Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

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...

Tong Republican leader in a General Assembly disproportionally controlled by Democrats, State  Senator Stephen Harding of Brookfield, and six other Republicans have signed a letter addressed to Governor Ned Lamont demanding the resignation of associates of former Chairwoman of Connecticut’s  Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) Marissa Gillett, who recently surrendered her office.   The six Republican senators, the Hartford Courant tells us, “are asking if two of her [Gillett’s] subordinates will also leave their jobs, along with an assistant attorney general who represented the agency.   “In light of the recent stories regarding public confessions of the intentional misleading of a Connecticut Superior Court judge, have the following individuals been asked to turn in their resignations?” the senators asked Gov. Ned Lamont and Attorney General William Tong in a letter. Those mentioned thus far were “PURA’s General Counsel and Legal Director Scott Mus...

Tong The bottom line is this: Once a political matter moves from the political to the judicial arena, political pretentions crumble because Connecticut’s court system is not supposed to be a creature at the beck and call of a one-party state executive department. Even in a one-party authoritarian apparat, Connecticut’s independent and separate judiciary serves constitutionally as a buffer that blunts executive overreach. The judiciary operates according to judicial rules, not executive fiat, and its constitutional independence depends wholly upon the just judgment of judges.   In Judge Matthew J. Budzik’s New Britain Superior Court, prior claims made by PURA collided with a judicial stone wall.   According to a Hartford Courant report, “CT judge learns ex-state official [Gillett] misled court on records that were erased,” a Gillett defense lawyer from Attorney General William Tong’s office admitted in court, following the resignation of Marisa Gillett as the chairman o...

Schumer An electrician is talking to his comrade at an East Hartford Diner, while munching on eggs-over-easy, rye toast, home fries and bacon. The subject of minority leader in the U.S. Senate Chuck Schumer arises and the electrician whispers somewhat dejectedly into his coffee cup, “I feel sorry for him, very weepy these days.”   We know that, at some point during his presidency, perhaps earlier, Joe Biden had entered a sort of political second childhood dominated by the itch to make the world over anew. Is Schumer now following the same path?   Schumer, still sharp as a pin, has not taken leave of his senses. But the senator, once a reliable mainstay of the Democrat Party, a modest John F. Kennedy liberal Democrat, is permitting the socialist tail in New York to wag the Democrat dog. Some say he has done so to curry favor with the far left wing of his party, anchored in the Northeast corridor by U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and socialist Senator Bernie Sa...

Larson In its Saturday, October 10, 2025 edition, front page, top of the fold, The Hartford Courant blared, “ Thousands expected at ‘No Kings’ rallies .” The rallies, across the nation and in Connecticut, were put together by an anti-President Donald Trump group called “Indivisible,” a play on the well-turned phrase taken from “The pledge of Allegiance”… “one nation, indivisible, “ the first version of which was penned in 1885 by Captain George Thatcher Balch, a Union army officer in the Civil War who later authored a book on how to teach patriotism to children in public schools.   Some may wonder whether Indivisible would permit patriotism – as it has been passed down to us traditionally from George Washington to the present day – to be taught in schools. Indivisible’s funding is invisible, according to  Factually : “Indivisible’s public-facing history and mission documents explain tactics and scope but stop short of listing funders, creating a transparent gap between dol...