"If you've been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else's expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves." – Thomas Sowell
How should we account for the steady gains made by Connecticut
Democrats in the recent municipal elections?
There are people in Connecticut whose daily lives are
negatively affected by high taxes, extravagant spending and consequent
inflation, which reduces the purchasing power of money. And there are people
whose lives are not materially affected by any of these political plagues.
Voting patterns suggest that those unaffected belong to the
upper middle classes who live in such places as Greenwich and West Hartford,
towns once reliably red, now purple verging on blue. High taxes and extravagant
spending by federal and state governments are viewed in such places as
survivable nuisances.
Democrat governors are used to bailing out heavily indebted
cities, and the cities happily elect Democrats, even in places that appear to
be politically corrupt such as Bridgeport.
Large cities in Connecticut have lain captive in Democrat
hands, some of them, for the past half century. Republicans have very nearly
written off the state’s larger urban areas.
Connecticut’s media, chiefly for business reasons, support the
all-Democrat members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation because,
just as you cannot get water from a stone, so you cannot get news from out of
office Republicans. Moving tax money – and political power – from
municipalities to state coffers and beggarly urban footstools work well for
Democrat big-spenders who routinely pass off their debts to ever dwindling
future generations.
Culturally, Connecticut, like most New England states, has
been trending far left for quite some time, and it is culture that is the
moving hand in politics.
In Connecticut, a state that codified Roe v. Wade in its statutes in 1990, more than three decades ago, Democrats
continue to use the abortion issue as a pry-bar to separate an undifferentiated
pro-abortion electorate from a dwindling pro-life electorate, and never mind
that abortions in Connecticut have been for decades, in the words of former
President Bill Clinton, “safe, legal” and by no means “rare.”
For all practical purposes, Connecticut easily might be
regarded as the abortion state. One would never know it by attending to the
political programs of Democrat cultural proponents. Clearly, abortion as a
political issue should have been “off the table” when Connecticut more than
three decades ago codified Roe v. Wade
in its statutes.
Abortion as a political issue has been kept alive by the
all-Democrat members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation, which
wrongly fears that state’s abortion statute may at any moment be repealed by a
Supreme Court that most recently, in Dobbs
v. Jackson Women’s Health, shifted decision making in the matter of
abortion from courts to state legislatures. Connecticut’s General Assembly, the
state’s legislature, is overwhelmingly Democrat.
The worry among pro-abortion Democrats in Connecticut that
the state’s pro-abortion statute has been put in jeopardy by Dobbs is a false flag.
Immediately after the Dobbs
decision was rendered, Nina Totenberg and Sarah McCammon of National Public Radio reported:
“Writing for the majority, he [Chief Justice Samuel Alito] said forthrightly
that abortion is a matter to be decided by states and the voters in the states.
‘We hold,’ he wrote, that ‘the Constitution does not confer a right to
abortion.’ As to what standard the courts should apply in the event that a
state regulation is challenged, Alito said any state regulation of abortion
[pro or contra abortion] is presumptively valid and ‘must be sustained if there
is a rational basis on which the legislature could have thought’ it was serving
‘legitimate state interests, including ‘respect for and preservation of
prenatal life at all stages of development.’”
The Democrat majority in Connecticut’s legislature has rarely
fretted that a “respect for and preservation of prenatal life at all stages of
development” would overthrow its guiding legislative statute. Connecticut’s
General Assembly, the state’s legislature, is overwhelmingly Democrat and
pro-abortion. Its Senior U.S. Senator, Dick Blumenthal, has aggressively
opposed every legislative interference with the nation’s chief abortion
factory, Planned Parenthood, and Blumenthal, also a proponent of euthanasia,
certainly is not in danger of losing office owing to his extreme positions on
abortion.
Then too, abortion is not the only political issue worth the
attention of Connecticut’s governors and state legislatures.
As elsewhere in the nation, the question of debt and
inflation -- a devaluation of currency that boosts the costs of products and
services -- remains foremost in people’s minds. There are two solutions to
improvident debt, one of them politically unlikely in the minds of most
neo-progressives in Connecticut’s General Assembly. You either reduce future
spending, so that the children and grandchildren of present taxpayers will be
relieved of the ever-growing cost of government, or you boost taxation and
rigorously apply the tax increases to debt payment. The recent history of
getting and spending in Connecticut strongly suggest that neo-progressive state
legislators are averse to both solutions.
The cowardice of state legislators is boundless. In office
political campaigners, mostly Democrats, have discovered that fake problems are
much easier to resolve than real problems.
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