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| Tong |
He has been putting in the hours, “working seven days a week
as he battles executive orders and federal spending freezes by President Donald
J. Trump in cases both locally and nationally.”
Tong is mandated by his position as Attorney General of
Connecticut, he believes, to serve as a “check and balance” against President
Donald Trump and efforts within his administration to oversee the spending of
tax dollars. “The lawsuits we [Tong and other attorneys general] have filed,
particularly against Elon Musk and DOGE, are really important as a check on
these guys,” Tong has said. “If there is no one checking these guys, there are
no checks and balances, then they are unrestricted with unchecked, unrestricted
power, and they can do whatever they want to hurt the people they don’t like
who are their political, and I should say, business adversaries.”
Actually, the expression “check and balance” is one that in
the past has been used to refer to the shared balance of power within the
federal government that is constitutionally divided between three branches of
government so as to prevent the accumulation of political power under a single
executive. Tong here is appropriating the expression purely for political
purposes. The Attorney General of Connecticut is by no means authorized by
statute to frustrate necessary economies within the federal executive branch of
government. The mandate of the office has not changed since the colonial period
when the present day attorney general was called “the king’s lawyer.”
The modern Office of Attorney General was created by
legislative statute in 1897, and the statute does not invest Tong with the power to
serve as a “check and balance” on the federal executive. Tong’s powers are
narrowly circumscribed in the statute under the subtitle:
Duties of Attorney General; deputy;
assistants; associate attorneys general. The Attorney General shall have general supervision over all legal
matters in which the state is an interested party, except those legal matters
over which prosecuting officers have direction. He shall appear for the state,
the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, the Secretary, the Treasurer and the
Comptroller, and for all heads of departments and state boards, commissioners,
agents, inspectors, committees, auditors, chemists, directors, harbor masters,
and institutions and for the State Librarian and the Connecticut Pilot Commission
in all suits and other civil proceedings, except upon criminal recognizances
and bail bonds, in which the state is a party or is interested, or in which the
official acts and doings of said officers are called in question, and for all
members of the state House of Representatives and the state Senate in all suits
and other civil proceedings brought against them involving their official acts
and doings in the discharge of their duties as legislators, in any court or
other tribunal, as the duties of his office require; and all such suits shall
be conducted by him or under his direction. When any measure affecting the
State Treasury is pending before any committee of the General Assembly, such
committee shall give him reasonable notice of the pendency of such measure, and
he shall appear and take such action as he deems to be for the best interests
of the state … All legal services required by such officers and boards in
matters relating to their official duties shall be performed by the Attorney
General or under his direction. All writs, summonses or other processes served
upon such officers and legislators shall, forthwith, be transmitted by them to
the Attorney General. All suits or other proceedings by such officers shall be
brought by the Attorney General or under his direction. He shall, when required
by either house of the General Assembly or when requested by the president pro
tempore of the Senate, the speaker of the House of Representatives, or the
majority leader or the minority leader of the Senate or House of
Representatives, give his opinion upon questions of law submitted to him by
either of said houses or any of said leaders...
24/7?
Tong claims to be working 24/7 on suits that would
circumscribe the power of the President of the United States to make economies
in his office by eliminating the president’s oversight of how tax money is
spent in the executive office. “It’s
24-7 right now,” Tong told the Hartford Courant. “The way I think about it is
the president is flooding the zone, and we’re flooding it back. I spend a lot
of time talking to my fellow attorneys general. My staff spends a lot of time
talking to their counterparts in other states.”
Some Republicans think the over-reaching Tong might better
make use of his time.
“The attorney general’s job is to be the lawyer for the
state of Connecticut,” state Republican chairman Ben Proto told The Hartford Courant
in an interview. “He is not the lawyer in D.C. He was not elected to fight the
presidential administration. He was elected to take care of the problems in the
state of Connecticut. … We have a massive energy problem, yet William Tong is
worried about whether or not the president is funding or not funding certain
programs, which is wholly within his prerogative as the president of the United
States.”
Tong has acknowledged that “So far, it doesn’t seem” that
Trump’s attempts to reign in the unchecked metastatic growth of his own executive department are “like,
specifically directed at Connecticut per
se in the way that he directed [unflattering comments at Maine Governor Janet
Mills]. But of course, all of these actions impact Connecticut people and
families directly. When that happens, it’s my job to stand up and fight for
Connecticut. Am I passionate about it? Of course I am. Am I aggressive? Yes.
That’s what the people of the state have come to expect from me, and I believe
that’s what they want. They want me to be tough. They want me to be strong, and
they want me to be aggressive.”
Proto is right about Tong’s mandate and his political
ambitions: Tong “was not elected to fight the presidential administration. He
was elected to take care of the problems in the state of Connecticut.” And
“This is all political, and William is trying to figure out how to move to the
next step or actually leap-frog a couple of steps on the political ladder. …
William Tong has to decide what he wants to do in 2026. Is he going to run for
attorney general again? Is he running for governor? Is he running for his life?
I don’t know what he’s doing.” Given the office’s confining statutory
guardrails, Tong should not be able to toss a Connecticut wrench into the
federal executive office’s delicate operational machinery. What Connecticut
needs, much more than a partisan activist attorney General, is an Inspector
General commissioned to examine destructive state spending.
Proto’s question is a live one. Is Tong now running for governor
or, more probably, U.S. Senator when Dick Blumenthal retires from office? If
so, he will find the field fairly crowded. In a one-party state such as
Connecticut, we should remember that the struggle for political power occurs
only within the dominant Democrat Party.
Two Democrat Connecticut U.S. Senators, Joe Lieberman and
Dick Blumenthal, have used their positions as Attorneys General as springboards
to the U.S. Congress. Blumenthal is getting on in years and his son, Matt
Blumenthal, a State Representative from the 147th district in Fairfield County,
has a lean and hungry look about him.
What or who will serve as a “check and balance” on the overweening
political ambition of Tong?
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