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| Lamont |
The recently proposed omnibus emergency certification bill
-- a catch basin for previous legislative measures that had been presented to Connecticut’s
General Assembly and, for one reason or another, had not passed muster – has
been modified by Governor Ned Lamont’s veto and intervention.
No Democrat legislator protested the original measure on
process grounds, and the most important question – “Who benefits by stuffing
parts of unpassed bills into an omnibus emergency measure?”—was never answered,
because the question was never asked.
The short answer to this question is, as might be expected – tax thirsty
single-party partisan Democrats benefit. Their emergency omnibus bill allows Connecticut’s
ruling Democrat Party to skirt normative processes, and it creates one measure
from many separate pieces that may be voted into law without confronting the
usual inconveniences: public hearings; debates in various relevant committees;
legislative process barriers; the felt presence of an alert, liberty loving media,
etc.
Mark Pazniokas of CTMirror noted in a story that appeared in
the Hartford Courant, “As an
emergency-certified bill, the measure bypassed public hearings and vetting by
committees. It has several million dollars in appropriations, though most
involved redirecting state funds or clarifying their use. Among other things,
it would have transferred $1.7 million to the Department of Labor for personal
services.”
The omnibus emergency measure gives partisan Democrats a
second bite at what should be regarded as poison fruit from a poison tree. One
reporter, slipping on a Freudian banana peel, referred to the initial measure
as the “ominous emergency measure.”
Lamont’s veto of the omnibus emergency bill arrived on our
political doorstep following vigorous pragmatic objections from Republicans and
process-minded Democrats in the General Assembly. Then too, federal
investigators are now stirring Connecticut’s corruption pot.
A federal investigation of corrupt practices in Connecticut,
the Hartford Courant tells us, is in
process. The feds are not a part of what might be called “the good old boy political
network” in Connecticut’s one party state, and their ongoing investigation into
misallocated and disappearing federal funds appears to hold out promise for
good government in the future.
The Courant/CTMirror notes, “The FBI’s investigation of [money-meister
state Senator Doug McCrory’s] role in delivering millions in earmarks, and his
relationship with a woman who greatly benefitted from them, played a direct
part in Gov. Ned Lamont’s line-item veto of earmarks Tuesday.”
McCrory appears to be taking the
FBI investigation in stride: “On Wednesday, McCrory was a featured speaker at a
press conference with Democratic leaders, Senate President Pro Tem Martin M.
Looney of New Haven and Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff of Norwalk, to advocate
for reform of Connecticut’s education funding formulas.”
Looney and Duff are both
committed progressives and as such perhaps more interested in transferring tax
money from the haves to the have-nots than they should be in the responsible
allocation of tax funds. For progressives, taxes are a cornucopia of semi-magic
solutions to problems conservatives associate with lavish spending. For middle
class taxpayers – and now the FBI – the misallocations of tax funds can be punishable
crimes. All Connecticut’s corruption dirt, one may hope, will come out in the
FBI wash.
State Senate Democrat leaders were
“disappointed” by Lamont’s veto and issued a fatwa in a minor key, according to
the Courant report: “In a joint written statement, Senate President Pro Tem
Martin M. Looney of New Haven and Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff of Norwalk
said the veto would “damage the governor’s credibility with their caucus.” We
do not know at this point whether the Democrat caucus in the General Assembly
is representative of the Democrat majority among Connecticut voting population
or the somewhat unwilling prisoner of Looney and Duff.
“’We are deeply disappointed by
the Governor’s abrupt decision to line-item veto critical funding that was
carefully negotiated over many months and agreed to by the Senate, the House,
and the Governor,’ they said. ‘That agreement did not emerge overnight, and
this change of heart is a troubling sign for the trust that must underpin our
ability to pass legislation this session.’”
Republican leader Vince Candelora
was “deeply disappointed” with the Democrat’s omnibus emergency certification
bill. “The 98-section bill, “he wrote in a rebuttal op-ed, “reads like a
creation from Doctor Frankenstein's lab, stuffed with warehouse labor mandates,
earmarks for select organizations and nonprofits, significant revisions to
election law, and a moratorium extension on racial imbalance enforcement. We
even got curriculum for Islamic and Arab studies. As one media outlet noted,
there was no unifying theme. But there was a clear pattern: policies that couldn't survive the full
democratic process were being resurrected under the cover of manufactured
urgency [emphasis mine]. Over the years, majority parties have slipped a
few dead ideas into budget bills in the dying embers of sessions. But this?
They weren't even bothering to hide it. The timing makes it worse. Connecticut
is under the shadow of an ongoing federal probe into the misuse of funding
awarded for community nonprofit organizations.”
With every passing day,
ideologically progressive Democrats in Connecticut’s General Assembly – and
their audience, presumptive “moderate” Democrats – permit themselves to be
stupefied by the trappings of power politics. But the problem with political
power, Lord Acton tells us, is that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power
corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they
exercise influence and not authority, still more when you super-add the
tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.”
Although Acton, an English Catholic
historian and – please note -- liberal politician, died in
1902, his entire life’s work was devoted
to the proposition that the greatest threat to human freedom was unchecked
power of a kind now practiced aggressively by Connecticut’s
progressive/authoritarian dominant Democrat political party. As an apostle of
liberty, Acton is closer to us in the post-modern era than, say, Looney or
Duff, whose operative ideology, a mere pretense of constitutional liberty, is
scraped from the bottom of the nation’s quasi-Marxist anti-democratic political
barrel.
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