Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

“A budget deal that closely resembles the 2011 budget agreement,” will be good for what ails Connecticut, said Martin Looney, the President Pro Tem in the Connecticut Senate, according to an NBC Connecticut story . “A budget deal that closely resembles the 2011 budget agreement might be needed in 2017,” said Mr. Looney. What ails Connecticut is excessive spending, pretty much everyone in the state now agrees – even Governor Dannel Malloy, who is responsible for both the largest and the second largest tax increases in state history. The first of Mr. Malloy’s tax increases was a not inconsiderable part of the 2011 budget deal that Mr. Looney would apply as a curative to Connecticut’s continuing ailments. Connecticut’s three major tax increases, the first promulgated during the administration of Governor Lowell Weicker, father of Connecticut’s income tax, served as political balm to union friendly governors and legislators. The tax increases relieved politicians of the necessity of...

The gubernatorial nomination on the Republican side is heavily, if politely, contested. In a few days, Republican nominating delegates will gather at Mohegan Sun Casino to sort out their ticket. On the Democratic side, the gubernatorial slot is a Malloy gimme – almost. State employee union gadfly Jonathan Pelto continues to sting Governor Dannel Malloy. Mr. Malloy’s temperament, like that of President Barack Obama, is sting averse. The Malloyalists who surround him sting back when stung. Both they and their chief have thin skins. And Mr. Malloy, when caught in a compromising position, has been known to throw a few elbows at his critics. In the past, whenever Mr. Pelto had harpooned Mr. Malloy on his blog “ Wait, What? ” gubernatorial factotum Roy Occhiogrosso, who has parleyed his Malloy connection into a Vice Presidential slot with Global Strategy, leapt forward to answer Mr. Pelto with a box on the ear.

Senate President Pro Tempore Donald Williams, the Chanticleer of gun regulation in Connecticut, was in a crowing mood when he announced publically a set of gun regulations the General Assembly was expected pass in response to the mass slaughter of students and faculty at Sandy Hook Elementary school. "There were some,” Mr. Williams said, “who said the 'Connecticut effect' would wear off — that it would wear off in Connecticut and it would wear off across the country. What they didn't know was that Democrats and Republicans would come together and work to put together the strongest and most comprehensive bill in theUnited States to fight gun violence, to strengthen the security at our schools, and to provide the mental health services that are necessary.”

Unlike the case in the national scene, it’s nearly impossible for Democrats in the General Assembly to blame Republicans for delays in passing a weapons ban bill, since Democrats control both houses of the General Assembly and the governorship. The most they can do is to express impatience concerning the deliberative nature of the legislature and promise to spook thoughtful legislators. Below, in a report written by the Harford Courant’s Jon Lender , State Senate President Pro Tempore Don Williams pledges to overcome Republican recalcitrance. Actually, what is – and should be – holding up legislation are reports from crime investigators, a report from a General Assembly panel and a report from a panel assembled by Governor Dannel Malloy. Mr. Williams is just spooking the boobs. Honorable people in the General assembly should be impatient with Mr. Williams’ impatience.

It was the intention of certain members of the General Assembly from the very moment the Bipartisan Task Force On Gun Violence Prevention And Children's Safety was formed to “e-cert” the normal legislative process, State Senate President Pro Tempore Donald Williams said in a recent interview . The emergency certification of a bill bypasses usual legislative hearings and requires, as the name itself implies, an emergency to justify it. Generally, e-certs are reserved for times of crisis such as natural disasters or when action cannot be delayed because of an approaching timeline. In this case, the “emergency” was triggered by a timeline set by legislative leaders who had tasked the bipartisan task force to complete its recommendations to the legislature before February 28, so that a bill could be produced on that date. Apparently, it is the assigned date that has created the emergency, which begs a question: If the task force completes its work on the 29 th rather than the ...

Speaker of the state House Chris Donovan and President Pro Tem of the state Senate Don Williams have been closeted together discussing two bills: a jobs bill pushed by Governor Dannel Malloy that appears to have bipartisan support in the General Assembly and Mr. Donovan’s signature minimum wage bill. Mr. Donovan, running for the U.S. Congress in Connecticut’s 5 th District, dearly wants to push his bill raising the minimum wage 50 cents over two years through the General Assembly, and to this end he announced last week that he intended to attach his bill to a budget implementer. After meeting with Mr. Williams for a little more than an hour, Mr. Donovan appeared to be uncertain which donkey’s rear he would attach his tail to, according to a story in CTNewsJunkie . Mr. Williams, who can count up to 36 without stumbling, is convinced he lacks the votes in the Senate to pass Mr. Donovan’s minimum wage hike, a point he pressed upon Mr. Donovan sometime before the soon to be ret...

Senate President Don Williams, after speaking with a number of senators concerning a bill supported by House Speaker Chris Donovan to raise the minimum wage, conveyed the disappointing news to Mr. Donovan through a text message: Mr. Donovan’s bill simply did not have enough support in the chamber to pass. Mr. Williams said he resorted to a text message, according to one report, “because he feared once senators started to leave the caucus room word would leak out.” Caucuses in both chambers of the General Assembly have been leak proof since Dannel Malloy had been elected governor. Unused to taking bad news for an answer, Mr. Donovan, retiring this year as Speaker, supposed that members in the Senate misunderstood how his scaled down proposal of a 50 cent hike in Connecticut’s present minimum wage -- at $8.25 the fourth highest in the country -- would be seamlessly meshed with tips given waitresses and bartenders. Mr. Donovan would see to it they were furnished with the right informati...

Some bills offered by politicians in campaign modes are difficult to pass but worth supporting as campaign puffers. They look good, in other words, on a campaign resume: “Democratic contender for the U.S. Senate Leon Trotsky, a proletarian himself whose grandmother worked her fingers to the bone in a soul grinding mill – for slave wages, we may add -- has always favored periotic increases in the minimum wage, while Republicans, mostly grasping yacht owners, have always fancied keeping the poor on the edge of poverty.” A bill that favors one or another preferred special interest and yet fails to pass in the legislature is not a failure -- provided it may afterwards be molded into campaign bullets and shot at political opponents.   And failed bills that entail disastrous consequences are problem free when they fail, because failure decouples crippling consequences from legislation. There are sound reasons for believing that minimum wage bills hurt the poor and affect large ...

Connecticut’s House of Representatives voted on April 11 to abolish the death penalty prospectively, which is another way of saying that the General Assembly will not apply its morals and its legal prescriptions to the Connecticut 11, inmates presently awaiting punishment on Death Row. The abolition bill having passed both houses of the General Assembly, will be made operative upon Governor Dannel Malloy’s signature. The prospective abolition bill is the single most cowardly piece of legislation passed in the last half century, and it gives the lie to every argument made in the General Assembly in favor of abolition. But in the case of the 11 inmates awaiting execution, the bill approved by Mr. Sharkey visits upon them a reciprocal evil. And we would be no less safe, the pro-repeal forces in the General Assembly have repeatedly assured us, if the sentences of the Connecticut 11 had been commuted to life in prison retrospectively. Mr. Sharkey has yet to share with us the moral ...

Speaker of the State House of Representatives Chris Donovan, actively running for the U.S. Congress in Connecticut’s 5th District, apparently has “compromised” on his most recent bill that would have hiked the state’s minimum wage 75 cents on July 1 and another 75 cents a year later, establishing in Connecticut, the land of steady spending habits, yet another first: the state with the highest minimum wage in the nation. Donovan’s compromise is a bit like that of Solomon’s, who proposed that a baby whose parentage had been questioned should be cut in half with a sword, each half to be parceled out to the disputing mothers. Solomon’s inelegant solution, offered as a ploy to ferret out the real mother, would have resulted in a dead baby. Mr. Donovan – perhaps in order to demonstrate his willingness to compromise should he ever reach the U.S. House of Representatives – has now offered a more “moderate” proposal: The Labor and Public Employees Committee recently voted 8-3, with the consen...

You cannot be a loyal opposition unless you are opposed to the reigning power – in Connecticut’s one party state, a General Assembly and a gubernatorial office dominated by Democrats – and are, at the same time, loyal to something other than the present regime. When Republicans in the General Assembly were frozen out of budget negotiations last fiscal year by a “notice me” governor and a Democratic legislature dominated by a single party, the Valley Forge experience forced them to become, perhaps for the first time in several decades, an authentic loyal opposition. Republican leaders in the state Senate on February 17 published their priorities for the 2012 legislative session . Pointing out the legislature’s constitutional requirement to devote the session in even years to budgetary matters, the Republicans outlined three major goals: •Strict adherence to the state’s constitutional spending cap; •No new taxes; and •No spending increases. Highlights of the Republican proposals ...

Duane Billington, a retired engineering technician and civic activist from Naples, “fought for 18 months against Jackson Laboratory's plan to expand in Florida,” according to a story in the Hartford Courant .” Ultimately Mr. Billington was successful. Jackson Laboratory pulled up their negotiating stakes in Florida. Governor Dannel Malloy’s chief of staff, Roy Occhiogrosso, read about the failed attempt to pitch the deal to Florida in a newspaper, evidentially shared the information with his boss, and a contingent from Connecticut was sent to Bar Harbor Maine to negotiate a deal with Jackson Laboratory administrators. The Courant story does not mention the names of members of the Connecticut contingent sent to negotiate with Jackson. The deal apparently was consummated and a letter of intent was signed between the parties. When two members of the General Assembly, Senator Len Suzio and Senate Republican leader Leonard Fasano, asked to see the memorandum of understanding betwe...

Mark Greenberg, a Republican running for the House in the 5th District, has called upon Chis Donovan, the Democratic Speaker of the state House running for the same seat, to step down from the redistricting commission that will recommend new borders for Connecticut’s five U.S. House of Representative districts. The committee is split evenly between Republicans and Democrats, and Mr. Donovan is the only member of the commission who will be seeking higher office. Other members of the commission are: Senator Martin Looney, (D, 11th District) Representative Sandy Nafis, (D, Newington) Senate President Pro Tempore Donald Williams, (D, 29th District) Minority Leader Representative Lawrence Cafero, (R, 142nd District) Senator Len Fasano, (R, 34th District) Senate Minority Leader John McKinney, (R, 28th District) Representative Arthur O'Neill, (R, 69th District) “Chris Donovan,” Mr. Greenberg noted in a press release, “is a declared candidate for the U.S. House of Representat...

“ There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics ” – Benjamin Disraeli Actuarial figures supporting claimed budget savings in Plan A2 -- son of Plan A, a slightly revised budget that Governor Dannel Malloy months ago submitted to the General Assembly for approval -- have been called into doubt for some time. The Malloy budget approved by the Democratic controlled General Assembly early in May, for instance, contained a savings line that could not be actuarially verified. The Malloy budget simply assumes a savings of $270 million arising from a commitment from state workers to devise ways of saving money. When Republican leaders -- who have been successfully cut out of the budget negotiation process by Mr. Malloy and Democratic leaders in the General Assembly – questioned the assumptions that underpinned the projected savings, Malloy communications director Colleen Flanagan intemperately responded that the figures had been verified by their actuaries and they we...

Editorial Page Editor of the Journal Inquirer Keith Burris takes a hatchet to certain unnamed members of the General Assembly in a column first published in the Journal Inquirer and reprinted in the Hartford Business Journal  : “Malloy came up empty. The legislature gave him zilch, nada, zippo.” The bully pulpit is still available to the the governor: “He can take it to the people and ask the public to change the hearts, minds, and votes of the House Democrats.” And if all else fails, Mr. Malloy, driven to desperate measures, can begin to consort with Republicans: “He can twist arms and try to turn enough Dems in the House, along with Republicans, to forge a working coalition for the modest things he wants to do.” So far, minority Republicans in the General Assembly have been treated by both Mr. Malloy and Democratic leaders in Connecticut  – President of the Senate Don Williams and Speaker of the House Chris Donovan – as if they were loopy uncles locked in the attic. M...

Plan B, held out to unions then in negotiations with the Malloy administration as a spook on a stick, was a thing of shark’s teeth and vampire fangs. Senator Edith Prague, almost always friendly to unions, warned the rank and file members who ultimately rejected the plan that brimstone would fall from the sky should Plan A be rejected and, when the plan was rejected, Ms. Prague suffered what can only be described as a political breakdown; she said union members were mad to reject a plan described by a private union leader as an offer to die for. Jonathan Pelto, the voice of unionism in Connecticut’s left leaning press, writhed in indignation and bit his fingernails to the cuticles. The leader of the Democratic caucus in the House, Speaker Chris Donovan, up to this point a declared disinterested observer in the negotiations taking place between the Malloy administration and union leaders, put off plans to announce his candidacy for U.S. Rep. in the 5th District and pledged his service...

General Assembly Democrats – i.e. Speaker of the House Chris Donovan and Senate President Don Williams – have not decided firmly to give Governor Dannel Malloy extraordinary rescission authority to remake the state budget after the collapse of Plan A. Repeating his offer to dominant Democrats in the legislature, Mr. Malloy has said that he would be perfectly willing to implement the dreaded Plan B should the General Assembly confer upon him what amounts to plenipotentiary powers. But a rift has occurred within the legislature. Mr. Williams is toying with the idea; but his confederate in the House, Mr. Donovan, pleased to have stepped out of the way of the cannons when Mr. Malloy was begging state workers to accept Plan A, now seems to be puffing out his chest, welcoming the bullets. Mr. Donovan has reminded Mr. Malloy that the General Assembly never agreed to confer upon him an expanded rescissionary authority that would allow the governor to shape the new budget without botherso...

The most recent poll from the Yankee Institute shows Governor Dannel “The Vozhd” Malloy blowing bubbles below the water line. “Voters oppose by wide margins every Malloy administration initiative tested in the survey: • On the budget deal, 57% of voters say the new state budget agreement ‘spends too much and raises taxes too much,’ while 39% describe it as ‘about as good as could be expected given a weak economy.’ • On the labor union concessions, 49% of voters say state employee unions ‘did not give up enough and should have been asked for more,’ while 36% say ‘the unions did give up a lot.’ • By a margin of 60-30%, voters describe the $572 million New Britain busway project as ‘a bad use of taxpayer money.’ • By a margin of 56-25%, voters describe the $864 million UConn Health Center expansion as ‘a bad use of taxpayer money.’” During the next legislative season, Mr. Malloy plans to travel about the state attempting to convince easily duped businessmen that Plan A, which ...

The budget submitted by Governor Dannel Malloy to the Democratic dominated General Assembly and approved by the legislature – although a pending deal between Mr. Malloy and state union workers requiring union givebacks of $1.6 billion had not been affirmed by the unions at its passage – is best seen as the inevitable political end piece of the first Weicker budget. The presumptions underlying Governor Lowell Weicker’s 1991 budget parallel Mr. Malloy’s. Indeed, the two budgets, as well as the political maneuvering involved in passing them, are nearly mirror images.

Notices from Amazon.com (see below) are in the e-mail. The most poignant line in the "flake off" letter is this one: “If you are not currently a resident of Connecticut, or if you are relocating to another state in the near future, you can manage the details of your Associates account here.” Ah yes, a future connection with Amazon.com beckons – from more tax friendly states elsewhere. Thanks Governor Danell Maloy. Thanks House Speaker Chris Donovan. Thanks President of the Senate Don Williams. The recipient of the letter below was an independent seller of hard to find books, a small business man now looking for a job in hardscrabble Connecticut. From: Amazon.com Associates Program [mailto:associates-autoresponse@amazon.com] Sent: Friday, June 10, 2011 5:05 AM Subject: Notice of Contract Termination Due to New Connecticut Law Hello, For well over a decade, the Amazon Associates Program has worked with thousands of Connecticut residents. Unfortunately, the budget signed...