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...

It’s been 228 years since Alexander Hamilton, seeking to allay fears that the national judiciary would swallow up the other two branches of government, wrote in The Federalist Number 78 that the Supreme Court, provided it observed what has come to be known as the separation of powers,  would under the Constitution be “the weakest of the three departments of power; that it can never attack with success either of the other two; and that all possible care is requisite to enable it to defend itself against their attacks. It equally proves, that though individual oppression may now and then proceed from the courts of justice, the general liberty of the people can never be endangered from that quarter; I mean so long as the judiciary remains truly distinct from both the legislature and the Executive.” The Supreme Court has long far exceeded Hamilton’s modest expectations, and appellate courts have followed suit. A headline in the Hartford Courant demonstrates how far courts hav...

Mark Pazniokas of CTMirror  points out that executive director of AFSCME Council 4 Sal Luciano is not just “another union bigwig.” He is House Majority Leader Joe Aresimowicz’s boss: “Aresimowicz is the education coordinator for AFSCME, a union that paid him $97,000 in 2015, more than double his $43,000 compensation as one of the highest-ranking members of the part-time Connecticut General Assembly.” Mr. Aresimowicz is on a fast track towards becoming the next Speaker of the House in the Democrat dominated General Assembly. If successful in his venture, he will be replacing Brendan Sharkey, a small business owner who recently announced he is calling it quits. Mr. Sharkey has been put through the wringer during the last few budget sessions, which have been, to use a polite word, fractious.

"Th’ newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward" – Mr. Dooley In Peace And War Dannel Malloy, Chairman of the Democratic Governors Association and the second least popular governor in the United States , has produced, in conjunction with Senate President Martin Looney and Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey, the third least popular budget in Connecticut.

Governor Dannel Malloy’s brief flirtation with Republican leaders in the Democrat dominated General Assembly is now officially over. The engagement ring has been repossessed, and we are back to square one; or, as Yogi Berry might put it, “It’s déjà vu all over again.” Shortly after Mr. Malloy agreed to accept the most recent budget presented to him by chastened leaders in the General Assembly, Republican House Minority Leader Themis Klarides expressed her dismay in a Facebook posting: “Despite what they claim, the final budget proposed by the Democrat majority does not include real structural changes necessary to change the course of business in Connecticut. It simply sets us up for tax increases after the elections in November.”

When the General Assembly, dominated by members of his own party, returned to Governor Dannel Malloy a revised budget that was $340 million out of balance, he did his duty. Mr. Malloy resubmitted to the legislature a second balanced budget that contained further spending reductions, no tax increases and no raids on rainy day funds. In an April 16 op-ed in a Hartford paper , Mr. Malloy noted pointedly that there were only three weeks left in the legislatives session and the legislature had not yet resolved a $900 million budget shortfall for the coming fiscal year. Mr. Malloy had determined that state government could not “respond to this challenge in the same way we have in the past, that we must change business as usual at the Capitol.” This was a late realization. During Mr. Malloy’s entire term in office, state government – including the governor’s office – virtually a one-party operation, had been waiting for Godot.

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of the People’s Republic of Vermont -- the nation’s first socialist presidential candidate since Eugene Debs (1855-1926), five times candidate for president and Norman Thomas, a presidential candidate six times from 1928-1948 -- has a hearty dislike, people will have noticed, for “greedy” companies larger than a mom-and-pop-deli. “Greed” is the mud-ball leftist extremists throw at business enterprises that are successful. There are two kinds of businesses: successful ones that make a profit and unsuccessful ones that go out of business. “Greed” is excessive profit-taking, the “excess” to be determined by socialists and progressives who historically have been much in the habit of transferring funds from obscenely greedy “haves” to the importunate and much more numerous “have-nots.” A Hartford newspaper  made Connecticut history when it called unions “greedy” in an editorial. Stubborn union leaders, the editorial pronounced, were perversely refu...

Is the long, amicable honeymoon between Governor Dannel Malloy and Democratic leaders in the General Assembly over? One report points to trouble in Eden. Following a Democratic majority caucus, Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey confided to reporters that his people pointed a crooked finger of blame at Mr. Malloy for raises that the University of Connecticut gave to non-teaching staff. The raises were rescinded following a budget address given to the General Assembly in which Mr. Malloy noticed, apparently for the first time, that a “new reality” would henceforth require the General Assembly to pare back spending. Like the near approach of execution in the morning, the prospect of elections clears the mind wonderfully.

“Cuz that’s where the money is.” Such was the response when Willy Sutton, the scrupulously honest bank robber of the 1920-30’s, was asked why he robbed banks. Before the reader draws the usual aphorism from his holster – “honesty is the best policy” – he should be advised that Willie denied having said the quip for which he is most famous. He robbed banks, Mr. Sutton said, because it was exhilarating: “I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life!” It turns out that the most famous line in bank robbing history was inserted into an after-interview story by a reporter who thought the quip would be good copy. He was right. Reporters In those days took such liberties – not like today. It is true, however, that Willie gave his name to a law, Sutton’s Law, which holds that in diagnosing crime, one should always consider the obvious.

Projected revenue figures from Connecticut’s usually non-partisan Office of Fiscal Analysis (OFA) have been fairly accurate. The accuracy of figures produced by agencies used in assembling budgets is generally proportionate to the political independence of the number crunchers. And of course all figures utilized by partisans – especially during elections, which bend hard truths to suit the ambitions of the reigning power – should be viewed with a great deal of suspicion. The figures most recently released by the OFA are balled fists. This year’s budget could be in the red by as much as $266 million, a too frequent occurrence during the entire administration of Governor Dannel Malloy.

Malloy budget already in red It’s been some time coming, but Governor Dannel Malloy, now tripping around the state selling his “austere” budget, is showing signs that he has been mugged by reality. He says it himself , bluntly and without the usual sugar topping: “… there is a certain reality. The nation’s gross national product last quarter grew by .7 percent – .7 percent. And there has been volatility in the stock market going back to June of last year. And that revenue is falling, not rising. That’s the reality.” The tax-increase solution to disappearing revenues has been tried and found wanting. Numerous times during his two terms in office Mr. Malloy has been forced to rely on his rescission authority to sop-up the red ink in numerous budgets. Raising taxes, Mr. Malloy said at the somber gathering in Middletown, would be ill advised. Mr. Malloy already has imposed two massive tax increases on his tax bludgeoned state, and still death is knocking on Connecticut’s...

President Pro Tem of the State Senate Martin Looney, one of the top Democratic leaders in the Democrat dominated General Assembly, has accused loyal opposition Republicans of campaigning. Mr. Looney wrote in a Harford Courant op-ed , “It's one thing to mount a campaign; it's another thing to govern. The Democratic majority in the General Assembly is committed to the hard work of governing.” Republican leaders in the General Assembly – excluded during Governor Dannel Malloy’s entire term in office, with one notable exception; they were admitted to vote for a hastily written gun control bill – would, and have, heartily agreed with one of the principal gate keepers in the law-making body: Bi-partisanship, flouted by Mr. Looney and Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey for five years, is necessary for good governance.  Excluded by Democrats from budget making, Republicans have wandered in the dessert for five years, but now the door has been thrown open to them, accor...

After paying court to Governor Dannel Malloy’s budget address, a eupeptic Republican noted that he sounded like Ronald Reagan. Another, unused to taking leaps of faith, said if only Mr. Malloy had done at the beginning of his term in office what he had said in his current budget address, we wouldn’t be in this fix. General Electric’s leave-taking may have served as a splash of cold water in Mr. Malloy’s face. Aetna, it appears, may be looking for an exit. Sikorsky has been sold, and other insurance companies, in part reacting to a failing Obamacare, are commingling in an effort to cut costs. More than a quarter of the total number of 893,851 active professional physicians reported by the Kaiser Family Foundation have now declined to participate in the new plans under the Affordable Care Act, a number of states have declined to set up exchanges, and UnitedHealth Group , the nation's largest health insurer, having lost more than $500 million on exchange plans, warned l...

The news was leaked in advance of the formal announcement. Capitol Report, Tom Dudchik’s popular Connecticut aggregation site, announced in a bold red headline -- BOSTON GLOBE: GE MOVING TO BOSTON, BOMBSHELL: GE EXEC CALL BAKER, WALSH . And several sub stories were listed: FLASHBACK: Looney: 'I think they doth protest too much'... FLASHBACK: Sharkey accuses GE of 'fear-mongering'... FLASHBACK: Aresimowicz tells GE suits 'take a weekend off from the yacht'...

Leading Democrats in the state – Governor Dannel Malloy, Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey, President Pro Tem of the Senate Martin Looney – have opened a multi- pronged attack on the state’s clean election program and its watchdog, Connecticut’s State Elections Enforcement Commission (SEEC). The effort to defang the state’s clean election laws began with an attempt by the Malloy administration to overleap a provision that prevents potential campaign contributors who do business with the state from polluting elections with campaign contributions to politicians who are in a position to advance their interests. The Malloy administration had produced a mailer  that was clearly a Malloy campaign ad. The administration added to the document a fine-print fig leaf concerning polling information and then argued that the small print polling notice transformed the Malloy campaign ad into a federal product that fell outside Connecticut clean campaign law regulations. The Repu...

The relationship between Republicans on the one hand and Governor Dannel Malloy and Democratic leaders in the General Assembly, Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey and President Pro Tem of the Senate Martin Looney, on the other has been frosty from the beginning of Mr. Malloy’s tenure in office. “Frosty” may be a considerable understatement: On budgetary matters, Democrats and Republicans were not on speaking terms at all. Mr. Malloy, quite consciously, pushed Republican leaders out of the room during all his budget negotiations, which made budget formation easier for the Governor, even as it signaled a certain audacious and dismissive attitude towards Republicans. In fact, Mr. Malloy had diagnosed Connecticut’s ills before he presented his first budget to the General Assembly. He knew what he had to do and proceeded to plow an unobstructed path for himself.

"… these people keep saying there's got to be other ways to do it. I'm calling their bluff" – Governor Dannel Malloy, announcing his plan for a pre-special session, closed door meeting. “These people” are, of course, minority Republicans in the General Assembly who have been consistently shooed out of room by Mr. Malloy during budget negotiations. The above quote suggests that Mr. Malloy, beset by continuing deficits, is now prepared to negotiate in good faith with side-bar Republicans. Mr. Malloy clearly is signaling that the “greater good” should take precedence over the lesser good sometimes supported by majority Democrats whose political livelihood depends upon securing the active intervention of special interests.

The following address was given to the Wallingford Rotary at IL Monticello Restaurant in Meriden on Sept 2. I want to thank Mark Davis for inviting me to speak to you today. As you know, he’s been involved in the Wallingford Rotary for years. After you’ve put in productive years with Rotary, you acquire bragging rights, and this Rotary has much to boast of. Mark doesn’t hold back. He and others regard Rotary as the best volunteer social organization in the country and he’s proud to associate with this  Rotary in particular, which started in 1923 and has given nearly a million dollars in grants to nonprofits. You are to be congratulated on your energy, business intelligence and community concern.

“I don't give reasons. I give orders!” -- Captain Ahab, Moby Dick It seems only yesterday that Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey was threatening to hold a net on the borders of Connecticut and catch companies as they fled a tax prone Democratic Governor and majority Democrats in the state’s General Assembly. Governor Malloy derided the notion. Christie, a blustery Republican, was an easy punching bag. Not so Governor Andrew Cuomo, who recently met with CEO of General Electric Jeff Immelt to discuss moving GE business from Connecticut to New York.

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth” – George Orwell, 1984 The “constant sniping and cherry-picking bad news from the good” has given Connecticut Speaker of the House of Representatives Brendan Sharkey heart palpitations. In a Hartford Courant column , Mr. Sharkey writes: “Rather than attempt to establish themselves as credible participants in our state's democratic process, the Republicans will say or do anything in an attempt to gain a political advantage, no matter how harsh or misleading, and without regard to the negative effects their behavior has on Connecticut's economy or its future.