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| Sen. Dick Blumenthal |
General Assembly
Members Have Vacated the Premises. It’s Over … For Now BLOG
The Blumenthals, father Dick and son Matt, were there in the
picture featured on the front page, top of the fold, in the Hartford Courant
story, “With tone of defiance and new laws,
Connecticut leaders push back hard against Trump and ICE.”
Both were smiling broadly as Governor Ned Lamont signed Bill
349 which, the Courant reminds us, “allows citizens to sue federal immigration
agents if they believe that their civil rights have been violated. In addition,
the bill prevents all law enforcement officers, including from the Immigration
and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE [Federal Immigration and Customs
Enforcement], from wearing masks, except in limited situations.”
Laws restraining police are old hat in Connecticut. Police “reform laws” affecting the personal
partial immunity of individual police officers reduce the inclination of
recruits to join police forces.
Some Connecticut politicians excluded from the photo-op were
not smiling.
House Republican leader Vincent Candelora characterized the
bill as “an election-year stunt.”
“Today’s rally,” Candelora said, “made clear where the
governor and General Assembly Democrats’ priorities lie — political theater in
an election year. They rushed in front of cameras to promote a flawed bill that
invites litigation, exposes federal and even local law enforcement to legal
liability, and even bars veterans from applying military training toward a law
enforcement career. Meanwhile, Connecticut residents are still waiting for
direct relief from the affordability crisis these same Democrats created. Their
priorities are badly out of whack.”
Senator Dick Blumenthal, for 20 years Connecticut’s white-hatted
crusading attorney general, thought while in office that one of his principal
duties, nowhere mentioned in the statute creating the office, was to swell the
state treasury with fines levied against his targets. He was faithful in
performing this self-perceived duty. State treasurers, governors and members of
Connecticut’s media were pleased with his performance. Why look a gift horse in
the mouth? When Blumenthal left the AG’s office and ascended to the US Senate,
his successor, George Jepsen, under pressure from Republican candidate for attorney
General Martha Dean and others, dismissed more
than 200 of Blumenthal’s pending cases.
Blumenthal has carried with him into the Senate his bullying
prosecutorial methods. Here is an embarrassing instance of Blumenthal’s ideological rigidity: Blumenthal questioned a number of
prospective federal judges -- “Who won the 2020 presidential election?”
The correct answer to Blumenthal’s question is: ”Whoever won
the electoral vote in the US Congress and was thereafter certified by Congress
won the election.”
The congressman is a US Senator and one expects him to be familiar
with the constitutional provision governing the election of presidents. But no
-- Blumenthal characterized a literal repetition of the constitutional provision
as judicially inappropriate. “You were instructed to give this answer,
right?,” he berated one of the judicial prospects. “I am amazed, just amazed, by the insult to
this committee of witness after witness seeking to be a federal judge
subverting our constitution and showing how you have no independence, which is
essential to a federal judge…” The judges questioned seemed more astonished than
Blumenthal that the senator had characterized a literal citation of a
constitutional provision as a “subversion of our constitution.”
The shameless peddling of false presumptions, a towering
arrogance, an irresistible inclination to present to the voting public an unctuous
moralistic face in danger zones – it has been said that there is no more
dangerous spot in Connecticut than that between Blumenthal and a television
camera – are all unfortunate characteristics that stem from a lack of modesty
and due proportion. Governance requires both modesty and prudence, without
which it is simply a destructive force before which honesty must withdraw in
fear and trembling.
Moving from the AG’s office to the US Congress, Blumenthal
took with him his most self-damaging characteristics and left the best behind.
He cannot stop prosecuting and primping before the cameras.
Striding in his father’s footsteps, Matt Blumenthal
characterized Connecticut’s newest attempt to drive ICE devils from
Connecticut’s political temples this way: “We’re not going to allow federal
agents or ICE to be intimidating people close to polling places. Given what has
happened in Minnesota and the violence and chaos we’ve seen them conduct in
Minneapolis, people in Connecticut have a very well-founded fear of these
activities, and so we don’t want them anywhere near the polls.”
It would take a Connecticut George Orwell to do satirical
justice to the state’s politically convenient non-compliance with federal
officials. Orwell started his political life serving with the Indian Imperial
Police in Burma, then a part of Britain’s vast colonial empire. The future
author of 1984, often referred to as Nineteen Eighty-Four, hated the
assignment. He hated colonialism and throughout his life protested against the
use of political force that – and this should not astonish a sometimes virtuous
Dick Blumenthal -- is the very opposite of small “d” democracy.
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