Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Connecticut is experiencing, the “experts” tell us, an “affordable” housing shortage. This is simply another way of saying too few housing opportunities are being offered in Connecticut to middle income people. The problem is not a lack of properties. There are in Connecticut post-industrial properties that may be converted into affordable rents for – to choose but one group, young Connecticut residents who graduate from Connecticut colleges with degrees that may earn them a spot in a vibrant Connecticut company.   The supply-side answer to a lack of housing is to increase the supply of housing. Easier said than done, say progressive politicians who favor replacing supply-side measures with the centralization of governmental force. The state should, progressive minded experts tell us, seize unproductive properties, rehabilitate them, and market them to productive landlords.   The problem, in many cases, is that the owners of such properties cannot sell them to prospect...

Connecticut Commentary will not here forecast the race of governor in Connecticut and contingent races. It may be more instructive to lay out for voters the correlation of political forces in Connecticut most of which favor Democrats.   The last Republican governor of Connecticut was Jodi Rell, who got along famously with Democrats, as did her predecessor, Governor John Rowland, untimely booted from office during his historic making third term. Governor Ned Lamont hopes to replicate Rowlands’s record.   Since Rell, Republican influence in the state’s General Assembly has diminished significantly. Democrats now enjoy a nearly veto-proof majority in the state legislature, not that there is any pressing need to veto measures supported by Lamont. All so called “moderate” Republican members of the state’s U.S. Congressional Delegation have been replaced by far less moderates Democrats who favor, unsurprisingly, leftist solutions to pressing budget deficits. Connecticut’s co...

Putin We know that most politicians pursue hyperbole as an avocation, and some are better at this than others. It is generally agreed that President Donald Trump is a master of the art of persuasion by exaggeration. But he is not a lone practitioner. In a serious democracy, practitioners would receive a death sentence for misleading the public.   In every hyperbole, a staple of all comedy, a lie lies asleep in bed with a truth. To lie is knowingly to say the thing that is not. The only lie consistently reproved by our free – and increasingly thin and costly newspaper media – is hypocrisy. But there is a saving grace to hypocrisy which, we are told, is “the compliment vice pays to virtue.” To mislead is a vice, but the politician who gives himself over to hypocrisy hangs onto the truth with one hand while bidding it good-bye – hopefully, temporarily – with the other. The hypocrite is not morally deracinated. He knows that the exception he relies upon really does prove, rather t...

Tong Fresh off a disaster in which one of his Assistant Attorneys  General, Seth Hollander, was referred by a judge to Connecticut’s Statewide Grievance Committee for having knowingly misled a court, Attorney General William Tong, all by his lonesome, is trying in a separate court filing to extend congressional immunity to Connecticut’s Freedom of Information Commission.   Mark Pazniokis of CTMirror puts it this way: “The office of Attorney General William Tong is asking a Connecticut court to rule for the first time in the 50-year history of the state Freedom of Information Act that all records relating to the “legitimate legislative activities” of the General Assembly are exempt from public disclosure.   “At issue is the meaning of the 55-word “speech or debate clause’ of the Connecticut Constitution. Like a similar provision in the U.S. Constitution, the clause creates a legislative privilege intended to protect legislators from arrest or other interference by ...

Weicker In any statewide contest between Republicans and Democrats in Connecticut, the Republican Party would face, many have argued, odds that cannot easily be overcome.   Current numbers stand against Republicans, Registered Democrats in Connecticut outnumber Republicans by a two-to-one majority.   Voters unaffiliated with either of Connecticut’s two major parties outnumber registered Democrats in Connecticut by a slight majority, and Democrats have for decades held major cities in Connecticut, the holy grail of power politics in the state. None of these fortifications are impregnable. To believe they are part of the permanent patrimony of the State Democrat Party is to yield to political despair and affirm the political superiority of hegemonic governance over that of a representative republic.   The enfeeblement of the state Republican Party begins with the political ascendancy of Senator Lowell Weicker. When Senator Weicker’s congressional ascendancy en...

Mamdani The Trinity of American Socialism – Father Bernie Sanders, a Vermont socialist; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and gang, the second persona of the Trinity; and Mayor of New York City in waiting Zohran Mamdani – it is intimated by a breathless, neo-progressive Eastern Seaboard media, are together the new face of the born-again Democrat Party. Mamdani has been regarded by some as the indispensable spirit completing the leftist Trinity.   The new face of the Democrat Party in New York City recently met at the White House with arch nemesis, President Donald Trump, who was cordial enough to forbear calling Mamdani a communist.   There is nothing strange in all this. Trump has met cordially with President of Russian Vladimir Putin, a communist proto-Stalinist. Putin began his military barrage of Ukraine by asserting that Ukraine was not even a country, and he has been for years attempting to reduce the non-country, inoffensive to Russia, to rubble. President Xi Jinping of China --...

Tong No one – least of all Connecticut Attorney General Willim Tong – should be surprised at Superior Court Judge Matthew Budzik’s ruling in a long-delayed case before his court. In his ruling, according to the Hartford Courant, “Superior Court Judge Matthew Budzik upheld every allegation two Avangrid gas subsidiaries made in lawsuits seeking to overturn year-old PURA rate decisions that not only denied the companies rate increases, but slashed then existing rates.”   Budzik’s ruling, tight and unequivocal, should be taught to prospective lawyers as a pristine example of what good lawyers may and may not do in defense of their clients. Hint: Remember, you are an officer of the court. At all costs, avoid misleading the court. If you fail to do so, you will do your client, your boss and your case irreparable harm on those occasions when the case is presented to a judge uncorrupted by political considerations.   Not only did Budzik decide the case rightly on its merits, h...

Lamont The title of a recent newspaper story reads, “Lamont’s bid for a third term could make him the longest serving governor since colonial era . ”   The colonial era, readers who have a nodding acquaintance with US history need not be reminded, was Connecticut’s pre-democracy era, a time when kings were kings and subjects were subject to the whimsey of monarchs.   The distinguishing characteristic of a monarchy, anyone associated with the “No Kings” movement would doubtless agree, is rule by a single executive – the king, his political court, and his political praetorian guard.   Thomas Jefferson, following in the intellectual footsteps of Voltaire, boldly declared himself an enemy of “every tyranny over the mind of man.” Jefferson kept a bust of Voltaire on his writing desk at Monticello. Modern journalists would do well to adopt Jefferson’s brash boast as their operative principle.   It is very much in doubt these days whether Jefferson’s offspring, the modern D...

Practical politics in Connecticut – that is, a politics of political action – is reserved only for in-office Democrat politicians. All others, including marginalized Republican political actors, are spectators of the sport, not participants. The entire Connecticut state Republican Party has been effectively benched for decades.   Democrats know that permitting Republicans in the state General Assembly to ventilate is harmless because, in a state in which a massive Democrat Party caucus determines political action, words alone do not give rise to political action.   Is this state of things a problem for our democracy?   The answer to that question is an unqualified “Yes!”   Partisan caucus politics is the opposite of democratic or republican politics.  In a vibrant two-party system, words that lead to political action are politically convincing because political action produces public consequences that cannot be distorted by otherwise convincing partisan politica...

Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont has finally declared he will run for a third term, a “feat that has been accomplished by only one other Connecticut politician during the past 200 years,” the Hartford Courant reminds us. Former Governor John Rowland was on his way to completing his third term in office when fate and corruption intervened.   The good news is that Lamont is not Zorhan Mamdani , the newly elected Mayor of New York City. Most Connecticut political commentators may agree that the state is not yet prepared for a socialist/communist putsch.   The not so good news, from Lamont’s perspective, is that the governor likely will be challenged in a Democrat Party gubernatorial primary by former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin among others.   “Lamont,” the Courant notes, “has been asked constantly by reporters when he will make the formal announcement, and he has repeatedly stated that he wanted to postpone the decision for as long as possible so that he could f...

Lamont Progressivism, socialism and communism historically have run progressively forward on the same ideological track. Here in the United States, progressivism was, among turn of the 20 th century Democrats, a moderate to liberal answer to socialism.   Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, the father of fascism, were at the beginning of their political careers energetic socialists. Progressive President Woodrow Wilson, students of history will recall, was responsible for tossing Eugene Debs in jail when the avowed socialist was impudent enough to run for president. In his acceptance speech as the Democrat Party’s primary choice for mayor of the Big Apple, socialist Zohran Mamdani quoted Debs approvingly and swore eternal enmity against President Donald Trump, successfully painted by Democrats as a menacing authoritarian, though decidedly not a socialist.   Anti-Trumpism has been a useful foil for state and national Democrats in off-year presidential elections, but the foil...

Mamdani "Democracy,” H.L. Mencken wrote, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."   The general public in New York City will not know what they have got until Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been in office for a few years. The   logical consequences of policy decisions take   some time to mature, and even then political analysts will long after be   at loggerheads squaring circles. We are just now finding out, for instance, that U.S. Senator Adam Schiff is a monumental but successful liar many years after he and other prominent Democrats, hoping to sink a future presidential campaign of Donald Trump, floated an improbable story that Trump was in cahoots with Russian President Vladimir Putin to deny Hillary Clinton a fair shot at becoming the nation’s first female president.   The New York Post published, two days prior to the election on its opinion page, a piece titled “ 20 reasons to vote against NYC may...