Connecticut Democrats fear police at the polls more than lawbreakers

By CHRIS POWELL

Given Connecticut’s worsening social disintegration, most people are probably glad to see police officers  patrolling on foot or in cruisers. Residents of cities, where crime is worst, often ask for more police visibility.

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But Connecticut’s Democratic state legislators and even Governor Lamont lately seem to consider police officers more as perpetrators of misconduct than as protectors against it. 

Last week the Hartford Courant reported about a new state law that got little attention when the General Assembly passed it and the governor signed it this year. The law forbids police officers from getting within 250 feet of a polling place unless they are responding to a serious emergency or their presence is approved by an election moderator.

The Democrats say ordinary police presence at polling places might cause disruption, especially because the Trump administration may send immigration agents there. 

While arrests by state or federal officers anywhere can be disruptive, officers are authorized to make arrests anywhere and polling places should be secure. In any case since Connecticut forbids state and municipal police from assisting federal immigration agents in most respects, disruption at polling places by state and municipal officers in immigration matters is not going to be a problem.

So the Democrats have to pretend that it would be. Stamford state Rep. Matt Blumenthal says that while “we have no reason to believe that state and local law enforcement would engage in any misconduct like that, we want to send a message here in Connecticut that this sort of conduct will not be tolerated.”

Apparently the Democrats could think of no way of letting police officers know that their misconduct at polling places would not be tolerated other than by prohibiting them from getting near one. So what about police misconduct at other places, like town halls, schools, supermarkets, and power and water plants? Should cops be banned there too? 

There are good reasons for police to patrol polling places. Politics can get heated. Arguments can develop between voters, between voters and poll workers, and between campaign workers for competing candidates. Crowded parking lots present easy targets for burglary and vandalism. After all, if cops on the beat are deterrents to crime, any location may benefit from having one around or stopping by.

So what’s really going on with the new law?

It’s the consequence of the Democratic Party’s having become, especially in Connecticut, the party of open borders and using illegal immigration to rig legislative districting in the party’s favor. So the Democrats purport to believe that the mere sight of a police officer at a polling place will scare away some of the party’s supporters. With the new law being so excessive and ridiculous, the Democrats protest too much. They have given their scheme away.

SEN. MURPHY’S RECKLESSNESS: President Trump started the war with Iran with a sneak attack and has been waging war with no more authorization than Congress’ refusal to cut off its money. This is typical Trumpian recklessness.

But too much can be made of it, since the United States and Iran long have been waging undeclared war against each other. Since Iran’s regime is theocratic and fascist, almost anything that destroys it would do humanity a favor, and whether Americans like it or not, the war is underway with much at stake.

That’s why Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy’s stance on the war is so irresponsible. He says the United States should end it “unilaterally,” giving Iran control of the choke points of the world’s oil supply and leaving longstanding U.S. allies at Iran’s mercy — not just those near Iran but all that import oil.

Murphy thus would facilitate the greatest victory for totalitarianism since World War II. 

Iran needn’t be militarily occupied. It should be neutered and blockaded until it gets a less threatening government. With some patience and courage the United States and its allies can accomplish that. 

Murphy imagines himself presidential timber while he is as reckless and weak as Trump and naive besides.

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

Despite CEA’s backing Lamont, many teachers may pick Elliott

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut’s largest teacher union, the Connecticut Education Association, has endorsed Governor Lamont for renomination in the Democratic primary and re-election in November. “Governor Lamont’s partnership with the education community has strengthened our schools and our profession,” CEA President Kate Dias says.

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Connecticut’s schools are always getting more money from state government. But whether that has “strengthened” them or just the teacher unions is a fair question, since in recent years student proficiency has correlated inversely with rising school spending and teacher compensation. 

The dirty little secret of education in Connecticut remains that student proficiency is mostly a matter of parenting and enforcement of academic standards, and no one who reveals the secret stands a chance in politics, since that would set both the teacher unions and parents against him. The governor won’t be revealing the secret, especially not while being challenged from his party’s extreme left by Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott, who promises salvation to the government class — a lot more taxation and spending.

Indeed, most CEA members who are Democrats might vote for Elliott despite their union’s endorsement of the governor. 

The New Haven teachers union, an affiliate of the state’s second largest teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers, has endorsed Elliott in the delusion that the city’s schools perform so terribly because of a lack of spending. 

But nearly a third of New Haven’s students are chronically absent from school and about half are living in single-parent households, so their academic performance would not improve even if their teachers each were paid a million dollars per year. Elliott wants them to keep dreaming that student proficiency is just a money problem, state government’s failure to liquidate Connecticut’s 19 billionaires.

All this is especially unfortunate, since teachers see the state’s social disintegration more intimately than anyone else except maybe police officers and social workers for the state Department of Children and Families. Teachers may be not only best-positioned but also most trusted to tell state residents what’s really going on, not just in schools but in homes and on streets, and to pose questions like: Why should kids go to school and why should parents bother to get them there when they will be promoted from grade to grade and given a high school diploma even if they learn nothing? 

You can keep telling parents that, as in Lake Wobegon, all their children are above average, but the more that parents are told this, the more of a shock awaits everyone when the kids reach adulthood and the real world. 

But then with binding arbitration of their union contracts, tenure, and exemption of their evaluations from disclosure under the state’s freedom-of-information law, Connecticut’s teachers are as removed from accountability as students and parents are. Teachers have no incentive to change that for anyone.

Elsewhere on the social disintegration front, a member of the Hartford City Council, Alex Thomas, a former youth pastor, recently pleaded guilty to stealing $15,000 from his church and laundering the money. But he plans to remain on the council anyway. 

The judge suspended Thomas’ prison sentence, so he won’t have to miss any council meetings, and there is no clamor in the city for him to resign.

* * *

AUDIT FOR ILLEGAL VOTERS: Not that anyone in authority wants to find out, but there might be a simple way of discovering whether illegal immigrants have registered to vote in Connecticut. 

Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas could commission an audit of the more than 60,000 “drive-only” licenses issued by the Motor Vehicles Department to people who chose not to affirm that they are citizens. The audit would check the names and addresses on the licenses against the voter rolls. 

The same could be done with the more than 10,000 identification cards New Haven city government has issued to help illegal residents pose as legal. This audit might be more difficult, since city government keeps the ID card list secret to protect lawbreakers, but maybe it could be subpoenaed.

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

Primary campaign shows Lamont frantically pandering to leftists

By CHRIS POWELL

In the demagoguery festival that is the Democratic primary for governor, Governor Lamont shouts, “ICE isn’t getting our voter rolls!” 

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But the secretary of the state’s office confirms that Connecticut’s voter rolls are public records subject to disclosure under the state’s freedom-of-information law, with driver’s license and Social Security numbers redacted along with the day and month of a voter’s birth. An electronic list of all voters, minus the redacted details, is available for $300. As with other public records, anyone should be able to inspect the list without charge. 

So what’s the problem if the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency should get a copy of Connecticut’s voter rolls? After all, as ICE recognizes, the voter rolls would be a good place to go looking for all sorts of lawbreakers, as would a list of the driver’s licenses issued by state government, and especially a list of the special driver’s licenses issued by state government to people who confess that they are not U.S. citizens, the “drive-only” licenses issued by state government to facilitate illegal immigration. 

Another good place to look for lawbreakers would be the list of recipients of the identification cards issued by New Haven city government since 2007, documents also issued to facilitate illegal immigration.

It’s hard to see how disclosing these lists to the federal government would be an invasion of privacy, as is sometimes maintained by leading Democrats. The federal government already has the Social Security numbers and birthdates of people enrolled in Social Security even as millions of people are using false or stolen numbers to evade identification requirements, and the “drive-only” licenses are themselves evidence of crime.

The governor’s campaign is broadcasting commercials showing him addressing ICE during his speech to the General Assembly in February, saying: “ICE, go home. We’re keeping Connecticut safe without you.”

That was more demagoguery, since it implied that the federal government enforces immigration law on the false premise that most illegal immigrants are largely criminals in ways other than their breaking immigration law. In fact, on average these days illegal immigrants may be better behaved than the native-born.

But many illegal immigrants are criminals and the country deserves protection against them. The country also deserves to have everyone coming here, even as a mere tourist, to be at least nominally reviewed for suitability and safety. 

Beyond that, the country deserves having all entrants aspiring to stay here evaluated for their readiness to support a democratic and secular government with equal rights for all and their readiness to assimilate into the country’s culture rather than to try to turn it toward the theocratic fascism and ethnic and religious hatreds that now infect Western Europe as the result of its own open-borders catastrophe.

Frantically capitulating and pandering to the leftist fanatics who seem to be taking over his party, the governor has been essentially proclaiming that even basic immigration law is illegitimate and should not be enforced. He also has been busily traversing the state distributing or promising more seemingly free stuff to hungry Democrats. This week his administration promised to give laptop computers to welfare recipients, purchased with federal money left over from the virus epidemic rescue package five years ago. That political slush fund endures. 

The governor’s campaign ads boast that he has the courage to stand up to President Trump. But that hardly takes courage in overwhelmingly Democratic Connecticut, where Republicans are few and most are sulking because the president is so megalomaniacal, reckless, and ill-mannered, even if not always wrong on policy. As his support for illegal immigration shows, the governor lacks the courage to stand up to those in his own party who want to turn Connecticut into a people’s republic.

Pushing Lamont in that direction was always the point of Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott’s challenge to the governor’s renomination. While Elliott is unlikely to wrest the nomination from Lamont in the primary next week, as a practical matter he may have already won.

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

Can eastern Connecticut get ready in time for its future?

By CHRIS POWELL

Fifty-six years ago Alfred M. Bingham of Salem, an elderly liberal lawyer and author with a national reputation whose father had been a U.S. senator from Connecticut in the 1920s, sought the Democratic nomination for Congress from eastern Connecticut. Bingham didn’t get the nomination but unlike many candidates he tried to think seriously and say what he thought. The most notable thing he said was that he didn’t think the people of eastern Connecticut were happy that massive instruments of death kept being built in and sailing out of New London harbor.

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Back then liberals in Connecticut sometimes gave a second thought to their state’s economic dependence on the munitions industry. Of course without that industry the world might not have been saved from tyranny during the world wars, the Union might not have won the Civil War, and the American Revolution might have been lost. But maybe back then liberals, including Bingham, still remembered the remarkable lament President Dwight D. Eisenhower offered a few weeks after taking office in 1953. While Eisenhower was the foremost U.S. general of his time, he wouldn’t glorify the military business.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” Eisenhower said. “This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” 

Leaving office eight years later Eisenhower warned more famously about the “military-industrial complex,” over which he had helped preside.

No second thoughts were expressed last week as Connecticut celebrated the U.S. Navy’s new $77 billion contract with the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics to build nine attack submarines and five ballistic missile submarines by 2038, largely at EB’s shipyards in Groton and Quonset Point, Rhode Island. Instead there were joy and even delirium, since the contract promises many years of prosperity and growth for southeastern Connecticut and redevelopment for its two impoverished cities, New London and Norwich.

Indeed, if Connecticut is not going to be chastened by such massive preparation for war, it at least should be chastened by what will have to be done, and fast, to get the submarines built here. EB has already hired 4,000 more employees so far this year and plans to hire another 12,000 by the end of next year. Where will they come from and where will they live?

Connecticut is notoriously deficient with housing, and together New London and Groton are reported to have increased their housing by only about 900 units in the last five years, an average of fewer than 200 per year. The new sub contract is being called a “signal” to housing developers about the opportunity awaiting them, but they don’t need a signal. A signal is needed by 20 or so municipal governments in the area, and if their usual zoning procedures are followed, southeastern Connecticut may require five years just to produce another 900 units when thousands more may be needed next year.

So state government should take charge not just of zoning in southeastern Connecticut but also local transportation, with commuter buses and even trains and ferries. 

The increasing aggressiveness of China, a ruthless totalitarian power, may justify the expansion and modernization of the U.S. submarine force and may fairly suppress concerns about the diversion of resources from human needs. But second thoughts still may be in order for eastern Connecticut. For the indefinite future life in the region will be based on war materiel and casino gambling. 

Better than nothing, perhaps, but the best that could be done? What if peace and good sense ever break out?

In any case, will anyone in authority in overwhelmingly Democratic Connecticut who is celebrating the submarine contract thank the people who most made this future possible — not just eastern Connecticut’s U.S. representative, Joe Courtney, a Democrat, but also President Trump and congressional Republicans?

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

Will state ever reduce poverty or just keep manufacturing it?

By CHRIS POWELL

Will the day ever come in Connecticut when those in authority notice that despite all their chest thumping, posturing, sanctimony, and spending, some very big undertakings of government aren’t working? That is, failing to accomplish their nominal objectives while supporting a bureaucracy with great salaries, benefits, and pensions.

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Will the day ever come when voters notice that they are always being charged more for policies that don’t work?

Will the day ever come when some aspirant for high office in the state dares to run on a platform of acknowledging and changing what has failed?

It’s not happening yet in this year’s campaign for governor. 

Governor Lamont congratulates himself for having approved all sorts of programs to subsidize the growing number of people who can’t support themselves in what is nearly the most expensive state in the country. But there is no inquiry into Connecticut’s worsening poverty. There is just the shoveling of blame at the Trump administration over, for example, its supposedly outrageous insistence that able-bodied adults without dependents work at least 80 hours per month to earn their food subsidies and medical insurance from the government.

Are modest work requirements for the able-bodied on welfare really so outrageous when the national debt is nearly $40 trillion and unpayable except through more of the inflation that is hobbling the working class?

The governor’s challenger in the Democratic primary, Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott, envisions a vast expansion of welfare and social-service subsidies to be financed by making “the rich” pay their “fair share,” though “the rich” already produce by far most state income tax revenue. Elliott panders to the simpletons who think the only fair tax is the tax someone else pays, though when someone else pays, those who don’t pay lose interest in government’s effectiveness or the lack of it.

People who don’t feel that they have “skin in the game” lose civic virtue.

Elliott is even more convinced than the governor that throwing more money will perfect society. Yes, more tax revenue might be extracted from “the rich,” but where is the evidence that Connecticut’s decades of throwing money at poverty has reduced it? The state’s cities remain poverty factories churning out dependence faster than money can be thrown at them.

The Republican nominee for governor, Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio, has yet to indicate that he sees a big picture of Connecticut apart from the state’s tax burden. But restraining taxes alone won’t fix Connecticut.

None of the candidates seems to have read last week’s report in Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers that the poverty rate for Black children in the state worsened every year from 2021 to 2024, the most recent year for which data is available, rising from 18% to 28% and erasing a decade of progress in the rate. 

The poverty rate for white children was steady at 5%. For Asian children it fluctuated around 9%, and for Hispanic children it fell steadily from 31% to 24% — which is still distressing.

Few other states, the Hearst report said, suffered as large an increase in Black child poverty.

This should be an issue in November’s elections. 

For example, it might be asked how a welfare system that subsidizes childbearing outside marriage and deprives so many children of fathers helps them become educated, confident, and self-sufficient. 

It might be asked how social promotion, the primary policy of Connecticut schools, helps educate children to enter adulthood with the skills and work ethic needed to get good jobs and achieve self-sufficiency.

Maybe more important, it might be asked whether the candidates or anyone in authority in Connecticut read last year’s study from the University of Virginia that found that the racial performance gaps in education and student behavior, gaps especially severe and disgraceful in Connecticut, are eliminated when fathers live with their children or are deeply involved in their lives.

Politically incorrect as it may be, one conscientious father is worth a hundred social programs, especially if those programs function mainly to sustain the government class.

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

Governor Lamont ignores more misconduct by state police

By CHRIS POWELL

Caught up in his primary campaign for renomination by the Democrats, maybe Governor Lamont and his publicists are too busy to notice and respond to news reports about improprieties in state government. Or maybe they’re just not inclined to call more attention to them, even by correcting them.

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But misconduct committed by the state police on the night of July 16 in Stonington and reported July 26 by The Day of New London is outrageous all the same. 

The newspaper’s managing editor, Joe Wojtas, wrote that he was driving past the Mystic Aquarium when he noticed a giant crane and police cruisers blocking the aquarium’s parking lot. So he parked on the street and got out to see what was going on. State police and Stonington officers were on the scene. They were providing an escort for the transfer to the aquarium of a beluga whale from Canada, an activity that sometimes prompts protests. The delivery to the aquarium apparently was being made at night behind a police cordon so it might be concealed from potential protesters.

From curbside — public property, not aquarium property — Wojtas began taking photographs and video with his mobile phone for newspaper use. Then three state troopers started shining their flashlights at him, ruining any images he might take. When he yelled at them, one trooper walked away but the other two continued to obstruct his photography with their flashlights.

Wojtas later complained to a state police publicist, who said he’d try to get an explanation. But none was given. Hence Wojtas’ column in The Day, which asked if this kind of thing is what the public pays the state police for.

For many years Connecticut’s state police have been notoriously unhelpful to journalists seeking timely information. The journalists generally have let the troopers get away with this lest they become even more obstructionist. Now the troopers apparently feel that concealing incidents of public interest and obstructing journalism is indeed part of their job.

Ordinarily the governor might be expected to represent the public interest here and direct the state police commissioner to reprimand the troopers and apologize for their misconduct. But the Lamont administration has been especially contemptuous of state freedom-of-information law, and as the governor seeks renomination, he is relying heavily on the support of the state employee unions. 

The governor’s challenger in the primary, Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott, isn’t likely to help correct the situation. He is trying to persuade state employees that he will be even more their tool than the governor is.

As for Republican state legislators, including Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio, the party’s nominee for governor, their “law and order” reflexes require them to pander to police officers in nearly all circumstances. It’s hard to imagine any misconduct by police that would prompt criticism from a Republican candidate in Connecticut.

So to answer Wojtas’ question: Yes, this misconduct is what Connecticut pays its state police for, along with some other things. Misconduct is overlooked or minimized. Standards and discipline in state government employment, especially the state police, long have been weak. They may remain weak while journalism remains so reluctant to press state officials for accountability even when journalism itself and the public’s right to know are attacked.

ANOTHER SANCTUARY: Told the other day that federal immigration agents had begun arresting illegal immigrants at Bradley International Airport, the governor dutifully expressed the outrage expected from a Democratic candidate as his party is taken over by the fanatical left.

“Leave these people alone,” the governor said indignantly. 

The Lamont administration already has enacted laws purportedly prohibiting federal immigration agents from making arrests at schools, churches, hospitals, courthouses, and other supposedly sensitive places. Strangely, all other lawbreakers still can be arrested there. Are Connecticut’s airports now to be classified as too sensitive for immigration arrests?

Meanwhile, the governor, Attorney General William Tong, and Democratic state legislators keep denying that Connecticut is a “sanctuary state” even as they lengthen the list of sanctuaries.

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

Voter registration case is more than an anomaly

By CHRIS POWELL

Maybe the illegal immigrant recently hailed as a martyr by Connecticut Democrats, West Hartford businessman Sead “Seyo” Cecunjanin, made an innocent mistake in 2018 when, in a transaction at the state Motor Vehicles Department, he applied to register to vote, falsely affirmed that he is a U.S. citizen, and was improperly added to the town’s voter rolls. 

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Of course given Cecunjanin’s record — 29 years spent in the United States in violation of a final order of removal for having entered the country illegally on a false passport, plus a second illegal entry — he deserves no benefit of any doubt.

It is illegal for non-citizens to vote, and when West Hartford’s Republican Town Committee exposed Cecunjanin’s improper registration last week and news organizations inquired about it, Connecticut’s secretary of the state’s office resentfully looked into it. While confirming the improper registration, the secretary’s office emphasized that Cecunjanin had never actually voted. His illegal registration, the secretary’s office said, was an anomaly.

Maybe. But how does the secretary’s office or anyone know that it’s an anomaly — know that others among the estimated 125,000 illegal immigrants in Connecticut haven’t also registered to vote? 

No one knows. Worse, no one in authority wants to know.

While it seems unlikely that many non-citizens have registered to vote, since it confers no financial benefit, Connecticut’s registration system invites fraud. Like so much else in state government, it’s never seriously audited. The system requires no proof of citizenship, just an affirmation no one ever checks — and it is widely known that no one ever checks.

Indeed, don’t expect action to be taken against Cecunjanin’s illegal registration, or, now that he has been released from federal custody and is back in West Hartford, expect him to return calls from journalists seeking explanations, though he has told one that he really didn’t register.

While Cecunjanin exploited a weak system, the bigger culprits are those who support it.

Start with the Democrats — members of Congress, state legislators, and a former Hartford mayor — who rallied at West Hartford Town Hall last month to protest Cecunjanin’s arrest by immigration authorities even before they had any idea why he had been arrested. They didn’t care. To Connecticut Democrats, any immigration arrest is wrong.

Then there is the state law engineered by Democrats authorizing special driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants, nominally for public safety but actually to facilitate their breaking immigration law, a racket originating in New Haven in 2007 when city government started issuing city identification cards to illegal immigrants to help them pose as legal.

The issuance of driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants is responsible for the recent voter registration scandal in New Jersey, where more than 6,000 non-citizens registered and hundreds voted. It is being dismissed as a computer programming error but it’s not. It’s the same policy error Connecticut has made, registering voters without proof of citizenship.  

Then there are the state laws forbidding police from cooperating with federal agents in apprehending immigration lawbreakers and purporting to ban agents from certain locations.

Facilitating illegal immigration and nullifying federal immigration law is state  policy. Connecticut is a “sanctuary state.”

This policy is called humane but it devalues citizenship and inhumanely increases public expense, particularly with medical care for people who can’t legally work and education for children who don’t speak English and need years of instruction in two languages. No one in authority, especially not in New Haven, the center of the state’s open-borders movement, whose schools are falling apart, ever asks how much more bilingual education Connecticut can afford or how much worse the housing shortage should become. When the governor says he welcomes immigrants, he refuses to distinguish between legal and illegal.

President Trump is a demagogue on this issue but Connecticut’s nullifiers are demagogues too. In a Democratic scheme to transform the country’s political complexion, many millions of people have entered illegally in recent years while the law continues to presume that a simple affirmation of citizenship is adequate for voter registration. It’s not anymore.

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

Child neglect is vast in Connecticut and DCF may not be so bad

By CHRIS POWELL

Beating up on Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families is easy and politically satisfying. Child neglect and abuse are rampant and worsening in the state and are beginning to overwhelm the agency’s social workers again, if not yet quite as much as the staff was overwhelmed when it was under federal court supervision from 1991 to 2022.

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Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers quantified the problem the other day, reporting that the deaths of 62 children in the state since January 2025 came under DCF investigation and the circumstances of about 20 of the children had been reviewed by the agency in some way before they died.

Distressingly, neither DCF nor police have yet offered an explanation of the circumstances around one of those deaths, that of a 3-year-old Manchester girl who was struck and killed by a car as she crossed a thoroughfare unaccompanied at about 4:30 in the morning on June 10. Apparently she is to be officially forgotten.

Three days later Governor Lamont reminded Connecticut that the government has arranged for free meals to be available to all children at various locations throughout the state while schools are on summer recess. As for getting the children to the free meals and back home, the program makes the big assumption that, unlike the Manchester girl, they have competent adult supervision.

It’s not DCF’s fault that Connecticut has thousands of households not competent to take care of their children. Many of these households are fatherless; many are headed by people with mental illness or a drug, alcohol, or gambling addiction, or people who are undereducated and whose ability to make a living doesn’t match the child-raising responsibilities they undertook. Inflation and the rising cost of housing, a large part of which is ever-increasing property taxes — the rising cost of government itself — may keep them from ever getting out of the hole they dug for themselves.

DCF social workers review such circumstances knowing that no children should have to live where household competence is marginal and their health and safety are at risk. But the social workers also know that removing children from such homes risks psychological harm to them and political harm to the agency. The social workers soon learn that their judgments are easily questioned — that they may always be damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

It’s not a happy job and many tire of it quickly, just as many teachers in Connecticut’s impoverished cities and inner suburbs are demoralized by the misbehavior of their unparented students and the difficulty of keeping order in their classes. These teachers become eager to leave for positions in towns with better-parented students and higher pay.

It is often said that DCF is broken, and investigation of its most troubling cases typically finds negligence or bad judgment. But if DCF is measured by the breadth of child neglect and abuse in Connecticut, the agency might seem to be an almost miraculous success.

For a good indicator of that neglect and abuse is the rate of chronic student absenteeism in the state’s schools. About 17% of students meet the chronic threshold, missing 10% or more of their classes. That’s about 83,000 students who are neglected at home if not abused too. Chronic absenteeism in the cities, which have more poverty, more danger to children, and a disproportionate number of DCF cases, is closer to 25% or even 30%.

Twenty fatalities in a year and a half in a population of at least 83,000 neglected children constitute a fatality rate of less than three-tenths of 1%, or two-tenths of 1% per year. 

Until Connecticut is ready to remove tens of thousands of neglected children from deficient homes and put them in group homes, modern orphanages, or ready otherwise to address the social disintegration being engendered by the excesses and perverse incentives of the welfare state, how much better can a child-protection agency fairly be expected to do — if it can even keep finding people willing to try to deal with it?

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

Legislators try blackmailing Yale to save discriminatory admissions

By CHRIS POWELL

It shouldn’t be shocking that the U.S. Justice Department is investigating Yale University in New Haven for illegal racial discrimination in its admissions practices. Higher education long has been discriminating that way and helped concoct a euphemism for it — “affirmative action” — a euphemism that fortunately no longer intimidates the Trump administration. 

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In 2023 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Harvard’s admissions policy discriminated illegally by race. So it’s a fair issue, and Yale says it is cooperating with the investigation and pursuing a settlement. 

But rather than acknowledge the issue’s legitimacy, some people are getting hysterical. They say academic freedom is at stake, but there is no academic freedom to violate civil rights law.

A group of Yale professors has threatened to sue the university if it reaches a settlement with the government on admissions policy, as if some law says professors can run the university instead of its administration.

And now eight state legislators are actually trying in public to blackmail the university out of considering a settlement. In a letter sent last week to Yale President Maurie McInnis, the legislators said they might try to reduce the university’s state tax exemption if it settles with the Justice Department.

Apparently it’s of no concern to the legislators that the university might be breaking civil rights law and thus be incurring much liability in its governance and finances. 

But there’s an even bigger irony in the legislators’ blackmail. For Yale’s tax exemption should be reduced irrespective of the admissions policy issue, and the General Assembly should have acted accordingly long ago.

About 56% of real estate in New Haven is exempt from city property taxes, and about 43% of that exempt property is owned by the university. The university recently agreed to increase the voluntary annual payment it makes to the city but this amount is a small fraction of the many millions of dollars Yale would pay additionally if its property wasn’t tax-exempt. The university’s tax exemption is a huge burden not just on city government but state government as well, since New Haven is an impoverished city and largely a financial ward of the state.

Of course the university’s contribution to the city and all southern Connecticut — in employment and spending — is huge as well. Indeed, without Yale, New Haven might slide into Long Island Sound.

Nevertheless, Yale’s property tax exemption is just too disproportionate, especially since the university’s endowment, worth around $44 billion, is the second largest university endowment in the country, second only to Harvard’s.

So it’s pathetic that those eight legislators can contemplate doing the right thing on the property tax issue only if can’t coerce Yale into taking a position that, while politically correct, might break federal law and incur great financial and administrative liability.

Historically the university has had a close relationship with government in Connecticut — beginning with the colonial government, which chartered Yale in 1701 and supported it financially in part to educate potential government officials. That close relationship endures insofar as Connecticut’s governor and lieutenant governor still automatically become members of the university’s Board of Trustees. 

Governor Lamont and Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz may not yet have taken their ex-officio trusteeships seriously, but now that those eight legislators — all Democrats, like the governor and lieutenant governor — are using their offices to blackmail the university into breaking federal law, a rebuke from the top of state government may be in order.

* * *

REQUIRE ‘e-VERIFY’: If enforcement of federal immigration law sometimes seems too sudden and cruel, it doesn’t have to be that way. 

Illegal immigration might be stopped quickly in Connecticut if state government required employers to use the federal government’s “e-Verify” system to confirm or deny a job applicant’s eligibility to work in the United States, and if employers hiring illegal immigrants were prosecuted vigorously and punished severely.

But strangely the people who protest the cruelty of immigration law enforcement oppose requiring use of “e-Verify.” They want illegal immigration all the same.

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

Tired of mentally ill defendants, courts consider something new

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut’s courts are tired of dealing with criminal defendants who are mentally ill but not criminally insane. State government has a place for the latter sort of criminals: Whiting Forensic Hospital in Middletown. But they are a small subset of the mentally ill, criminals so sick that they are not responsible for themselves. 

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Most criminal defendants who are mentally ill and convicted of serious crimes end up in Connecticut’s prison system — which may be even more tired of dealing with the mentally ill than the courts are. The prisons are full of people from what the politically incorrect past properly called broken homes, people whose upbringing was miserable, who didn’t get a decent education and entered adulthood fit only for menial work, people to whom crime and drug abuse seemed the most practical way of life, and people with learning disabilities.

The prison system does what it can with those people but it’s not terribly effective, since most released prisoners return to crime and are back in prison within a few years even as many released prisoners also return to crime but aren’t caught. 

Connecticut’s courts strive to avoid putting people in prison, knowing how prison can damage and handicap troublesome people even more. But the state is full of repeat offenders who should have been locked up permanently after multiple convictions, and at some point the public simply has to be protected. The public is not as protected against repeat offenders as it should be, but prison is expensive and most legislators and governors have preferred to have the public pay for repeat offenders by enduring more crimes than pay with taxes for imprisoning more criminals.

So since the governor and General Assembly seem indifferent to the mental illness problem faced by the courts and prisons, the Judicial Department has bravely undertaken to try to do something about it on its own.

This month Chief Justice Raheem L. Mullins announced a committee to plan the creation of an experimental “behavioral health court” to be based in New Haven and potentially expanded statewide.

The committee will include judges, police officials, medical and addiction experts, educators, and people who have gone through mental illness and addiction themselves. One of the judges, Dan Klau, lost a daughter to drug addiction and mental illness, and not for lack of trying to help her. Indeed, nearly everyone knows someone who is mentally ill or addicted; the problem is getting worse in Connecticut even as state government, in its relentless pursuit of tax revenue, increasingly facilitates drug and gambling addiction.

Mentally ill or addicted people “might initially come to court for minor incidents,” the chief justice says. “However, without proper intervention, their conduct can spiral out of control, especially if they choose to self-medicate with alcohol or illegal drugs. Our goal is to triage these individuals and get them help before they inflict irreparable harm on themselves or someone else.”

The chief justice hasn’t defined a particular format for the behavioral health court, leaving that to the committee. Getting people “the help they need” is a cliché that needs definition too. 

There are many other questions. Judges already have great discretion in sentencing and can condition sentences and probations on a defendant’s cooperation with various treatments, but how well do they work? If judges made enough use of their discretion in sentencing the mentally ill and addicted, and if enough treatment was available and worked, would a behavioral health court be needed?

Would a behavioral health court be just another mechanism of what state law euphemizes as “accelerated rehabilitation,” the gradual erasure of a defendant’s responsibility, and the release of more repeat offenders? Who would audit the results of the court to prevent it from becoming such a mechanism? How much would the court cost, and, if it worked, how much might it save?

The committee should answer these questions. In any case it aims to confront a longstanding disaster the rest of state government has been happy to overlook. 

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