Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont traveled to New York the other day to convince Wall Street Journal editorial writers that his state is in the grip of a turn-around, thanks to the Lamont administration. The business oriented WSJ is not at all the same media gang that covers the Lamont administration at home. Most Connecticut news outlets are willing to allow Lamont a loose tether; not so the WSJ, which has been critical of the direction of the state for the past few decades.

Be The Storm I’d like to thank Mary Ann Turner, the Chairman of the Enfield Republican Town Committee, for inviting me here today. It’s a pleasure to be with you. Enfield, everyone in the room may know, was the place where prominent theologian Jonathan Edwards delivered his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon. The sermon provided one of the sparks that lit the spiritual conflagration later called “The Great Awakening” and was  so fearful and effective a sermon that people in the pews broke out in tears. I think I can assure everyone in the room that my keynote may not have a similar effect. Republicans have just been through a bruising election. I’d like to touch very gently on a few sore topics, but we don’t want to end up at a funeral here. Mark Twain, asked if he had attended the funeral of a man he intensely disliked, replied – No, I didn’t. But I sent along a message to the grief stricken that I heartily approved of the ceremony.

We cannot know yet what a Ned Lamont administration will be like. Fate is always a work in progress. But it seems a reasonable assumption that there will be Democrat Party continuity between the Malloy and Lamont administrations; both Lamont and Malloy are progressive Democrats. Lamont did stress during his campaign that he had run for governor against Malloy, but this was largely a feint for show. Nothing in the Lamont campaign suggests a policy break with Malloy. Moreover, the election results have returned Connecticut to the status quo ante as it existed during Malloy’s first campaign. Republicans had made some inroads to power during the Malloy administration. Prior to the November elections – a stunning victory for the majority party in Connecticut -- Republicans were at parity with Democrats in the Senate and trailing them by a few seats in the House. The election washed out these gains.

Guest blog By Sean Murphy In my last commentary ,   I discussed what Bob Stefanowski will face from Republican Party insiders and elected officials.   Keep in mind while Republicans won all over the country since 2010, Connecticut Republicans lost every statewide elected race and could not muster control in the General Assembly.   The reason for that is incumbent Republicans always do what they see as the minimum to get re-elected.   They cozy up to local town committees.   They get their state grants, in many cases via bonding for some local pork project that gets them positive press.   Then after they put their time in, they move on up to a high paying job and get their outrageous pensions and lifetime health insurance.    What are the key issues that need to be front and center?  

Guest Blog By Sean Murphy The August 14 th  Republican primary left me quite confused. In our current environment, only half of Republican voters voted for Joe Markley for Lt Governor. We elected an actual outsider president who, astonishingly, makes and keeps promises.  Americans of all political backgrounds despise double talking politicians.  We can see every day how murderously the Swamp in DC behaves towards President Trump.

Political campaigns are narrow spaces; there is not a lot of elbow room in them to explain in fulsome detail proposed public programs and their consequences. But a good campaign must represent more than a string of feel-good bumper sticker sentiments. Republicans vying for the gubernatorial race this year climbed out on a conservative limb and dedicated themselves to specific policy changes: no more tax increases; permanent reductions in spending; and, most alarming to progressive Democrats, the wresting of democratic government from powerful special interests -- i.e. union representatives.

Now that the party primaries have concluded, the substance of the play will change – because the audience will have changed. Democrat Party nominee Ned Lamont unsurprisingly dished Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim with 81 percent of the primary vote. On the Republican side , Bob Stefanowski hauled in 30 percent of the vote, 9 points more than Mayor Mark Boughton of Danbury, not a strong showing for a party nominee. In the hotly contested 5 th  District, abandoned by Elizabeth Esty after charges she had not moved quickly enough on reported incidents of  harassment by her Chief of Staff  against one of her female aides. Jahana Hayes upset party nominee Mary Glassman with a convincing 62 percent of the vote. State Senator Joe Markley won a resounding victory over his two primary opponents, and Susan Bysiewicz, hand-picked by Lamont for the Lieutenant Governor slot, prevailed over her primary opponent with 62 percent of the vote. During primaries, politicians tend...

In Shakespeare’s King Lear, a dethroned but wiser king, about to be dragged off to prison, says to his only faithful daughter, Cordelia, “Come on, let’s go to prison. The two of us together will sing like birds in a cage. We will be good to each other. When you ask for my blessing, I’ll get down on my knees and ask you to forgive me. That’s how we’ll live—we’ll pray, we’ll sing, we’ll tell old stories, we’ll laugh at pretentious courtiers, we’ll listen to nasty court gossip, we’ll find out who’s losing and who’s winning, who’s in and who’s out. We’ll think about the mysteries of the universe as if we were God’s spies. In prison we’ll outlast hordes of rulers that will come and go as their fortunes change.” The reporter might easily have opened his piece on State Senator Joe Markley – “ Tea Partier Or Constitutional Conservative: Lt. Gov. Candidate Owns GOP Right Flank ” – by noting, very incidentally, that Markley is one of the few, if not the only, state legislator with whom o...

I happen to be writing something on Mark Twain’s politics, and I couldn’t help but wonder what he might have thought rather than written – for Twain was fairly cautious, some would say over-cautious, while his wife and censor Oliva was still alive – about recent Connecticut politics. Surely Twain would have noticed that the flight of progressive politicians from their sinecures have followed the flight of businesses and entrepreneurial capital from his beloved state. There’s got to be some heavy levity, Twain’s specialty, in there somewhere. Not even Olivia, the keeper of Twain’s reputation, could have prevented him from poking fun at Connecticut’s political Grand Guignol. Following a fatal dip in the polls, Governor Dannel Malloy has chosen not to run again, and he has been followed out the door by his Lieutenant Governor, a promising Democrat gubernatorial prospect who has not spent time in prison, Comptroller Kevin Lembo, Attorney General George Jepsen, and other Democ...

Democrats, the ruling party in the General Assembly for the past thirty years, have been very hard on Connecticut. Most economists worth consulting agree that the state is under water, blowing bubbles, and all the usual stratagems to which Democrats have in the past resorted to pull the near corpse aboard – tax increases, more regulations, moving budget money from one or another “lockbox” in order to cover deficits, plundering the rich – have only made festering problems worse. The General Assembly now has produced a compromise budget, and some  thoughtful analysts   have argued that this compromise will compromise a winning Republican campaign in 2018.

The charge made by Connecticut’s  State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC ) against State Representative Rob Sampson and State Senator Joe Markley is that the two made statements in joint campaign mailers that, according to a story by  Christine Stewart in CTNewsJunkie , “were cast in such a way to oppose an individual [Governor Dannel Malloy] who was running for statewide office in 2014. He said by joining the Citizens Election Program and receiving tens of thousands of dollars to run their campaign meant they agreed to restrict their spending to candidates who were in the race.” Examples of the offending statements were listed by Sampson and Markley in a media release:

The bad news, some conservatives in Connecticut will say, is that State Senator Joe Markley will not be running for governor. The good news is that Mr. Markley -- now representing the 16th Senatorial District, which includes the towns of Cheshire, Prospect, Southington, Wolcott and Waterbury – has announced he is running for Lieutenant Governor. Why not governor? “When asked why he didn’t aim for the top office,”  the Record Journal reports , “he said there are already many strong Republican candidates considering a run. I’m very interested in having some Republican elected as governor next year because we have to change direction in this state. I feel that this is the spot on the ticket where I can most be of service.”

There is only one Republican State Senator who voted against the Malloy-Sikorsky-Lockheed Martin-Governor Dannel Malloy deal, pompously called “Connecticut Strategic Investment Act.” That would be Senator Joe Markley , who most certainly is not against strategic investment. Like many conservatives, Markley believes that production should be directed by the needs of the market place – not by politicians operating hand in glove with mega companies to arrange deals profitable to both. Senator Markley thinks crony capitalism, not at all the same thing as strategic investment, is a bell sounding the death knell of business in Connecticut. Crony capitalism is at best a polite form of bribery.

Governor Dannel Malloy, a righteous dragon, entered office in 2011 shooting flames out of his nostrils. Previous laggard Republican governors, ne’er-do-wells in Mr. Malloy’s considered judgment, had resorted to budget alchemy to balance their books. He would fix that: Open government, balanced budgets and an absence of the usual end of the fiscal year chicanery would usher in a long hoped for prosperity. And, oh yes, having in his first budget imposed on Connecticut one of the largest tax increase in state history, there would be no tax increases in Mr. Malloy’s second term. You can take that to the bank.

The following document was sent to me by someone who wishes Connecticut State Senator Joe Markley the best in his pursuit of the chairmanship of the Republican Party. Mr. Markley’s name has been in circulation for several weeks. Connecticut Commentary, while it does not endorse candidates, sees a good deal of merit in Mr. Markley’s bid. He is a masterful organizer, a thoughtful and principled politician. As a bonus, Mr. Markley is one of the few legislators in the General Assembly who can make a speech, sometimes studded with literary references, that bears repeating. The communication below – designed to outline some of Mr. Markley’s proposals for the  reification of a political party that now has been marginalized by progressives in the General Assembly with knives in their brains, assisted as ever by Governor Dannel “The Porcupine” Malloy – is clear and eminently readable. It would be redundant to outline the outline here. Connecticut Commentary wishes to say only that it ...

State Senator Joe Markley of Southington lately has expressed an interest in heading the state Republican Party as its Chairman, which is on the order of Custer expressing an interest in leading the 7 th Calvary against a Cheyenne and Sioux encampment near the Little Big Horn River. Why would anyone want to do that?

Here is an accurate transcript of a conversation between Dennis House of Face the State and former Ambassador to Ireland Tom Foley . Mr. Foley hopes to secure the Republican Party’s nomination for governor. Neither Mr. Foley nor Governor Dannel Malloy has as yet formally announced their respective bids for the governor’s office. A great deal of commentary – most of it critical of Mr. Foley’s comments -- already has preceded the posting of a transcript. But it’s always a good idea to put first things first: First the transcript, then the commentary:

There are dozens of questions concerning the bill awarding to illegal immigrants special licenses marked “FOR DRIVING PURPOSES ONLY,” some of which were discussed, others not, as the bill wended its way through the General Assembly . Just to begin with, the notation on the license is at least in one respect like the Jewish star pinned on clothing during the Nazi period, the purpose of which was to alert authorities that the wearer was a doubtful-citizen slated for special treatment – or, as it turned out, mistreatment. Legal immigrants, once they are embraced by their chosen country, simply disappear into the patriotic woodwork; they become citizens. “Undocumented immigrants,” having been documented with a license that singles them out as “the other,” do not therefore become citizens invested with the full panoply of citizens’ rights. They cannot use their licenses to vote, for example, which seems to be the primary reason their license will be marked “FOR DRIVING PURPOSES ON...

“I seen my chances, and I took’em” – George Washington Plunkitt Tom Foley, an announced Republican candidate for governor, dropped an anvil on the multi-footed Connecticut centipede, and -- Ouch! A bill written by Mr. Foley and launched by State Senator Joe Markley was, according to a story written by Mark Pazniokas in CTMirror , “ problematic for many members of the part-time state legislature, including a potential GOP rival.”

When the Democratic dominated General Assembly perhaps unwittingly passed Bill HB 6650 establishing a Risk Reduction Earned Credits program for some prisoners incarcerated for violent crimes, the opposition from Republicans was nearly instantaneous. Then State Senator Len Suzio took the lead in agitating against the program. He was not alone. In a June 6, 2011 media release , State Senator Joe Markley said that the program “amounts to a jail break.” Mr. Markley went on to list the categories of violent prisoners eligible for early release under the program: