Can Connecticut Democrats rise above identity politics?

By CHRIS POWELL

Why are some people Democrats and others Republicans? 

Personal identities have always had something to do with it. Some people inherit party affiliations from parents. Many Democrats come from the working and government classes. Many Republicans come from the propertied and professional classes. 

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Ethnicity often has had something to do with it as well. 

Many Irish immigrants to Connecticut became Democrats because Republicans were in charge when the Irish arrived and were often hostile to newcomers. The next wave of immigrants, the Italians, found themselves in a rivalry with the Irish and so many became Republicans. 

Upon their liberation after the Civil War, Blacks became Republicans because Democrats were aligned with the former slave states. Blacks began migrating to the Democrats in the 1960s when Republicans took them for granted and Democratic leaders became more aggressive about civil rights and racial equality.

Political culture is involved as well. The anti-Vietnam War movement originated as a largely youthful rebellion in the Democratic Party during a Democratic presidency and within a few years the party had become not just anti-Vietnam but also the party of sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and perpetual protest. President Richard Nixon exploited the resulting fear of civil disorder and had the Republican Party pose as the representative of the “silent majority,” the cultural establishment.

Nowadays the cultural establishment is Democratic and politically correct in the extreme, supporting open borders and transgenderism in sports and thereby boosting President Trump, who delights in denouncing  all things “woke.”

Political correctness is based to a great extent on identity politics, the assignment of the electorate to interest groups based not on public policy but on mere personal characteristics. Democrats see identity politics as a recruiting tool, though it may alienate as many people as it attracts. 

Identity politics was the object of an appeal made this week by the vice chairwoman of Connecticut’s Democratic State Central Committee, Vanita Bhalla, who urged people to join one of the state party’s “caucuses.”    

“Our caucuses,” Bhalla wrote, “are where Democrats come together around shared experiences, organize, and make sure our party reflects the full diversity of Connecticut. They help shape policy conversations, strengthen relationships across communities, and bring new voices into our work at every level. Joining a caucus is a great way to meet like-minded people.”

But the 10 Democratic caucuses Bhalla identified actually proclaim insularity and conformity, implying that members of each group think the same and want something for themselves as a special interest rather than something benefiting the public generally. The special interests the Democrats imagine cultivating with caucuses actually may be hard to figure out.

As policy matters, the LGBTQ+ Caucus may want state government to support the claim of transgender people to a right to participate in sports contrary to their biological sex, and to support sex-change surgery for minors. The Women’s Caucus, at least a caucus of Democratic women, may want state law to endorse late-term abortion. The Black and Hispanic caucuses may want more state financial aid to the municipalities where most Blacks and Hispanics live.

But what do the Asian-American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Caucus, the Disability Caucus, the Immigrant Voters Caucus, the Muslim Caucus, the Small Towns Caucus, and the Veterans Caucus want in public policy that differs from what most other people, or at least most other Democrats, want for everyone?

Do these caucuses ever go beyond the personal identity interest and approach the national or state interest — the public interest? Indeed, as these caucuses suggest, is it really possible to approach the public interest only after people are sorted into identity groups? If caucuses are necessary — and local Democratic town committees insufficient as forums — why not organize them according to policy issues instead?

Organizing people by identity groups risks stereotyping and caricaturing people — the opposite of the “diversity” the caucuses are supposed to reflect. But then “diversity” isn’t really the objective. Getting votes is, whatever the cost.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Throwing money at schools hides the learning problem

By CHRIS POWELL

While Governor Lamont has proposed a state budget that would increase spending by $1.2 billion or 4.4%, it has prompted furious if predictable complaints from municipal school systems, higher educators, hospitals, social service agencies, and others. They say the governor’s budget isn’t nearly enough, even though the his proposal comes within a mere million dollars of overrunning what is called the state spending cap.

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Yes, state government still neglects certain compelling needs. For example, because of Connecticut’s lack of mental hospitals and shelters for the homeless, the state’s primary treatment for mental illness is fresh air. But even as opportunities to economize in state government abound, there is little discussion of them. Legislators in the Republican minority are eager to review the social-service spending “earmarks” Democratic senators stuffed into the previous state budget as raw patronage for their friends and lovers, spending that is never evaluated for results, but that’s about it for economizing.

Auditing major government policies for results is never undertaken either, though what might be the fattest target was indicated the other day by a report from Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers. That is, public school enrollment in the state is lower than it has been for at least 20 years, having fallen by more than 10,000 students from 2024 to 2025, a decline of 2.1% in just one year, and enrollment is projected to continue to fall substantially for the next five years.

Yet school systems keep spending more while the few proficiency tests state government allows show learning is declining too. Spending increases are not purchasing better education, but this is not questioned by the state Education Department or any legislative committee.

Maybe that is because any inquiry into the anomaly might notice that 19% of Connecticut’s public school students are now classified as requiring “special education.” That is, they have serious learning disabilities. This indicates the worsening neglect of children in their own homes and may indict welfare policy’s destruction of the family.

These trends would be terrifying if anyone in authority insisted on examining them. But elected officials seem to be more terrified of finding out that the critical factor in education is not what the people on the payroll claim — per-pupil spending — but per-pupil parenting. Such a realization might be explosive. So everyone in authority figures it’s better just to throw more money at educators so they will go away for another year.

But the underlying problem — the social disintegration caused by government policy — won’t go away. There was another hint of it last week in the Yale Daily News. The paper reported that New Haven students are not the only ones chronically absent from the city’s schools, with a third of them having missed 10% or more of their school days in the last school year. Last year nearly a third of the city’s own teachers also met the chronically absent standard, being absent for illness or personal time on 10% or more of their workdays. On average 12% of New Haven’s teachers are absent every day.

It’s probably not because they are such slackers. More likely it’s because teaching a student population that is overwhelmingly poor, fatherless, and demoralized is extremely difficult, burns teachers out, and causes them to seek jobs in school systems with better salaries and demographics.

An English teacher at a city “magnet” school explained, “When I get home I am mentally and physically exhausted from babysitting, not teaching.” He said he spends only 30 minutes of a 90-minute class doing actual teaching, the rest managing student misbehavior.

But misbehaving students in Connecticut no longer can be expelled from school. Political correctness requires that they be permitted to impair the education of their classmates. After all, which elected officials dare to tell their constituents that they are failing as parents and raising incorrigible kids?

So government in Connecticut will do nothing about the collapse of education, and the only thing conscientious parents can do about it is try to move away from the poverty factory.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)


Hartford’s new curriculum: toilet training and diapers

By CHRIS POWELL

Teachers in Connecticut, especially those in the poverty factories that are the state’s cities, long have lamented that many of their youngest students arrive in school grossly unprepared even for kindergarten, unable to identify things as simple as letters and colors because of a lack of parenting.

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But child neglect is getting worse, as was indicated last week when Connecticut Inside Investigator took note of a state labor board decision involving Hartford’s schools. 

Hartford’s school system used to require that children in its pre-kindergarten program be toilet-trained. In case of an “accident,” teachers were told to “coach” the kids about how to use the bathroom. 

But two years ago the school superintendent removed the toilet-trained requirement and made teachers responsible for cleaning up after accidents and changing diapers. Predictably enough, more children who were not toilet-trained entered the pre-K program and many more teachers got stuck cleaning up accidents and changing diapers. The teachers union complained and the labor board has ruled that the new policy is void because it should have been negotiated with the union.

Even so, Connecticut Inside Investigator says, the school system’s internet site still asserts that children who are not toilet-trained are welcome in the pre-K program and school staff will help children “to acquire this skill at school.”

The labor board decision suggests that no union contract would be violated if cleanup and diaper duty was assigned to classroom “para-educators,” the euphemism for teacher aides who help keep incorrigibles under control. So much for “solidarity forever.”

Another indication that child neglect is worsening in Connecticut came the other day in Governor Lamont’s welcoming address to the new session of the General Assembly. The governor proposed appropriating enough money to provide free breakfast to students in all the state’s public schools. Some schools already provide it as well as free lunches, and there are even occasional free dinners for students as well. Some schools also maintain food pantries from which students can take food home.

Meanwhile some state legislators want a new law to facilitate early parole for young people who were imprisoned for serious crimes committed before they were 26.

These things scream social disintegration and yet there is no official curiosity about its causes, much less any official inquiry, only proposal after proposal in the legislature for more remediation via welfare benefits. Connecticut seems to think that children don’t need two competent parents, just a social worker and a probation officer. Maybe the next remediation will require teachers and “para-professionals” not just to toilet-train and diaper their neglected students but also to take the kids home with them at night.

If Connecticut ever wants to undertake such a parenting program, other recent investigative journalism suggests that state government might fund it amply by eliminating obvious inefficiencies elsewhere in its workforce.

Connecticut Inside Investigator’s Marc E. Fitch reports that while 13,000 state employees have been approved to work at home by internet and telephone, they are still getting “snow days” off with pay. The only thing preventing them from working at home in bad weather is the master state employee union contract and the arbiters who almost always construe it against the public interest.

Governor Lamont is said to want state employees to come back to their offices more often and to be planning to negotiate this with the State Employee Bargaining Agent Coalition. He could also try to negotiate the “snow days” issue. But the governor is a Democrat and is seeking re-election this year, and the state employee unions are his party’s campaign army. So he may not negotiate too hard.

And as the Yankee Institute’s Meghan Portfolio noted the other day, while most state governments have consolidated Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday into a single paid holiday for their employees — Presidents Day — Connecticut maintains those two separate paid holidays in February for its state employees.

So it seems to be time to change the state’s motto, “Qui transtulit sustinet,” to “Pecunia tantum est.” That is, “It’s only money.”

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Fault in paralyzed man’s case is more fairly settled at last

By CHRIS POWELL

While there was plenty of negligence in the case of Randy Cox, the man who was paralyzed after his arrest by New Haven police in 2022, the court decision concluding the case’s criminal aspects suggests that the negligence really wasn’t that of the officers it was blamed on.

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Cox had gotten drunk and was holding a bottle of liquor and brandishing a gun he carried illegally as he walked past a street fair, scaring people, one of whom called the cops. They arrested him and put him into a van for transport to the police station. Inside the van he resisted arrest, yelled, kicked, and rolled on the floor before sitting on the van’s bench. But the bench had no seatbelts and when the driver stopped hard to avoid a collision, Cox slid head-first to the wall at the front of the passenger compartment, breaking his neck.

Rather than wait for an ambulance, the officer driving the van continued to the station, where other officers didn’t believe Cox’s protests that he couldn’t move. They figured he was just drunk and faking injury, so they manhandled him into a wheelchair and then into a cell before medical help arrived.

Since Cox is Black, New Haven and then the country were filled with shrieks of racism as his catastrophic injury became clear, though most of the officers who handled him after his arrest were also members of minority groups. Mayor Justin Elicker, who is white and whose city is two-thirds minority, was quickly intimidated out of treating the situation honestly. Scapegoats were needed to calm the political controversy. 

Fortunately for the mayor, five officers were soon charged criminally. Two pleaded guilty in plea bargains — one of them was fired and lost her appeal for reinstatement and the other retired. The remaining three insisted on innocence and this month were more or less vindicated. Superior Court Judge David Zagaja granted them  “accelerated rehabilitation,” a probation that dismisses charges, ruling that the officers had not meant to hurt Cox and had not caused his catastrophic injury.

Impartial observers could have seen as much long before now. The city’s responsibility for Cox’s injury was entirely a matter of the failure to install seatbelts in the prisoner transport van, a failure dating back many years, a failure for which New Haven and its insurance company have paid Cox and his racism-contriving “civil rights” lawyer $45 million, which, it is hoped, will cover the lifetime care Cox is likely to need. 

While politically correct Connecticut may not be able to acknowledge it, the heavier responsibility here falls on Cox himself. Getting drunk in public is never a good idea. Getting drunk, carrying a gun illegally, and brandishing it at a street fair, scaring people and compelling police to arrest you, is a worse idea. 

Of course no one is paying more for his mistake than Cox himself, but if he had been white and a member of the National Rifle Association, he might not have been forgiven as quickly as he was, with the criminal charges against him dropped because of his injury and the mayor, still playing politics, treating him as an innocent who was persecuted by the police.

As for the three officers who now have beaten the criminal charges against them, all were fired but one regained his job through an appeal and the two others continue their appeals. 

Mayor Elicker says he disagrees with the judge’s decision to dismiss the charges against the three officers, so presumably he will continue to oppose reinstating the two still appealing. But a fairer resolution would be a settlement reinstating them with less than full back pay in recognition that for three years they have suffered far out of proportion to whatever they did wrong.

All this leaves political liberalism in Connecticut to sort out the wonderful contradiction of its two silliest principles: that minorities are always right, and so are members of government employee unions.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Is there any policy reason not to renominate Larson?

By CHRIS POWELL

Will former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin ever come up with a reason for his challenge to U.S. Rep. John B. Larson’s renomination by the Democratic Party besides the claim that Larson, at 77, is too old? 

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Bronin, 46, has $1.5 million in campaign money, so publicizing his ideas should be easy if he ever wants to offer any. It would be particularly worthwhile if he could outline any differences with Larson on policy. But Larson is very liberal and while volunteering an un-liberal idea or two might show that Bronin is capable of original thought, original thought might be fatal to candidates in a Democratic primary in Connecticut.

If Larson is too old, he still keeps turning up in public appearances or news reports nearly every day without spending his own campaign money, almost $1 million, on paid advertising. When the Democratic minority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, came to Hartford last week to endorse Larson, the best Bronin could do was grouse. “The Democratic Party,” Bronin said, “would be stronger if our leadership spent less time protecting people who have been in Congress for decades and more time working to lift up a new generation of Democrats to help us build a stronger, more energetic, more effective Democratic Party.”

More effective how exactly? Bronin didn’t say, though opportunities abound. 

Last week the Democrats in Congress decided to suspend, among other things, the salaries of airport security employees to punish President Trump and his administration for what Democrats see as excessively rough enforcement of immigration law. Larson and the rest of Connecticut’s congressional delegation, all Democrats, think suspending the salaries of airport security employees is a great tactic, and Bronin hasn’t objected, though the many residents of the 1st Congressional District who travel by air might disagree if their flights start getting delayed or canceled as happened during the government shutdown engineered by congressional Democrats last year.

Opposing immigration law enforcement seems to be the biggest part of Democratic campaigns and Larson is going along with it. Last week he condemned the Trump administration for trying to “infiltrate” field offices of the Social Security Administration to apprehend illegal immigrants. This complaint was nonsensical. 

For illegal immigrants don’t qualify for Social Security and if they are receiving such benefits it would be properly a matter for law enforcement. So why should illegal immigrants be exempt from apprehension at Social Security offices, or exempt anywhere for that matter? Larson didn’t explain but Bronin won’t call him on it because in a Democratic primary he’ll support illegal immigration as much as Larson will.

And why is Larson Bronin’s only target for trying to remain in office in a vigorous old age? Among Connecticut’s other members of Congress, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro is also seeking re-election this year though, at 82, she is five years older than Larson. U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney is seeking re-election at 72. U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal is in his third term at age 80. Does Bronin think any of them should retire for the sake of “a stronger, more energetic, more effective Democratic Party”?

Bronin needn’t worry. Most Connecticut journalists are partisan Democrats and won’t ask.

Like most Democrats, Larson seems to think that the best reason for renominating and re-electing him is his bloviating against Trump. But this comes at the expense of serious policy issues, even as Larson has a strong claim on the best issue — strengthening the Social Security system, for which he long has been the primary advocate of crucial legislation.

Bronin has faulted Larson for not getting the legislation passed, but the party’s congressional leadership was too timid about it. In Jeffries the House Democrats have a new leader who supports Larson’s legislation enthusiastically. With the Democrats likely to win a majority in the House in November, the bill could pass there and a weakened national Republican Party might find it hard to oppose.

Bloviating against Trump won’t help get his signature on the bill. 

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Teacher union’s political racket is ready to take over Connecticut

By CHRIS POWELL

For many years Connecticut’s teacher unions ran a discreet political racket. Many of their members would hold teaching jobs in towns adjacent to the towns in which they lived and then seek municipal office in their home towns, particularly office on their local board of education. They were usually elected.

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This arrangement — working in one town, getting elected in another — would mask a potential conflict of interest, wherein, as municipal officials, these board members would decide on or even negotiate contracts with a local affiliate of the statewide union to which they also belonged via their job in a neighboring town. Were board members most loyal to the public interest or to their union interest?

Since the connection of school board members to the union whose members get most money spent by school boards was seldom reported by news organizations, the question of primary loyalty was not posed in public forums. If it had been posed, it might have elicited a claim that the public interest and the union interest were identical. That might have been an interesting discussion.

The teacher union racket is no longer discreet. For the Yankee Institute’s Meghan Portfolio reported the other day that the state’s largest teacher union, the Connecticut Education Association, now celebrates the racket. The union’s December newsletter proclaims that in November’s municipal elections 57 CEA members won elections in more than 45 towns, with only five of the union’s candidates losing.

The CEA newsletter, Portfolio writes, “makes clear this was no spontaneous wave of civic participation. Candidates were guided through a union-run pipeline, including a formal questionnaire process and participation in the National Education Association’s ‘See Educators Run’ program.”

The union threw its resources into its members’ campaigns with e-mails, text messages, flyers, telephone calls, and door-to-door canvassing. Since name recognition and personal contact are the main deciders of most municipal elections, such electioneering is usually successful, especially since news coverage of school board elections, always skimpy, has vanished.

Indeed, the CEA may already have figured out that with just a little more effort it can gain control of every school board and town council in the state before people realize what is going on, there being no one left to tell them.

Of course this is only democratic politics in the era of local journalism’s demise. Even people with the worst potential conflicts of interest have the right to run for public office, and special interests with access to big money, especially money derived from government, heavily influence if not control all sorts of political nominations and elections everywhere, though this is most pronounced with teacher union control of the Democratic Party. Teacher union members typically constitute 10% of the party’s national convention delegates.

But the special interest influence in politics and government may be worst with teacher unions, since education is the prerequisite of democracy. Destroy education and you destroy democracy, and the trends in American education are terrible. Enrollments, student proficiency, and accountability are falling even as school costs keep rising, and civic engagement is collapsing along with journalism and literacy generally. 

This is the perfect environment for special-interest control of government. No wonder the CEA, special interest No. 1, is celebrating. 

College student loan debt remains a huge problem, so people may have welcomed the announcement last week that Connecticut’s Student Loan Reimbursement Program has begun accepting applications for reimbursement of college student loan payments made in 2025. 

Reimbursement of up to $5,000 per year is available to Connecticut residents who earned a degree in the state and are making $125,000 a year or less.

This isn’t fair. It’s really a bailout for the failure of higher education, which is grossly overpriced, long having awarded degrees of little use in making a living and having stuck its victims with debt that seriously impairs their lives or that, as with Connecticut’s reimbursement program, is transferred to taxpayers, many of whom did not attend college or paid their own way.

It’s another part of the education racket.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Republican senators top governor’s tax cut by $1 billion

By CHRIS POWELL

If Connecticut’s next state budget can be considered a sort of poker game of tax cutting, Governor Lamont has opened with $500 million and the minority Republicans in the state Senate have seen his $500 million and raised him $1 billion.

But it’s not as hopeful for taxpayers as it looks.

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The governor, a Democrat seeking election to a third term in November, proposes to spend $500 million to issue state tax “rebates” — $200 for single people and $400 for couples — a week ahead of Election Day. (If President Trump, a Republican, tried something like this, Democrats and most journalists would scream: “Bribery!”) 

If things go according to what seems like the Democratic plan, soon after the election state residents will be hit with big increases in oil, gasoline, natural gas, and electricity prices as a result of a “climate superfund” tax many Democrats want to levy against energy producers to punish them for letting state residents use their fuels for the last century. Of course the energy producers won’t pay the tax by themselves; they’ll recover the cost by raising prices and the public will pay. But people will blame the energy producers, not the elected officials who enacted the tax and quickly took their “tax rebates” away.

The Republican senators, previously tribunes of fiscal responsibility, have counterproposed sharp reductions in the state income tax and property taxes on cars, $1.5 billion worth — reductions that might endure year after year.

The Republican senators also would eliminate state government’s “public benefits” charges on electric utility bills, which help to make Connecticut’s electricity prices nearly the highest in the country.   

Sen. Ryan Fazio, R-Greenwich, a candidate for his party’s nomination for governor, says, “There is so much pork stuffed in our public benefits tax that it would boggle the mind — over 50 different government programs passed by the legislature and the governor over many years.”

Indeed, but Governor Lamont notes that some of the “public benefits” charges are not “pork.” They also pay for a guarantee of electricity supply from the Millstone nuclear power station in Waterford and for management of the regional electric grid. Some of the charges would be more honestly and transparently placed in the state budget and financed by general revenue rather than by what is essentially a sales tax on electricity, but they’d still have to be paid, and eliminating the “public benefits” tax won’t save as much money as Republicans imply.

So where is the rest of the money for the Republican tax relief to come from? 

The Senate Republican leader, Brookfield’s Stephen Harding, says: “We have a $4 billion-plus ‘rainy-day fund.’ The people of the state have essentially been overtaxed by that much.”

Not really. This claim is wrong for the same reason Governor Lamont, Democratic legislators, and state Comptroller Sean Scanlon are wrong when they claim that state government lately has produced balanced budgets with surpluses.

For the state employee and teacher pension funds are still underfunded by $35 billion or more, so the “rainy-day fund” and the supposed surpluses are really just borrowing from the pension funds and pushing their burdens deeper into the future, when they will thrust on taxpayers who weren’t even born when the pensioners were working, taxpayers who never benefited from the pensioners’ services.

When it comes to state budgeting and taxes, there are really only three ways of serving the public better: reducing the burden of government, improving services and making them more efficient, and eliminating the inessential. Connecticut fails badly in these respects. 

The failure starts with state government’s failure to care about actual results. State government equates success with merely spending money even as important results worsen, including education, poverty, payroll control, and corruption. The Democrats can’t find anything to cut, especially since most failures profit Democrats, and the Republicans are too few and averse to being frank about the horrible.

Two-hundred-dollar “tax rebate” checks may help voters overlook failure but they won’t fix or improve anything.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

More environmental deceit; and hypocrisy on housing

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut’s environmental extremists aren’t just extreme. They’re deceitful too, and as the new session of the General Assembly begins they are coming back with legislation that is more extremism and deception.

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They want state government to put another tax on conventional energy — oil and natural gas — in the name of reducing “climate change,” which used to be called “global warming,” as if Earth’s climate hasn’t been changing, oscillating between warming and cooling cycles for millennia, long before the rise of mankind and the internal combustion engine, the invention being blamed for “climate change.”

The deceitfulness of the environmental extremists’ proposal is that they want to levy the new tax on the producers of oil and natural gas rather than on the consumers — that is, the people of Connecticut — as if the producers are the bad guys and force people to use their fuels instead of the far more expensive and far less effective fuels the environmental extremists prefer. The new tax would be an indirect tax on a necessity of life and drive up energy costs as producers and wholesalers recovered the tax from ordinary users. 

But to the environmental extremists and deceivers, the nice thing about the proposal is that the public would blame the big energy companies for the resulting price increases, not the true perpetrators, their own state legislators and the governor.

By contrast, a tax on retail fuel purchasers — a sales tax — would be clearly visible to all and honestly fix political responsibility for higher costs.

The environmental extremists and deceivers are following the model set by the dishonest tax Connecticut already applies to fuel — what is called the gross earnings tax, which is applied to the first sale of petroleum products brought into the state. This is a tax on wholesalers and adds about 26 cents to the retail price of each gallon of gasoline in the state. The wholesale tax is built into the sales price. People can’t see it or understand it. It fools them very well, which is why the environmental extremists and deceivers love it and are eager to expand on it.

Chris Herb, president of the Connecticut Energy Marketers Association, gets to the point that the environmental extremists and deceivers avoid. “Anyone supporting this proposal,” Herb says, “is supporting higher electric bills, higher heating costs, and higher prices at the gas pump.” 

Such higher prices won’t be popular. But bashing corporations usually plays well politically.

Since Connecticut is so highly taxed and expensive, many state legislators now are prattling about the need for “affordability” in public policy. With bitter cold, deep snow, and high wind having just caused state residents to spend more than ever to keep their homes warm, the campaign for “affordability” should easily defeat more hidden taxes on energy — if the campaign is sincere.

* * *

It seems that advocates of Connecticut’s new housing legislation, including Governor Lamont, don’t really think it will accomplish much. For they are supporting legislation that would give municipal fair-rent commissions authority to prevent landlords who acquire existing rental properties from raising rents by more than 5%.

Meanwhile Connecticut is full of apartments and tenements that need maintenance and renovation costing more than their current rents can support. Indeed, Connecticut lately seems to have more rent control than housing construction.

Connecticut is in urgent need of at least 100,000 more housing units, and the housing shortage is a big part of the state’s “affordability” problem. The shortage can be solved only by housing construction or swift deportation of the state’s illegal immigrant population, which isn’t going to happen as long as state government remains controlled by the people who have made Connecticut a “sanctuary state.”

No one is likely to try to build housing if his chances of making money are substantially impaired by rent control.

Enacting rent control amid a desperate shortage of housing may be popular but it’s hypocritical and will only make things worse.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Lamont thrills Democrats with nullification rhetoric

By CHRIS POWELL

Speaking to the General Assembly last week, Governor Lamont felt obliged to rile up members of his party’s big majority against immigration law enforcement. Referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, the governor said: “ICE, everywhere you go uninvited, violence follows. Go home. We’re keeping Connecticut safe without you.”

Democratic legislators stood up, whooped, and cheered.

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But even as the governor spoke, a few blocks away from the state Capitol at the federal courthouse in Hartford an illegal immigrant from Jamaica who had been living in New Haven was sentenced to 22 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to illegally re-entering the United States. 

The Hartford Courant reports that the man already had served four years in prison on state drug, weapons, and forgery charges and had been deported back to Jamaica in 2018. Returning illegally, he obtained a California driver’s license under a false name and registered two cars in Connecticut, though Connecticut, a “sanctuary state” like California, also would have been glad to give him a driver’s license. In 2023 a state warrant charged him with breach of peace and threatening but he remained at large until the federal government apprehended him.

State government did not keep Connecticut safe against this guy and hasn’t kept Connecticut safe against many others like him. ICE has apprehended many illegal immigrant criminals in Connecticut, as well as many ordinary illegals the governor would exempt from enforcement. 

Indeed, in telling ICE to “go home,” the governor suggested that it’s improper for immigration agents to be in Connecticut at all — that Connecticut is not part of the United States and that the federal government has no law enforcement power here. That position is insurrection and nullification, just as it was in the last century when Southern governors told federal agents to go home and not bother their states for violating the Constitution and federal civil rights law.

Addressing the legislature, the governor also lamented the death of “that young mother shot twice in the head in Minneapolis,” Renee Good. 

“The White House called her a domestic terrorist,” the governor noted. “She reminded me of my daughter.”

Yes, “domestic terrorist” was gross exaggeration, and some ICE agents, like some regular police officers, commit excesses. 

But Renee Good wasn’t shot by an ICE agent for no reason. She was shot because, after parking her car perpendicularly across a street to obstruct an immigration law enforcement action in concert with people blowing whistles and making noise to warn enforcement targets — that is, after committing a federal felony — she tried to drive away to evade arrest and struck or nearly struck an ICE agent, who shot her.

Good and her associates weren’t “domestic terrorists” but nullifiers and insurrectionists who went looking for trouble. Unfortunately Good found it, as did the other Minneapolis resident killed by ICE agents while seeking to obstruct enforcement, Alex Pretti. 

It may be hoped that the governor’s daughter knows better than to do stuff like that.

But many nullifiers and insurrectionists in Connecticut don’t know better. 

A few weeks ago some of them rioted outside the garage of the federal courthouse in Hartford, trying to prevent immigration agents from taking a detainee away. The rioters broke the window of one of the exiting ICE vehicles. Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam approved and blamed President Trump for the riot.

Now, according to the New Haven Independent, nullifiers and insurrectionists in New Haven are incorporating Minneapolis obstruction tactics, tracking ICE agents, blowing whistles and making other noise, and posting on the internet the locations of agents so their targets can escape — more federal felonies.

This will risk or even seek confrontation as in Minneapolis. What does the governor think of such conduct? What does Attorney General William Tong, who also often sounds like a nullifier, think of it? Will journalists ask them?

The nullifiers and insurrectionists in New Haven are looking for a fight. Will the governor and attorney general advise against it or let it happen and then blame ICE?

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

Governor can bribe voters but it won’t lessen poverty

By CHRIS POWELL

Governor Lamont’s address this week welcoming the General Assembly back to work was reminiscent of the old lament about election years — that people in a democracy are easily bribed with their own money.

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 Such a bribe was the highlight of the governor’s remarks — his proposal to issue “tax rebates,” $200 for single people, $400 for married couples. Meanwhile people around the state, most of them associated with the governor’s own party, are clamoring for state government to appropriate more money for social needs state government still neglects. 

Many of those needs are more compelling than the needs or wants of many of the people who will receive those “tax rebates.” But who will be candid about the incongruity? 

That is, the “tax rebates” are needed most to help re-elect the regime so that it can hold power for another four years in the name of addressing all those unmet social needs, though those needs seem only to increase as more is spent in the name of alleviating them. Seldom are any problems actually solved.

The governor’s address inadvertently acknowledged that poverty has been worsening in Connecticut during his administration. 

Once upon a time in Connecticut most parents could feed their children before sending them to school. Indeed, once upon a time most children in Connecticut had two parents. Now many children in Connecticut — most children in the cities — have only one parent, if that, and many arrive at school unfed and distracted by hunger. It’s a big problem. So the governor would have all public schools provide free breakfasts.

Not long ago most working people in Connecticut had jobs requiring a skill level, and their compensation included adequate employer-sponsored medical insurance. Not anymore. Today many young people in Connecticut graduate from high school largely uneducated and qualified only for menial work. As a result more adults are working in minimum-wage jobs once considered entry-level. So the governor wants state government to offer a “public option” program of medical insurance for people who don’t qualify for Medicaid, insurance for the destitute.

The governor said he will appoint a special commission to study the funding of elementary and high school education. It would have been better to study why poverty is worsening. For everyone in state and local government already knows that funding lower education is always a tug of war between state taxes and municipal property taxes, with most of the money ending up with members of teacher unions, who control most municipal spending by virtue of the binding arbitration of their contracts. Nearly every legislative session tinkers with school funding formulas without ever improving student performance. Formula tinkering is just the illusion of concern and action, since student performance is not a matter of per-pupil spending at all but almost entirely a matter of per-pupil parenting, which can’t be discussed though it is at the center of the poverty problem.

The governor noted that Connecticut’s high housing prices are impoverishing people who don’t own their housing. But he seems to expect far more housing construction than is likely to result from the state’s new law restricting municipal zoning. With 169 cities and towns in charge of housing development, there will be little urgency and accountability. What’s needed is a state housing development agency to acquire and take control of the sort of vacant or underused city and inner-suburb properties the governor cited in his address, and to contract for middle-income housing to be built on them urgently.

Instead the other day the governor proposed to apply rent control to apartments owned by out-of-state landlords, a demagogic form of expropriation that will inhibit housing creation.

As most legislative sessions do, the new one will produce a lot more spending, which will be euphemized, as the governor did in his address, as “investment,” a presumption that government spending is always productive. It isn’t. After all, as the Lamont administration’s most recent scandal has shown, state government lately has “invested” hundreds of thousands of dollars in Hartford Sen. Douglas McCrory’s girlfriend.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)