Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Someone – no one is certain who did it – dismembered the non-partisan State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC), and the heart and liver of the thing ended up in the Secretary of State’s office. The elections commission is supposed to prevent the kind of hanky panky that is the life and blood of machine party politics. The need for such a committee was felt after former Governor John Rowland, now a respected radio commentator and member of the fourth estate, was packed off to jail for having “deprived the state of honest services.” Governor Dannel Malloy, the titular head of the dominant Democratic Party machine in Connecticut, has combined some agencies, supposedly as a cost saving measure, and that is how the body parts of the SEEC came to be parceled out to various agencies. This dismemberment, the leftist watchdog group Common Cause says, has considerably emasculated the hound of fair elections heaven. The relevant watchdog agencies during the late mid-term elections nodd...

Andy Sauer is the executive director of the Connecticut chapter of Common Cause, which bills itself, according to an introductory blurb provided in a recent interview, as “a non-profit lobbying group that says it promotes responsible, accountable government, and has long fought for campaign finance reform.” Part of this is true. Common Cause is a liberal lobbying group that has aggressively pushed campaign finance reform. The whole gaggle of liberal lobbying groups was there, according to Sauer, at the birth of the campaign finance reform bill, and their influence cannot be overstated. They shaped the bill voted into law by the legislature. Praising Gov. Jodi Rell, Sauer remarked in the interview, “One of the first things she did was [to] meet with campaign finance reform advocates. I was there ... Tom Swan [of Connecticut Citizen Action Group], Karen Hobert Flynn as the chair of Common Cause was there, the League of Women Voters, CONNpirg ... We were the first, and to the best of my k...