Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

“ It is, perhaps, too complimentary to call them Utopians, they ought rather to be called dys-topians, or caco-topians. What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favor is too bad to be practicable " – John Stuart Mill Gov. Jodi Rell this year conspired with the Democrat leadership in the legislature to shut down a promising Republican alternative budget. There’s something old and something new in all this. In times past, other Republican governors have joined the Democrat leadership and blissfully ignored objections coming from the loyal opposition. Former Governor John Rowland was notorious for beating up on the loyal opposition within his own party to bring in expensive Democrat crafted budgets. And former senator and governor Lowell Weicker, the father of Connecticut’s income tax, had been practicing the art of subtly and not so subtly undermining the efforts of his party ever since he emerged mewling from the political cri...