Misconduct forgotten, a grifter sits in the governor’s chair

By CHRIS POWELL

Twenty years ago Ned Lamont accomplished what may have been the neatest trick in Connecticut political history. He won the primary for the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator, defeating the incumbent, Joe Lieberman, and lost the election on the same night.

By firing cop in shooting, did Hartford mayor yield to politics?

Accountability terrifies public higher educators

At last Linda McMahon finds a school that will listen to her

How did it happen? 

While being a good liberal Democrat in most respects, Lieberman was in trouble with many Democrats for supporting the war in Iraq that was being waged by the administration of President George W. Bush, a Republican, in pursuit of imaginary “weapons of mass destruction.” Lamont mobilized anti-war Democrats and narrowly won the primary, 52-48%.

But as he claimed victory on live television, Lamont was standing next to his supporter from New York, Al Sharpton, who back then was known less for being a “civil rights leader” than a race hustler, a perpetrator of the Tawana Brawley rape hoax, an income tax evader, a violator of federal campaign finance law, a defaulter on a libel judgment arising from the hoax, and an all-around grifter. In a general election Sharpton was the kiss of political death and so, standing next to him that night, Lamont kissed the moderate vote goodbye. Running as an independent Lieberman easily defeated Lamont and a token Republican nominee, drawing both Democratic and Republican votes.

Now governor and seeking re-election to a third term, Lamont is somewhat in the position Lieberman was in 20 years ago: He is the moderate or somewhat less liberal candidate in what likely will be a Democratic primary with far-left Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott. So the other day Lamont seemed to see political benefit in paling around with Sharpton in the governor’s office at the state Capitol. Sharpton and civil rights lawyer Ben Crump had just spoken at the funeral of a mentally ill Black man who had been fatally shot by police during a psychotic episode in Hartford. They were there to racialize the incident.

For as Lenin and other totalitarians are supposed to have said: If you label something well enough, you don’t have to argue with it. No matter how unsubstantiated, accusations of racism still put people on the defensive in Connecticut.

The governor may have been confident he wouldn’t have to worry about being tarnished by Sharpton’s misconduct, since most of it happened long ago and Connecticut’s politically correct journalists would never bring it up even if they knew about it.

Instead the journalists reported that the governor and Sharpton agreed that police need more training in handling mentally ill people who are threatening others. The journalists did not report that while Hartford two years ago created a special squad of social workers to respond to such troubled people, city government lately has much reduced the squad’s funding and has been relying more on intervention by the police to handle the dozens of psychotic episodes that occur in the city every week.

Sharpton didn’t bring that up either. Of course he probably didn’t know about it, nor about the $70 million deficit being run by Hartford’s school system, nor about the system’s incompetence in the face of the enduring poverty and neglect at home of its heavily minority student population.

But then why bother? Everyone was having such a good time in Lamont’s office, with Sharpton sitting in the governor’s chair and remarking, “He’s one of the best governors in the country.”

Polls suggest that Connecticut well may concur in November, since most people have concluded that nothing can be done about the poverty of the cities except to increase their residents’ dependence on welfare and keep raising city government salaries.

Indeed, poverty is big business for many people now, including Sharpton himself, whose non-profit “civil rights organization,” the National Action Network, pays him annual salaries of between $600,000 and $1 million, money drawn in part from donations made by corporations afraid of being targeted by boycotts staged by the group. Such extortion may be what the group means by its slogan: “No justice, no peace.”  

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

By firing cop in shooting, did Hartford mayor yield to politics?

By CHRIS POWELL

When he peremptorily fired the Hartford police officer who shot and killed a mentally ill man who was walking through his neighborhood with a long knife and was refusing police commands to drop it, Mayor Arunan Arulampalam last week worsened a bad situation and probably increased city government’s financial liability.

Accountability terrifies public higher educators

At last Linda McMahon finds a school that will listen to her

Democrats’ legislation would turn Connecticut into a people’s republic

Many people throughout Connecticut may have seen police body camera and bystander video of the incident. Three officers were escorting the man at a safe distance and trying to talk him out of his mission, which seems to have been to commit “suicide by cop,” especially since he had already cut himself with the knife. He also disregarded appeals of family and friends to drop it. Shots from a stun gun failed to bring him down. A fourth officer arrived, drew his gun, also told the man to drop the knife, and was approached by the man, who may have seen this as his best chance to get killed. Whereupon the officer obligingly shot him nine times in quick succession, mortally wounding him.

Hartford police deserve special sympathy, being assigned to keep order in a city that has become an open-air mental hospital, where every month brings more than a hundred similar “mental health crisis” calls — the euphemism for psychotic episodes — even as state government has no mental hospitals for the chronically but not yet criminally insane. But even police sympathizers may wonder why the man had to be shot so many times so fast, or why the officers couldn’t have kept escorting him downtown for coffee in the hope that he would tire of walking, come to his senses for a moment, and surrender.

The law still may be on the officer’s side. An officer may use deadly force if he reasonably fears for his life or the lives of others. The police would not have been summoned by the disturbed man’s family and officers would not have been escorting him if they all didn’t fear that he was putting lives in danger. More efforts to humor and isolate the disturbed man might have been nice but were probably not legally required. 

The state’s inspector general is investigating and will decide for purposes of prosecution.

Mayor Arulampalam is entitled to think, as many people do, that the police should have kept escorting and ducking away from the man as necessary for a while longer. But the mayor could have reached that conclusion long before he was interrupted by critics of the police during his “State of the City” address, and long before he attended the funeral of the disturbed man, who was Black, and heard civil rights leader Al Sharpton and civil rights lawyer Ben Crump make the incident a racial issue. Crump even charged demagogically that the man was shot because he was Black.

So now the fired officer and his union can plausibly argue that the mayor succumbed to political pressure instead of following due process and giving the officer a chance to defend himself.

It is easy to imagine an expensive result here. 

The inspector general will regret that more time wasn’t spent escorting the disturbed man but will acknowledge that the officer who shot him was within the law. 

The mayor will stick by the officer’s firing and it will go to state labor board arbitration, where firings of unionized government employees are seldom upheld. The officer’s penalty will be reduced to a few weeks of suspension and some retraining and he will be reinstated with a lot of back pay. 

The disturbed man’s estate will sue the city and win or settle for a few million dollars.

The city’s police will keep getting more than a hundred “mental health crisis” calls every month, times will get harder, mental illness will increase, the whole state will move closer to being an open-air mental hospital, and no one in authority will ask why or do anything relevant about it. 

But at least Mayor Arulampalam will have gained sufficient political cover with his constituents.

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

Accountability terrifies public higher educators

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut’s public higher educators, or at least those with the ear of the General Assembly, want to prohibit the public from finding out what they’re teaching students at tax expense. For the fourth straight year they have persuaded legislators to advance a bill that would exempt the outlines of their courses — “syllabuses” — from disclosure under the state’s freedom-of-information law.

At last Linda McMahon finds a school that will listen to her

Democrats’ legislation would turn Connecticut into a people’s republic

Another bailout won’t reveal why Hartford’s schools fail

Thus the courses being taught — their materials, assignments, grading policies, and teaching schedules — would become state secrets.

Why? Because the higher educators are terrified of criticism — terrified that the FOI law might be “weaponized” by anti-intellectual yahoos to try to hold them to account for their work.

But of course to serve as a weapon of accountability in government is the very point of FOI law. There can be no accountability if the governed can’t examine what the government is doing. 

In recent years higher education, like lower education, has been taken over by the political left and now is sometimes much engaged in propagandizing as much as teaching. Liberals and Democrats outnumber conservatives and Republicans in education jobs by dozens to one. Any institution so politically one-sided needs extra scrutiny to determine if it serves the public interest.

Indeed, the secrecy legislation sought by Connecticut’s public higher educators is proof that they can’t be trusted to serve the public interest.

The public higher educators are also again seeking legislation to prevent disclosure of records about their teaching or research on scholarly issues, again fearing that disclosure will facilitate criticism, which they deliberately misconstrue as harassment and intimidation. 

Yes, some government records will always be requested by people who dislike what the government is doing or what they suspect it is doing. Some requesters of records may even be malicious. But so what? 

For in a democracy people are entitled to dislike what the government is doing and even to hate it. They are simply entitled to know. The public higher educators may have forgotten it, but disliking what the government is doing was at the heart of the American Revolution. 

Besides, the state Freedom of Information Commission is already empowered to dismiss requests for public records that constitute mere harassment.

The problem is that Connecticut’s public higher educators, or at least those who purport to represent them, consider simple accountability itself to be hateful. So they should switch to teaching in private colleges and universities, or in government colleges and universities in places like Russia, China, North Korea, or Iran. Their “academic freedom” might be constrained in those places, but they’d never have to answer to the public for what the government paid them to do.

LIMIT PROPERTY TAX EXEMPTIONS: New Haven is celebrating Yale University’s decision to increase its voluntary annual payment to city government by 43% over the next seven years, from $23 million now to $33.6 million in 2033. This may be generous of the university in light of the huge new punitive tax the federal government has levied on Yale’s $40-billion-plus endowment and other big university endowments.

Despite the big increase in Yale’s annual gift, the city is likely to raise its property taxes by 4%, which, like the property taxes of all Connecticut’s cities, are already far too high. Welcome as it is, the university’s higher annual voluntary payment doesn’t really address the city’s big tax problem.

That problem is that most real estate in New Haven, about 56% of it, is tax-exempt under state law, and while the university is still the city’s second-largest property taxpayer, it owns 45% of the property in the city and most of it is tax-exempt — $4.5 billion worth.

This is a gross failure of state government policy. Property tax exemptions per property owner should be sharply limited, starting with a gradual reduction of Yale’s exemption to $1 billion. Eventually that would bring tens of millions of dollars in additional revenue to New Haven city government each year, allowing a reduction in property taxes and state financial aid.

Yet state government pays little attention to the issue.

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

At last Linda McMahon finds a school that will listen to her

By CHRIS POWELL

U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon at last has found a school in Connecticut willing to listen to her. 

McMahon’s visit to speak at a civics program at an elementary school in Fairfield in January was canceled when parents objected and the school administration decided that public education’s usual exaltation of “diversity” doesn’t apply to political views.

Democrats’ legislation would turn Connecticut into a people’s republic

Another bailout won’t reveal why Hartford’s schools fail

Overlong legislative hearings are for venting, not persuading

Her visit to Thomaston High School for a similar program this month was canceled when school officials worried that they couldn’t provide a safe and orderly environment. The Thomaston police department has only about 15 officers and so presumably might be overwhelmed by the local anti-fascist brigade. 

But now the Buckley Institute at Yale University in New Haven will welcome McMahon on April 16 to speak about “the roadmap for restoring American education.” The institute, named for the late Yale graduate and conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr., was founded 15 years ago by people at Yale who had tired of the university’s stifling leftism, and, lest it risk proving their complaint, the university doesn’t get in the institute’s way.

New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker, a liberal Democrat who holds two master’s degrees from Yale, doesn’t object to McMahon’s appearance but says she and President Trump “don’t have a ‘roadmap to restore education’ and, conversely, seem to be hell-bent on undermining public education for our most vulnerable students.”

Yes, Trump pledged to eliminate or at least hobble the U.S. Education Department, and McMahon accepted his appointment for that purpose. But then the department was established 46 years ago mainly as a reward to the national teacher unions for their support of the Democratic Party. The premise was that the unions would control the department and it would spend much more federal money that would find its way to union members.

Of course indications are that education in the United States has declined substantially since the department was established. For indeed the department is most of all a source of educator patronage and leftist ideology, so Republicans have a case for getting rid of it. They also can argue that Democrats, especially in Connecticut, including Mayor Elicker, who is also a member of his city’s school board, don’t have much of an educational record to defend.

It’s not the fault of Trump and McMahon that about a third of New Haven’s students and teachers alike are chronically absent, missing 10% or more of their classes, and that, when they do manage to show up, so many students chronically misbehave, causing their teachers to burn out faster. Nor is it the fault of Trump and McMahon that New Haven’s students, like those in Connecticut’s other cities, perform so poorly on the few proficiency tests the state dares to give them even as education spending keeps rising while enrollments fall.

Those failures are part of a bigger societal problem — the explosion of poverty, the welfare system’s destruction of the family, and government’s growing reluctance to enforce standards generally.  

McMahon, the zillionaire co-founder of a wrestling entertainment business, may not be the ideal exponent of a “roadmap for restoring American education.” But such a map would be compelling if it ever went beyond the map now in use by the education establishment: Throw more money, never hold anyone accountable — not students, parents, teachers, or administrators — socially promote everyone, even the illiterate, and make sure that results are not measured and publicized much.

If McMahon wants to be really outrageous at Yale, she could remark on the stunning recent improvements in the education of the poorest and most disadvantaged students in the schools of darkest Mississippi and other Southern states — the result of a new concentration on phonics to teach reading and the refusal to promote students past Grade 3 unless they are competent readers. This promises, or threatens, to be the end of social promotion and the beginning of accountability.

But will Yale and New Haven have enough police on duty to allow such a reformist message to be heard in the citadel of political correctness?    

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

Democrats’ legislation would turn Connecticut into a people’s republic

By CHRIS POWELL

Apparently afraid that Democrats in California and Illinois are getting ahead of them, Connecticut’s Democratic state legislators have pushed into overdrive their campaign to destroy the private sector and turn the state into a people’s republic.

Another bailout won’t reveal why Hartford’s schools fail

Overlong legislative hearings are for venting, not persuading

Why should Connecticut waive law enforcement anywhere?

Not only have the Democratic legislators revived their bill to award unemployment compensation to strikers — that is, to have government pay people for walking off their jobs (except state government jobs, of course) — legislation Governor Lamont vetoed last year, but now they want state government to control the intricacies of the supermarket business.

A bill approved last week by the General Assembly’s Labor and Public Employees Committee would require supermarkets to operate one cashier-staffed checkout station for every two self-checkout stations and to limit self-checkout stations to eight per store.

What is the point of taking these decisions away from supermarket management? The supermarket business has a low profit margin, there is fairly good competition in the business in Connecticut, and customers have choices if they are not satisfied with checkout arrangements. If checkout is too slow for them, they’ll shop elsewhere.

The legislation’s only point seems to be to guarantee cashier jobs by suppressing automation. So why not also prohibit supermarkets from using universal product codes on the goods they sell? Entering prices manually into the cash register, as was done in the old days, would force supermarkets to hire many more cashiers while lengthening checkout times. How have the Luddites on the labor committee missed that idea? 

Of course restricting checkout automation in supermarkets would drive up costs and prices even as Democratic legislators prattle about making Connecticut more affordable. 

But many supermarket employees are unionized and their unions support the Democrats, so protecting supermarket employees against technology comes first.

Meanwhile Democrats are advocating a bill that has been cleared by the legislature’s Housing Committee and would essentially expropriate owners of apartment buildings. 

The bill would restrict landlords from evicting tenants at the end of their leases. A landlord would have to allege some specific fault on the tenant’s part. A landlord’s wanting to raise the rent without risking a bogus racial or religious discrimination complaint wouldn’t be a good enough reason. Nor would a landlord’s simply disliking a tenant’s demeanor be good enough, though tenants would remain free to terminate their lease for not liking their landlord’s demeanor. While requiring landlords to be loyal to their tenants, the bill would not oblige tenants to be loyal to their landlords.

Such expropriation of rental housing is the real Democratic response to Connecticut’s housing shortage. The only way of alleviating the shortage is to build housing, and expropriation of landlords will discourage new rental housing. But getting more housing built is more controversial politically than demagoguing against landlords, so the Democrats choose demagoguery. 

Their expropriation legislation shows that Democrats aren’t serious about “affordable” housing despite their defense of the controversial state law that limits use of municipal zoning against housing construction in towns that lack inexpensive housing. Despite the controversy, that law isn’t getting much housing built.

If Connecticut was serious about housing, the Housing Department would be directed to get aggressive — to condemn and acquire some of the hundreds of dilapidated or vacant former industrial and commercial properties around the state that are already connected to roads and utilities. The department would put the properties out to bid to developers for multi-family housing construction and exempt the projects from municipal zoning. 

No pristine areas would be chewed up by new housing and no environmental damage would be done. Only blighted and under-used areas would be reclaimed.

Yes, getting new housing this way would be controversial too, since, while people say they want more housing in general, few want it near them, even if it would replace the ruins of a factory. 

So instead Democrats propose to expropriate landlords, which will only pretend to address the housing shortage, and the shortage will worsen unless more people get fed up and move out of state, as is happening in California and Illinois.

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

Another bailout won’t reveal why Hartford’s schools fail

By CHRIS POWELL

Eight years ago Gov. Dannel P. Malloy induced a sleepwalking General Assembly to approve a bailout of $550 million for Hartford’s incompetent city government. This week nothing seemed to have changed, with the Hartford Courant reporting that the city’s school system is operating with a likely deficit of $70 million and is asking Mayor Arunan Arulampalam for the $48 million in city government’s emergency fund.

Overlong legislative hearings are for venting, not persuading

Why should Connecticut waive law enforcement anywhere?

Public schools couldn’t meet new home-school standards

Rejecting the request, the mayor noted that it would buy the school system only a six-month reprieve, whereupon the system would be insolvent again unless it made major changes. Unfortunately such changes seem impossible politically at the city level. At the state level, if a $550 million bailout couldn’t make Hartford city government solvent and competent eight years ago, there is not much to be said for another one. 

The biggest part of the problem may be that Hartford, overwhelmed by its impoverished population, lacks the self-sufficient, independent, and property-tax-conscious middle class necessary for competent self-government, just as Bridgeport and New Haven lack it. This isn’t the fault of the cities themselves. They are what decades of mistaken, poverty-inducing, and poverty-concentrating state policy have made them.      

More than a quarter of Hartford’s students are learning-disabled enough to be classified as needing “special education.” About 40% of the city’s students — most of them the better-parented ones — attend regional schools instead of the city’s own. 

This is the consequence of state policy arising from the state Supreme Court’s 1996 decision in the school segregation case of Sheff v. O’Neill. The policy sought to transfer out of the city’s schools as many students who wanted to get out, instead of making the schools better. The concentration in those schools of less-parented and learning-disabled students may make it almost impossible for them to improve, but as long as the most motivated students can get out, nobody cares now. Hail the majesty of civil-rights law!

As a matter of fairness, state government should have assumed all “special education” costs in all school systems long ago. These are general social costs of poverty and disability, and sticking municipalities with them is virtually a proclamation that state government means to concentrate poverty in the cities.

But the problems of Hartford’s schools are largely offset by the hugely disproportionate state financial aid they get, which allows them to spend about $30,000 per student per year, far above the state average. The failure to get good results from all this spending indicates poor administration on top of the usual obstructions to management inflicted by state labor law and union contract.

The situations in Bridgeport’s and New Haven’s schools are similar. Because of some serious embarrassments that were publicized statewide in the last two years, Bridgeport’s school system lately has been getting extra supervision from the state Education Department. But except for the additional work for the department, it’s hard to see why it shouldn’t be providing similar supervision to Hartford and New Haven as well. 

Indeed, the three city school systems have been failing for so long that it’s hard to see why state government hasn’t acknowledged its obligation to take them under its own direct management, except that state government doesn’t know what to do about the bigger problem — worsening poverty — other than to throw more money at it, which hasn’t improved education but at least buys off politically active local people and can be construed as concern.

But how Connecticut’s elected officials still prattle piously about education! At the moment legislators are again rummaging through state government’s finances in search of another $150 million to be marked “education” and funneled to municipalities, though there is no inquiry in the legislature about the results being produced by education spending.

A serious legislative inquiry about results — student learning — might discover that higher education spending in Connecticut correlates mainly with the quality of the cars driven by teachers and school administrators, while student learning correlates not with per-pupil spending but per-pupil parenting.

Maybe that’s why there is never an inquiry about results.

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

-END-

Overlong legislative hearings are for venting, not persuading

By CHRIS POWELL

Small but feisty, the Republican minority in the General Assembly made a big stink the other day about the Democratic majority’s deciding to terminate at midnight a public hearing on vaccine legislation. Hundreds of people who wanted to speak at the hearing lost their opportunity.

Why should Connecticut waive law enforcement anywhere?

Public schools couldn’t meet new home-school standards

Greens would cripple democracy in guise of making state cleaner

It didn’t look good and the Republicans probably would have been foolish not to complain about it. But there really wasn’t much substance to their complaint.

For even with the most controversial issues, public hearings before the legislature are almost always needlessly exhausting. The relevant arguments are always made within the first couple of hours and what follows is mainly repetition and sometimes impotent venting. Meanwhile legislators duck out to attend other hearings, converse with constituents or lobbyists, get something to eat or drink, or use the bathroom. 

Seldom are all committee members present during a hearing. As it drags on, only a few committee members may remain at their desks, sometimes only two or three. Even when many committee members are present, as testimony becomes redundant some will immerse themselves in their laptop computers, and they don’t miss much.

So it’s hard to blame them.

Besides, people can express their views to the legislature without chewing up the clock at three minutes per speaker. For everyone can submit written testimony of nearly any length. That testimony is made available to all committee members and may reach more of them than spoken testimony does. Individual constituent contact with legislators outside of hearings may be far more effective than anything said at a hearing.

Yes, as the Republicans complain, the legislature’s Democratic majority has become more arrogant as it has increased. But limits on the public’s speaking time aren’t the worst of that arrogance. The Democrats’ recent use of the “emergency certification” procedure to call urgent votes on disparate legislation about which there was no emergency was far more objectionable — and a little ridiculous. 

The Democrats noted fairly that some of their “emergency” bills were old ones and already had hearings last year, so no one was sneaking something through — at least not this time. But by invoking a bogus “emergency” the Democrats were really confessing their inability to manage the session well enough to get its work done before this year’s earlier adjournment date.

The legislature’s tradition of unlimited debate even during the last days of the session does allow a minority to filibuster fatally much legislation that has ample support to pass. But such time pressures could be greatly reduced if not eliminated if the majority didn’t let legislators clutter the agenda with so much trivial legislation. 

A state like Connecticut — where public education is collapsing amid its refusal to enforce standards; where poverty, homelessness, and mental illness are exploding as times get harder; and where state employee salaries and pensions are cannibalizing the government — really doesn’t need to consider legislation directing the state’s flagship public university to undertake a study of unidentified flying objects. A study of those serious unaddressed issues might be helpful, if much scarier than UFOs.

Nor does Connecticut need the trivial legislation approved the other day by the Government Administration and Elections Committee to allow municipalities to experiment with ranked-choice voting. 

Ranked-choice voting — or “instant runoff” voting — enables voters to transfer their votes to second-choice candidates if their first choices don’t achieve a majority. In recent decades Connecticut has elected a U.S. senator (Lowell P. Weicker Jr.) and three governors (Weicker, John G. Rowland, and Ned Lamont) with less than a majority vote, even as ranked-choice voting might have produced different winners. 

Since ranked-choice voting may be complicated, it is worth trying only for the most important offices, not for municipal offices, where few are important, voter participation is low, and understaffed municipal election officials are unlikely to volunteer for the extra work.

Only the secretary of the state’s office might be competent to experiment with ranked-choice voting, and only elections for president, governor, and Congress are important enough to require decision by majority rather than mere plurality vote.

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

Why should Connecticut waive law enforcement anywhere?

By CHRIS POWELL

Hearings of the General Assembly on proposed legislation almost always could use more critical questions, especially when such questions are not merely politically inconvenient but politically incorrect. 

Suspension of fuel taxes won’t really save any money

Public schools couldn’t meet new home-school standards

Greens would cripple democracy in guise of making state cleaner

Such was the case the other day when scores of open-borders advocates spoke at the Judiciary Committee’s hearing on legislation proposed by Governor Lamont for more obstruction of immigration law, though the governor, Attorney General William Tong, and most Democratic state legislators keep denying that Connecticut is a “sanctuary state.”

The governor’s legislation would establish “protected areas” where Connecticut would pretend that immigration law enforcement is prohibited — places like schools, hospitals, and churches.

Perhaps most deserving a critical question or two at the hearing was Norma Martinez HoSang, director of the Connecticut for All Coalition, an alliance of open-borders groups. HoSang said: “Families should be able to pray at church services, attend community meals or mosques or synagogues, and gather for holiday celebrations without worrying that law enforcement actions are outside the door. Patients should feel safe going to hospitals for emergency treatment, taking their children to pediatric checkups, or visiting community health clinics for vaccinations and prenatal care.”

No legislator asked simply: Why should someone breaking the law feel safe? Why should someone residing in the country illegally be exempt from immigration law enforcement anywhere?

People who have committed other crimes enjoy no such exemption from arrest. Indeed, anyone who testified at a legislative hearing that suspects in murders, assaults, robberies, or thefts should be exempt from arrest at particular places would be considered ridiculous. Maybe that’s why Connecticut has no law establishing “protected areas” where arresting people is itself a crime.

These “protected areas” are being proposed in Connecticut only to legitimize or facilitate illegal immigration, or, since federal immigration agents are not obliged to respect state-declared “protected areas,” they are being proposed just to strike a politically correct pose.

Connecticut and the country have so much illegal immigration — and have so much crime committed by illegal immigrants, even if, on average, illegal immigrants are better behaved than the native-born — precisely because the country generally and Connecticut in particular are viewed, or until recently were viewed, as being “protected areas.” That is, “sanctuary states.”

Not long ago even leading Democrats acknowledged that a major inducement for illegal immigration was the prospect of receiving government services, including housing, medical care, and education, and even driver’s licenses and other official forms of identification without having to attain citizenship or legal residency. 

This prospect became even more of an inducement under the previous national administration when most immigration law enforcement was suspended and millions of people were admitted without review, just told to attend an immigration court hearing at a distant date, whereupon they disappeared into the country and never appeared for their hearings.

Illegal immigrants would not have the fear cited by HoSang and other advocates of open borders — would not have to worry about being hunted — if proof of citizenship or legal residency was required from anyone seeking employment, schooling, housing, medical care, or anything else important in the United States. Living in the country illegally would be too impractical. Illegal immigration has been so easy and extensive only because, through mistaken compassion or political subversion, public policy facilitates it.

If government stops facilitating illegal immigration there will be much less of it. There already is much less now that the new federal administration has re-imposed ordinary control at the border.

Fear of being caught for violating immigration law can justify enacting “protected areas” only if one believes that anyone should be admitted to the country at any time and, if he reaches Connecticut, should be exempt from immigration law enforcement. “Protected areas” can be justified only if one believes that people who fear open borders and resent the crimes committed by illegal immigrants should just pound sand.

With his legislation Governor Lamont has become an enthusiastic nullifier of federal law and advocate of open borders.

Will anyone running against him make an issue of it?

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

Suspension of fuel taxes won’t really save money

By CHRIS POWELL

Don’t make too much fun of Governor Lamont’s idea about suspending Connecticut’s fuel taxes while prices are soaring because of the war in the Middle East. But the idea isn’t such a boon either.

Public schools couldn’t meet new home-school standards

Greens would cripple democracy in guise of making state cleaner

Students visiting state Capitol insist money equals education

For while money today is of course better than money later, the governor means only to finance the fuel tax break by moving state government’s money around a bit, not by reducing state government’s total tax burden. After all, he already had proposed to give $500 million in sales tax rebates to state residents, to be paid just a few days before his re-election is to be decided in November. He says the suspension of fuel taxes could be financed by reducing the sales tax rebates. The suspension of the fuel tax would just cannibalize part of the sales tax rebate promised in November. 

Another option the governor sees for financing suspension of the fuel taxes is to take the money from the $500 million emergency fund he and the General Assembly created late last year to replace federal aid canceled by the Trump administration for social programs. But then whatever money is taken from the emergency fund to replace the foregone fuel tax revenue won’t be available for the social service emergencies it was appropriated for.

In a pinch state government can always cheat a little more on its pension funds, which still have $35 billion in unfunded liabilities, a deficit that dwarfs the $4 billion in state government’s “rainy-day fund,” the money Democrats are eager to spend soon, since they don’t mind pushing pension debts even deeper into the future.

But in the end the only way state government can reduce its burden on the public is to become more efficient or to spend and tax less. There are ways of doing that but none that are as easy politically as just juggling money among state government’s accounts.

PRIVACY VS. JUSTICE: State legislators are intent on restricting release of data from the license plate reader cameras that some municipalities have installed to increase enforcement of speed limits. 

Some legislators want to protect privacy rights, insofar as everyone’s legal comings and goings are nobody’s business but their own, least of all government’s. 

In contrast, Democratic legislators seem to want to restrict release of the data more out of fear that federal immigration authorities might use it to locate illegal immigrants. Use of the data by immigration agents seems unlikely except in pursuit of illegals suspected of the most serous offenses, but many Democrats think that facilitating illegal immigration is the highest objective of public service, higher even than facilitating abortion and transgenderism.

Most people involved with the license plate reader data issue think all data should be deleted after 30 days, which should satisfy privacy concerns. 

But some police officials note that not all crimes become known to authorities within 30 days of their commission and that deletion of license plate reader data after 30 days is sure to be regretted eventually during investigations of serious crimes. Sometimes a body or other crucial evidence isn’t found in a deserted area until long after a crime. Old license plate reader data could help solve it.

Indeed, being able to discover where everyone was at the time of a crime would be a great gift to investigators and justice. But for the indefinite future the data storage necessary for that will be available only to God.

STICK WITH WILLIMANTIC: At 70 years old Windham Technical High School in that town’s Willimantic section is antiquated and needs replacement. State government owns land in nearby Mansfield that could accommodate a new school, but if one is to be built, it should remain in Willimantic. 

That little impoverished city needs the traffic and economic activity, and technical students would probably find more job potential there than in Mansfield, which is rural except around the University of Connecticut campus. 

Windham can make former mill property available for a new school and has a stronger claim on state government’s help.

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

Public schools couldn’t meet new home-school standards

By CHRIS POWELL

In principle there’s nothing wrong with the basics of the home-schooling legislation that got a public hearing before the General Assembly this week. The bill would require people to notify local officials in person when they withdraw their children from public school to home-school them, to bring their home-schooled children to some sort of wellness inspection once a year, and to provide evidence that the children are learning.

But the legislation should prompt howls of ironic laughter.

Greens would cripple democracy in guise of making state cleaner

Students visiting state Capitol insist money equals education

Just another week in Hartford as state legislators look away

The legislation has arisen out of the case involving an abused girl who was murdered by her family and whose abuse and murder were concealed by a claim of home-schooling that fooled the state Department of Children and Families. It’s fair to worry that claims of home-schooling can conceal child abuse or worse. 

Unfortunately the howling has to start when one notices that child neglect and abuse in Connecticut are almost infinitely more frequent among children being public-schooled, children about whom state and municipal governments seldom do anything.

Thousands of public school students in the state — almost 20% of them — are chronically absent from school, but there are no longer any penalties for them or their parents, so the problem endures. In cities the chronic absenteeism rate is closer to 25%. When those children are absent it’s not because they are being home-schooled but because their parents are negligent.

A few weeks ago it was reported that Hartford’s schools have changed their policy and now accept young children who are not toilet-trained. School staffers were instructed to clean and re-diaper them. This change of policy indicates wholesale child neglect in the city, but no one advocating the new accountability requirements for home-schooling has taken note of it. Nor have the state Education Department and the Department of Children and Families.

Requiring parents of home-schooled kids to produce evidence of learning may be the biggest howler. For Connecticut’s public schools have no such requirement for their own students. Social promotion is policy throughout the state, with advancement from grade to grade and graduation achieved without having to learn anything except how to stash your cell phone in a Yondr pouch.

Two years ago Hartford’s school system was exposed for having graduated a young woman who was illiterate. She is unlikely to have been the only such graduate in Hartford or the rest of the state that year. The city’s school superintendent and the state education commissioner promised investigations but no explanation was produced and no state legislator has ever demanded one. 

Indeed, while the failures of public education in Connecticut practically scream for investigation, the General Assembly is deaf to the problem.

Why? 

First, it’s because the people who most deserve reprimanding — neglectful parents — are among the legislators’ own constituents. There are many in nearly every legislator’s district. The law should hold them to account. But standards are falling throughout society, and politics in Connecticut lacks the courage to restore them. 

And second, legislators overlook the failures of public education because an examination would discomfort teachers and their unions. Teachers aren’t to blame for child neglect and abuse and chronic absenteeism; they see Connecticut’s social disintegration most intimately and must play the hands they are dealt. But teachers are to blame for much of public education’s unaccountability — binding arbitration of union contracts, the secrecy of teacher evaluations, the impossibility of firing inadequate teachers, and hostility to competition in education.

That hostility to competition in education may be the bigger part of the legislative campaign against home-schooling. Legislators know that if they make trouble for home-schooling parents, they will win political points, endorsements, and contributions from teachers and their unions, Connecticut’s most influential special interest.

So instead legislators scapegoat the home-schoolers, who probably get far better results with their students than the public schools do. Some proficiency testing could settle the matter but Connecticut practically forbids proficiency testing in public schools, especially at graduation, presumably because the results would be terrifying. Taxpayers mustn’t know the results but instead just keep throwing money.

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