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 All so called “moderate” Republican members of the state’s U.S. Congressional Delegation have been replaced by far less moderates Democrats who favor, unsurprisingly, leftist solutions to pressing budget deficits.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...