Raising state taxes on the rich is just an excuse for plunder

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut is already nearly the highest-taxed state in the country, as well as nearly the most expensive (in part because its taxes are so high), but last Wednesday — the deadline for submission of state and federal tax returns — a hundred people from what calls itself the Connecticut for All coalition gathered at the state Capitol to urge state government to raise taxes on the rich.

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When it showed up at the Capitol in March, the Connecticut for All coalition was supporting legislation to increase state government’s obstruction of federal immigration law enforcement. That’s what Connecticut for All means by “all” — open borders admitting all illegal immigrants — as if the state doesn’t already have a desperate shortage of housing and expensive schools whose costs are rising in part because they must enroll so many illegal immigrant students who don’t speak English.

Connecticut for All’s arguments for higher taxes on the rich are as flawed as its arguments for open borders — especially its argument that taxes should be raised on the rich because some lower-income people pay a higher share of their income in state and local taxes than rich people do.

As is the case with federal taxes, the rich also already pay the overwhelming majority of state and local taxes in Connecticut. 

Poor people pay no income taxes and often get various income supports from the government, like earned-income tax credits, medical insurance, and food and housing stipends, which help refund the taxes they pay indirectly — sales taxes, municipal property taxes (paid through their rents), and federal and state energy taxes.

Besides, the percentage-of-income argument doesn’t accurately indicate the practical burden of taxes. 

Twenty percent of the annual income of someone earning minimum wage in Connecticut — $16.94 per hour or $35,000 per year — is $7,000. 

But just 19% of the annual income of someone earning $350,000, who is subject not just to sales and property taxes, as the poor are, but also to state and federal income taxes, is $66,500, more than nine times as much. 

Who really bears more of the burden of government?

Yes, inflation — currency devaluation — benefits the wealthy, since they own property and stocks, whose value rises even as inflation ravages the poor, who own little property. But then why do Democrats, supposedly the tribunes of the poor, like and perpetuate inflation even more than Republicans do? 

Maybe what is most disgraceful about the clamor for raising taxes on the wealthy is its sense of entitlement, as was expressed by a college instructor at the Connecticut for All rally at the Capitol last week. “It’s time to tax the wealthy and the ultra-wealthy and redistribute those funds to the hard-working people of Connecticut,” she said.

Of course many wealthy people are not “hard-working” at all but mere beneficiaries of inherited wealth or government patronage. But many poor people aren’t so “hard-working” either but collectors of welfare benefits, people who are already beneficiaries of much income redistribution. Poverty is not virtue.

Yes, taxation is always a mechanism of income redistribution, but its original objective in this country was the maintenance of a decent government and a prosperous society. Contrary to the suggestion of that college instructor who spoke at the Capitol, the tax system was not originally meant for plunder, and it should not be regarded as a device for making one’s living from the sweat of others. That attitude has produced vast waste and corruption in government. 

Raising taxes on the rich in Connecticut isn’t yet a matter of fairness; the people advocating it are not trying to calculate mathematically what tax rates are fair. They just want government to control and spend more money.

All able-bodied people, no matter how poor, should share and feel the burden of government, for as was said by a great liberal authority from a century ago, Theodore Roosevelt, the first duty of a citizen is not to vote himself more government subsidies but to pull his own weight.

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

Better education is impossible but maybe not fairer taxation

By CHRIS POWELL

No issue in Connecticut generates more comment with less effect than public education, and now Governor Lamont is doubling down. He is arranging the appointment of the Governor’s Blue-Ribbon Commission on K-12 Education Funding and Accountability, which, in the hope of making education funding fairer and more effective, will study state government’s main mechanism for financing local education, the “education cost sharing” grant, which distributes nearly $2.5 billion to municipalities every year. 

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Of course every year the General Assembly discusses state funding for municipal education and the resounding conclusion is only that everybody who gets education money wants more. No special commission is likely to receive a different response, not even one with a reporting deadline as far off as the one the governor is establishing — Jan. 15, 2027, nine months away.

Announcing the commission last week, the governor acknowledged that it wouldn’t help anyone for a long time. So he added that he will work with legislative leaders to find extra money, as much as $500 million, to throw at local education this year. Like most education money, most of this money will end up in the pockets of members of teacher unions, the state’s most influential special interest. After all, this is a state election year, the governor and legislative leaders are Democrats, and the unions are the party’s largest component, slightly ahead of the state employee unions, for which the governor also has just arranged generous raises.

But at least the governor last week specified one huge unfairness in education funding — the burden of “special education,” the extra expense of schooling children with learning and physical disabilities and behavioral problems. These students come disproportionately from impoverished households in the cities and inner suburbs. 

There is no fairness in requiring municipalities to bear most of the expense of “special education.” These are general societal costs. Indeed, the “education cost sharing” grant was established nearly three decades ago with the aim of distributing over the whole state the higher costs of educating the poor. 

For three reasons it hasn’t succeeded.

First, equalization of school funding burdens contradicts a higher principle of education in Connecticut: local control. Wealthier towns will always be inclined and able to spend more on their schools — unless state government takes control of local education. That will never be possible politically. Even liberal Democrats in the suburbs would never stand for it. 

Second, school performance is only slightly, if at all, a matter of per-pupil spending and almost entirely a matter of per-pupil parenting. Single-parent households are disproportionately poor and on the whole their children get much less parenting. Only less welfare and more fathers in the home can fix that.

Third is that equalizing education would require frequent measuring of and accountability for results, which is also politically impossible. Public education in Connecticut operates almost entirely on social promotion. Proficiency tests are minimized and discouraged and even when administered carry no consequences for students, teachers, and schools. In Connecticut student performance simply doesn’t matter at any level. Any requirement for performance would spark comprehensive revolt — including revolt from voters and legislators.      

It would be shocking if the governor’s new commission approached these issues.

But the commission still could strike a small blow for fairness in educational taxation if it recommended that state government assume responsibility for all “special education” costs. Lifting those costs from the cities would give them a theoretical chance to reduce their excessive property tax rates. 

Of course the governor’s commission is hardly necessary for such a policy initiative. Instead of throwing another $500 million at members of teacher unions this year, the governor and legislature could use the money to start having state government cover all “special education.”

While the teacher unions might be sore about this, there still would be some political consolation, since the state Education Department would have to hire dozens more employees to administer the new “special education” system, and they’d all be unionized and vote Democratic.

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

ICE should explain faster but protests want ‘no nations’

By CHRIS POWELL

Even people who want federal immigration law enforced and who voted for Donald Trump for president in the belief that the open borders policy of the Biden administration and the Democratic Party was national suicide should be aggravated with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

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ICE often seems to forget that government’s obligation to account publicly for arrests goes back eight centuries to Magna Carta and English common law and was assumed by this country’s founders to be a principle of decent government and so was incorporated into the Constitution. 

But this month news organizations, the state’s highest elected officials, and community leaders could not induce ICE to account for its arrest of a Cheshire High School student from Afghanistan who had been legally admitted to the country. Eventually a federal judge concluded that the young man’s detention was the result of a clerical or typographical error in the expiration date of his authorization to remain in the United States. He remained in detention but further proceedings should release him.

This sort of thing compromises all immigration law enforcement.

But then opposition to ICE, especially in Connecticut, is aggravating too. While protests in support of other ICE-detained immigrants are frequent, they seldom show any interest in the circumstances. That is, was the arrested and detained person in the country legally or illegally? The protests brazenly assume — as Governor Lamont and most other leading Democrats in the state do — that anyone who enters the country illegally or remains illegally when a visa expires and who reaches Connecticut should be exempt from immigration law enforcement.

That was the case the other day when a hundred people gathered at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven to demand the release of a nursing student who had recently been arrested by ICE and taken to a detention center in New Hampshire.

Fortunately this time ICE responded publicly within a few days. The student, ICE said, was a young woman from Ecuador who had entered the country in 2021 on a six-month tourist visa. That would make her an illegal immigrant for more than the last four years. ICE added that she twice had been charged criminally, though the charges don’t sound serious. 

Of course visa overstays are a common form of illegal immigration, signifying the illegal immigrant’s confidence that even when your lawbreaking is a matter of record, the government isn’t likely to bother you. In most cases that confidence has been justified but now things are changing.

The protesters at Southern chanted: “Say it loud, say it clear, immigrants belong here.” But legal or illegal immigrants or both? The protesters more or less answered with another chant: “No borders, no nations, stop the deportations.”

John Jairo Lugo, the director of Unidad Latina en Accion, an open-borders group in New Haven, urged the crowd to join a national strike on May Day to bring the country’s economy to a halt in protest of immigration law enforcement. Lugo concluded with obscenity that has become a big part of such protests.

A few days earlier dozens of students at Hamden High School left their classes and walked to Town Hall to demand an end to immigration law enforcement in their town. 

One student carried a sign reading, “We’re skipping our lessons to teach you one.” But just whom did the students presume to be teaching? For nearly everyone in state government and municipal government in Hamden supports open borders and opposes immigration law enforcement. Indeed, while the school administration cautioned students that their walkout was not approved, school Superintendent Gary Highsmith said afterward that no one would be disciplined for it. That sure sounded like approval.

Maybe someday a few brave and enterprising students at Hamden High will stage a walkout for a politically incorrect cause to see if the precedent set by the superintendent still holds or is suddenly reconsidered. After all, forgiveness of school walkouts implies that, despite the huge expense of schools, students who skip classes don’t miss anything important.

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

A golden age of unaccountability dawns for municipal government

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut is nearly the highest-taxed and most expensive state in the country, and though state legislators are prattling about making the state more “affordable,” most of this year’s session of the General Assembly has been a scramble to spend more money. Indeed, the legislature long has been most remarkable for its inability to audit government for actual results and to discover any substantial spending that can be reduced.

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But not anymore. Last week the state House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a bill that would repeal the old state law requiring municipal governments to give formal notice of their plans and actions by purchasing legal notices in newspapers.

The legislation’s rationale is that posting the notices on municipal internet sites will alert the public sufficiently to what local government is doing and that it will be free, saving municipal governments altogether maybe two or three million dollars every year.

The money is real but the claim that sufficient notice can be achieved by municipal government internet sites is laughable. For the audience of municipal government internet sites is tiny. By contrast, even as newspaper readership declines, newspapers still have a substantial audience. More important, legal notices alert news organizations to what government is doing, and in turn news organizations alert the public both in print and on their internet sites.   

Since newspapers charge for legal notice advertising, the notice requirement can be viewed as a subsidy to newspapers. But that is not how the advertising requirement originated. The requirement buys a service of value — and not just notice to the public about the particular item being advertised but also local news reporting generally, which is in serious decline because the internet and social media are drawing the audience away from local news and because civic engagement is declining along with literacy generally.

If the advertising requirement is repealed, then for everyone who reads legal notices on his municipality’s internet site there may be hundreds or even thousands of people who lose access to local news as newspapers adjust to their loss of income by reducing their news coverage and frequency of publication.

Municipal officials have been advocating repeal of the legal notice advertising requirement for many years, and saving money is not the only reason for their enthusiasm. 

The advertising requirement is a relic of the era of limited government, which is long gone. The current era is one of virtually unlimited government with many more people drawing their livelihood from government. 

As the primary mechanisms of accountability to the public, news organizations annoy government officials. Government is so much easier without journalism — which is not to say that government without journalism would be more efficient but rather that government’s inefficiencies, mistakes, and crimes would be disclosed less often.

That’s why while the legislature finds it almost impossible to reduce or eliminate government spending anywhere else, it seems about to proclaim that journalism about government is readily expendable.

The state Senate’s approval of the House-passed legislation and Governor Lamont’s signature on it may inaugurate a golden age of unaccountability in government in Connecticut, a more expensive and mysterious age.

GAMBLING’S DAMAGE: According to a report last week in Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers, some state legislators are having doubts about state government’s expansion of legal gambling in recent years, particularly about sports betting, which has compounded with gambling casinos, internet casino gambling, and what now may seem like the deadly first step back in 1972, the state lottery.

Gambling addiction has exploded in the state, damaging thousands of lives, ruining families, helping to corrupt national sports, and recently snaring even New Haven’s police chief, all while making a very few people rich in the guise of reparations for ancient wrongs no one alive today suffered from. Gullible Connecticut is supposed to believe that casino gambling is social justice.

Legislators and governors have thought that getting money through gambling — indirect rather than direct taxation — is worth the awful consequences to society. It isn’t and remains a matter of political cowardice.

—

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

-END-

Are people no longer obliged to support their own children?

By CHRIS POWELL

Anyone following the news in Connecticut might wonder if people are still expected to support their own children, or if a great wave of impoverishment and exemption from responsibility is sweeping the state.

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It is said that half the households with children in Connecticut can’t afford diapers, so state legislators want to appropriate $1 million for a program distributing free diapers to households with incomes of $62,000 or less.

New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker’s city budget proposal is being criticized for omitting an appropriation of $400,000 for groups distributing free food in the city. The city’s Coordinated Food Access Network says 37% of New Haven’s residents are getting free food from local food charities quite apart from the money they receive from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

The General Assembly is advancing legislation to extend free breakfast and lunch to all public school students. The other day WTIC-AM1080 talk radio host Reese Hopkins noted a claim being made in support of the legislation: that free meals in school are the only meals thousands of Connecticut children get. So, Hopkins asked: If children aren’t being fed at home, isn’t that child neglect or abuse? And where are the corresponding complaints to the state Department of Children and Families? 

Advocates of the free school meals bill don’t seem to have made any.

In January, celebrating Connecticut’s having indexed its minimum wage to inflation so it will rise automatically every year — it’s now at $16.94 per hour — state Labor Commissioner Dante Bartolomeo said thousands of single women in the state support their families on minimum-wage jobs. Of course they don’t do it on minimum wage alone; many also receive SNAP benefits, state medical insurance, and housing vouchers, as well as free diapers.

But where do people get the idea that, while contraception and abortion are also essentially free for those who can’t afford them, they should be having children they can’t support themselves, and having them without a father or other partner in their home? Such children are overwhelmingly the ones who, because of lack of sufficient parenting, develop learning disabilities and behavioral problems, require costly “special education,” and do poorly in school — and then in life.

Poor people aren’t necessarily stupid. Like everyone else, they respond to incentives and disincentives from government. Taking care of widows and orphans, victims of misfortune, is one thing. Lowering the general cost of living is another thing, an objective with which Connecticut fails terribly, particularly in regard to housing, electricity, and taxes. 

But subsidizing people to do what they shouldn’t — to overextend themselves, sink themselves in poverty, and impose profound costs on society — is national suicide.

Where do people get the idea that they are not obliged to support their own children? They get it from the government itself, which, with its perverse incentives, essentially manufactures poverty.

Since inflation has risen sharply in recent years, “affordability” has become a theme with politicians of both parties in Connecticut. But most of what they are doing in the name of “affordability” is not making the state more affordable at all. 

Real affordability would reduce costs, as by making government more efficient and effective, stripping out the inessential, and facilitating housing construction. But most policies being pursued in the name of “affordability” don’t reduce costs at all but just increase government subsidies.

Tax cuts, rebates, and refunds — much proposed at the state Capitol lately — in effect constitute mere borrowing against state government’s long-term pension obligations unless they are financed by spending cuts, few of which seem to have been proposed by either Democrats or Republicans. Any tax cuts, rebates, and refunds this year also are likely to be nullified by contractual or inflation-induced spending increases next year.   

No one in authority seems to be going through the budget to identify many things that could be foregone, not even the political patronage grants. Instead it seems to be assumed that any tax cuts, rebates, and refunds can be undone once November’s state elections are safely past.

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

UConn facilitates student riots; and sidewalks aren’t therapy

By CHRIS POWELL

Students at the University of Michigan’s main campus in Ann Arbor rioted Monday night, along with other city residents, after the university’s men’s basketball team, the Wolverines, defeated the University of Connecticut in the national college championship game. The rioters set 40 fires and vandalized streetlights and street signs. Police made a few arrests.

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Administrators at UConn’s main campus in Storrs expected similar trouble if the Huskies won. Remembering the riots after the Huskies won national championships in 1999 and 2023, UConn administrators had streetlights, street signs, and trash cans removed in advance of the title game. After the 2023 game was won rioters did more than $100,000 in property damage on the UConn campus, and there were a few arrests and expulsions. Many rioters were not students but young people who figured that the university would not be prepared to maintain order.

UConn’s removal of streetlights and street signs this week wasn’t just a disgrace, an indication of the university’s low opinion of its students. It was also almost an invitation to misconduct and drunkenness. It signaled that UConn expected rioting and vandalism, considering them normal when college athletic championships are won.

Of course riots frequently follow championships in major-league sports as well. (College sports no longer can be distinguished from “professional” sports, since college sports themselves have gone pro.) But the participants in the riots in major-league cities have not been specially admitted to an institution of higher education, and local governments in major-league cities aren’t yet taking down streetlights and signs in anticipation of rioting.

Such riots keep happening because their participants have little fear of consequences. Criminal law enforcement is weak throughout the country and especially in Connecticut. State legislators and courts here strive less to see that justice is done than that criminals are kept out of prison. Such policy is far less expensive than justice but it robs justice of its crucial deterrence.

Removing streetlights and signs on campus in advance of championship games also confirms that UConn knows that there is little deterrence to student misbehavior. If UConn shows that it knows, potential rioters can take the hint.

So rather than removing streetlights and signs, the university should assign an armed police officer to each one and, if not enough officers are available, ask the governor to dispatch state police officers and even the National Guard to show as much force as necessary to restore ordinary deterrence. Of course the Tolland County Superior Court state’s attorney’s office would have to resolve to be stingy with plea bargains and probations, and news organizations would have to report convictions and punishments. But some respect for the university particularly and public institutions generally might be restored. After all, this year’s national tournaments won’t be the last one UConn teams play in.

* * *

The General Assembly’s Planning and Development Committee has confirmed that state government won’t do anything effective this year about the housing shortage, homelessness, and mental illness.

The committee this week approved legislation formally authorizing people to sleep or panhandle in parks, on sidewalks, or in other public places.

Supporters of the legislation saw it as a helpful response to homelessness. They noted that 20 homeless people died of exposure or other causes outdoors in Connecticut this winter. Of course that is a disgrace, but the legislation won’t get anyone indoors. It will diminish the value to the public of parks and sidewalks. Sleeping or panhandling vagrants will scare people away.

For many if not most homeless people are mentally ill or drug-addicted. Some prefer to stay outside no matter how cold it gets. They need overnight shelters, supportive housing — studio apartments with supervision and medical care on the premises so they can undertake recovery — and, for those incapable of caring for themselves, confinement in mental hospitals.

Those things cost money. Authorizing the homeless, addicted, and mentally ill to sleep and panhandle in parks and on sidewalks is just pretending to care about them. It’s really a rationalization for ignoring them. 

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

If cows will get tax credits, all journalists should farm

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut’s dairy farmers, long having suffered in a marginal business and having been reduced in numbers from about 800 in the 1970s to only 80 today, say they are on the brink of failure and require a subsidy from state government to survive.

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Other states, including Massachusetts, provide what Connecticut’s dairy farmers want: a tax credit to offset low milk prices. So such legislation has been proposed in the General Assembly by state Sen. Stephen Harding, R-Brookfield, whose district is rural and has many farms.

The farmers estimate that collectively they are likely to lose $20 million this year, so the legislation’s tax credit would cover that loss.

Of course dairy farms aren’t the only businesses in trouble in Connecticut. The state is nearly the highest taxed in the country and might be losing population if not for illegal immigration. These days hardly a business enters or expands in the state without seeking some sort of financial incentive or tax abatement from state or municipal government. 

Struggling businesses that receive no such subsidy might look at the proposal to subsidize dairy farms and wonder: What’s so special about them? 

Cows may be cute and dairy farms quaint, but the legislature should ask that question and, if it approves the subsidy legislation, provide a clear answer to it. 

For could Connecticut really not survive without dairy farms? Would it be wrong to let Massachusetts and other states subsidize the milk consumed in Connecticut? 

Farming generally is also a marginal business in Connecticut, so if dairy farms get a state subsidy, why shouldn’t other farms get one too?

Legislators may have noticed — and enjoyed — the sharp decline of the news business in the state in recent years. Local news, the most expensive to produce, since its potential audience is smallest, has nearly vanished. The state’s newspapers are shadows of their former selves with less local news than ever. Few radio stations in the state have reporters anymore, and television news increasingly emphasizes weather as if its viewers live without windows. 

Last year there was some talk in the legislature about subsidizing the news business in the hope of reviving it. Nothing was done, but if cows can get tax credits, anything serving the public interest more than chocolate milk might have a fair claim as well. 

After all, if every dairy farm in Connecticut closed, the state still would get plenty of dairy products elsewhere. For the state’s dairy farms aren’t as crucial to dairy products in Connecticut as the trucking industry is. 

But if Connecticut’s news organizations disappear, no one in other states will step in to provide the missing news. Indeed, most news organizations in other states are in as much trouble as Connecticut’s are, and for the same reasons.

This doesn’t mean that government subsidies for news organizations are a good idea. Government money is inevitably compromising, and defining news organizations for tax purposes would be a challenge. For journalism is a constitutional right, not a profession — a right anyone can exercise at any time with no more capital than a pen, a pad, and an internet site or e-mail provider. 

Indeed, state policy might be of more help to news organizations not with subsidies but with schools that made their students more literate, more familiar with history and government, more civic-minded, and less full of self-esteem after 13 years of social promotion. 

The only people who read newspapers and follow news organizations anymore are people who care about their communities, want to know what is going on in them, and want the authorities to be held to account — and many if not most people today no longer care about that. More than half Connecticut’s eligible adult population didn’t vote in the last election for governor. In such an environment there is little future for journalism, civic-mindedness, and democracy itself.  

Government subsidies for failing industries are horrible precedents, inviting more special pleading and subsidies. But maybe every Connecticut journalist will have to rent a cow.

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

Governor argues weakly against voter registration ID proposal

By CHRIS POWELL

Democratic leaders in Connecticut are clamoring against what Republicans in Congress are calling the SAVE Act, which would require people registering to vote to produce proof of citizenship. Since the state’s congressional delegation is entirely Democratic and there is little chance that the state will elect any Republican to Congress this year, the Democrats may fear that the principle of the SAVE Act makes so much sense that Republicans could exploit it even in Connecticut. 

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National opinion polls show the public overwhelming favors requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration. 

So the other day Governor Lamont, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, and Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas held a press conference to publicize their opposition to requiring proof of citizenship. Their arguments were weak but they could have been confident that reporters would not question them critically.

“I don’t want to put up all these bureaucratic roadblocks to make it tougher” to vote, the governor said. He added: “I don’t think I need any lectures about election fraud from a president who famously called the secretary of state down in Georgia and told him to ‘find me 11,780 votes.'”

Yes, President Trump is often disgraceful. But that is not an argument for or against policy; it is a distraction, frequently used by Democrats these days to change the subject.

As for what the governor calls “all these bureaucratic roadblocks,” meeting the requirement of the SAVE Act — producing proof of citizenship — would not be onerous. Proof would be constituted by a birth certificate, a naturalization certificate, or a U.S. passport. While many citizens haven’t secured their birth certificate, replacing one is not difficult, and maintaining one may be considered part of basic responsibility to one’s family and society.

After all, producing identification is required in many aspects of daily life — like banking and obtaining government licenses, transportation tickets, and telephone and utility services. Nearly everyone in the country has often had to produce identification in pursuit of a normal life. 

Replacing a birth certificate may take a while, but a requirement for proof of citizenship in voter registration could give people plenty of time to get their documents in order. The next elections are seven months away. 

As for Trump’s corruption in pursuit of extra votes in Georgia, how much more corrupt was that than the last Democratic national administration’s opening the borders to millions of illegal immigrants? How much more corrupt was it than Connecticut’s issuance of driver’s licenses and New Haven’s issuance of city identification cards to illegal immigrants precisely to facilitate their living in the state illegally and thereby to increase the number of Democrat-dominated state and federal legislative election districts? 

At the press conference Secretary Thomas noted that under the SAVE Act driver’s licenses would not help people register to vote. Well, of course not. As shown by Connecticut’s own driver’s licenses issued to illegal immigrants, driver’s licenses aren’t proof of citizenship.  

Opposing requiring proof of citizenship in voter registration, Connecticut Democrats note that there isn’t much evidence of illegal immigrants voting. But it does happen sometimes, there long has been much evidence of election fraud in Bridgeport, and recently a member of Tolland’s Town Council — a Republican — was exposed as having changed his legal residence to Florida and having registered to vote there without resigning from the council. 

Indeed, some Democrats around the country already propose to let non-citizens vote in municipal elections.

In any case Connecticut has never done a serious audit of its voter rolls and the state allows anyone to register to vote simply by claiming to be a citizen, at the risk of being charged with making a false statement. But such claims are never checked, and people know it.   

The governor doesn’t want to be lectured about election security by Trump. Fair enough. So why should supporters of a citizenship requirement for voter registration want to be lectured about election security by a governor who is enthusiastically subverting enforcement of immigration law?      

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

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.

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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.

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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)