democrat Party of former President John
Kennedy off a leftist cliff. And,
bereft of all irony and satire, a quantifiably leftist
media has followed the
neo-progressive pied pipers towards journalistic oblivion. Presently, “only
16% of Americans have a great
deal/quite a lot of confidence in newspapers,” Gallup reported last year.
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