Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

That crunching sound you hear is the fall of the house of Malloy. Governor Dannel Malloy’s disapproval rating at Mid-March was a hefty 68 percent, according to a recent poll published by Quinnipiac College . The low approval rating of 23 percent marks Mr. Malloy, head of the Democratic Governors Association, as the most unpopular governor in the nation, only a few weeks after Mr. Malloy was awarded the Kennedy Center’s Profile in Courage Award. A previous Connecticut Governor, Lowell Weicker, also received the same award shortly after his popularity rating in the state plummeted during his contentious term in office, in the course of which Mr. Weicker had vetoed three non-income tax budgets and finally succeeded in forcing the General Assembly to impose an income tax on a state that once had attracted businesses because it was a low tax, low regulatory Eden.

As leading politicians in Connecticut – including Republicans, so far frozen out of budget negotiations by Governor Dannel Malloy -- gather together to decide collectively how to shore up sagging state revenues, a recent report issued by state comptroller Kevin Lembo contains a fly in the ointment. Mr. Lembo is predicting a $118 million budget deficit. No surprise there; deficits have been a recurring feature in budgets sent by Mr. Malloy to the Democratic controlled General Assembly. Rather than call a special session to fix the problem, Mr. Malloy has relied on his rescission authority to patch the repetitive holes.  Mr. Malloy’s last budget cuts came a bit too close to the bone and disturbed Democratic leaders in the General Assembly, who in the past had winked at Mr. Malloy’s two massive tax increases, the largest and the second largest in state history.

Some notable politician who is not Catholic really ought to come to the defense of Catholics – because they are now under assault from anti-Catholic Catholic politicians. Just as there is no anti-communist so fierce as an ex-communist, so there is no anti-Catholic quite so energetically opposed to Catholic orthodoxy as a Catholic politician on the make and in need of votes from others who may share his distaste for all things Catholic. The uninterrupted assault on Catholics, the Reverend Robert Barron points out in National Review , is bone wearingly old. Arthur Schlesinger, the reliably liberal historian and social critic, used to say that a poisonous anti-Catholicism was the oldest prejudice in the United States, an early bloom that washed upon our shore with the arrival of the Mayflower. In the Boston of Sam Adams’ day, anti-Papists used to place an effigy of the pope in a chair that was paraded through the streets – Boston’s version of the English Guy Fawkes celebrati...

When Governor Dannel Malloy first came into office, some commentators who had paid close attention to his campaign assumed he was ready to vigorously attack spending. He had often enough during his campaign batted around the catch phrase “fair share.” It was generally understood that everyone in Connecticut would, under the Malloy dispensation, be expected to contribute his “fair share” in taxes and give-backs, and most people expected, after the new governor had imposed on taxpayers the largest tax increase in state history, that the consumption side of government would see proportional reductions in spending. The tax increase was immediate and, some would argue, devastating to an economy in the grip of a prolonged recession: See President Jack Kennedy’s speech to the Economic Club of New York. Mr. Malloy’s prospective savings, as it turned out, would be distant and amorphous. Who could have guessed, as the Malloy campaign rolled out, that the governor would soon become...