Blumenthal sees no justification for immigration law enforcement

By CHRIS POWELL

Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal went to Danbury the other day to meet privately with people whose relatives had been arrested in the recent sweep through the city and nearby towns by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. About a hundred people were arrested. The senator also held a public meeting to hear complaints about the arrests from municipal officials and advocates for illegal immigrants.

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Deploring the arrests, Blumenthal said: “Cruelty is the point. Fear and terror are the goal. I don’t recognize America in what I saw in Danbury.”

Cruelty, fear, and terror? Holding people to account for any lawbreaking often seems cruel to them and their relatives and causes fear and terror. Most law conveys the fear of breaking it; otherwise it would be meaningless.

But the arrests in the Danbury area had a bigger objective than cruelty even if it wasn’t obvious to the senator. It was to apprehend and remove people in the country illegally. 

After all, if the objective had been only cruelty, the ICE agents could have arrested anyone.

G.K. Chesterton recognized the sort of problem here. “As is common in most modern discussions,” he wrote in 1910, “the unmentionable thing is the pivot of the whole discussion.” 

What is unmentionable by the senator and the advocates for the people arrested by ICE — what is the pivot of the discussion — is simply whether the arrested people were in the country illegally, and, if so, whether the law should be enforced against them. 

Fortunately for the senator and the advocates for the people arrested by ICE, most journalists don’t consider those points to be worth addressing either. Most journalists are interested only in publicizing what seems like the cruelty of enforcing law they dislike.

Addressing the central points from the start would change the subject from the profound sadness felt by the people who recklessly gambled that the United States would never enforce immigration law against them — people who bet their lives and even those of the spouses they acquired and the children they had after entering illegally and who lost that bet.

Connecticut is full of little groups working furiously to obstruct and sabotage immigration law enforcement — engaged in a form of nullification and secession that is essentially treason — but at least they are candid about wanting open borders and forgiveness of all immigration violations. 

By contrast Blumenthal and other Democratic officials in the state, especially Governor Lamont and Attorney General William Tong, seem to want to fudge the issue — to leave illegal immigrants in a netherworld, some with flimsy or temporary exemptions from enforcement, or to put them on “a path to citizenship,” the euphemism for a mass amnesty for their lawbreaking. For with an estimated 14 million illegal immigrants in the country, any normal review of their suitability for regular legal admission would take decades.

Blumenthal and other Democrats acknowledge that the immigration system is “broken” but don’t acknowledge that repairing it — giving normal review to everyone seeking admission — is impossible without deporting most illegal immigrants and telling them to get back in line because there can be no reward for breaking the law.

Nor do the senator and other Democrats address the question of who broke the immigration system and why. 

For the system was broken during a Democratic national administration, an administration that just shrugged and claimed falsely that controlling the border was impossible, when it actually didn’t want the border controlled at all but wanted instead for illegal immigrants to locate in Democratic “sanctuary” cities and states, where, as constitutionally required, the census would count them for purposes of congressional and state legislative districting. That would increase the number of safely Democratic districts and alter the country’s political composition in favor of the party that broke the system — all without letting illegal immigrants vote. Their mere presence would change everything.

If Blumenthal didn’t recognize America in Danbury amid the recent immigration law enforcement there, it’s because his party’s idea of America is no immigration enforcement at all.

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

‘Diversity, equity, and inclusion’ don’t substitute for achievement

By CHRIS POWELL

In recent years American higher education has made a fetish of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which has succeeded “affirmative action” as the euphemism for racial preferences in hiring and the award of other benefits. Since higher education is the fortress of what styles itself as liberalism — that is, political correctness — the Trump administration delights in attacking it, and now is proposing to revoke tax-exempt status for colleges whose policies benefit students according to their race. Many colleges have such policies to help Black, Hispanic, and other minority students specifically.

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In the strict legal and moral senses the administration is right. Government should be color-blind in dealing with individuals. That’s equality under the law. 

But of course the country continues to suffer vast economic and social inequality, especially regarding race and class, which should be just as intolerable as racial preferences. Social harmony and justice won’t be achieved until opportunity is more equal.

Racial preferences sabotage their purported objective, for they instill suspicion and resentment, impugn the qualifications of their beneficiaries, and confer a false sense of achievement.

But getting rid of racial preferences and curbing the arrogance of higher education, nice as that would be, will do little to democratize opportunity.

Fortunately democratizing opportunity doesn’t require treating people according to race or ethnicity, since economic and social inequality are matters of poverty more than race and ethnicity. Higher education implicitly acknowledges this with scholarships and tuition discounts for students who are from poor families or who face other disadvantages. Favoring applicants from minority groups when all other aspects of applicants are equal is fair and won’t cause trouble or resentment.

Otherwise racial preferences are clumsy and unintelligent substitutes for fairness and the country doesn’t need them to elevate the poor and disadvantaged.

College scholarship programs like those run by the school systems in Hartford, New Haven, and Waterbury,  cities with much poverty, elevate students without regard to race even as most of their beneficiaries come from minority groups. Under those programs students who attend school consistently, behave well, and get high grades are guaranteed substantial financial aid for higher education. The money comes from private donors, charitable foundations, colleges, and government. The program in New Haven is largely funded by Yale University, which additionally covers tuition for its own students of limited means.

Colleges today crave outstanding minority students, as they should, since the country needs them badly.

But higher education is only a secondary mechanism of elevating the poor. Indeed, much of higher education is fluff of little value. 

The primary mechanisms of elevating the poor are lower education and parenting, areas in which Connecticut, while a rich state, fails terribly.  

Most poor children in Connecticut are poor because they have only one parent and because the state’s welfare system rewards and incentivizes childbearing outside marriage and thus impairs family formation. 

Many of these children never advance far educationally because the state’s schools operate by social promotion. Connecticut’s schools have no requirement for students to earn advancement from grade to grade and graduation from high school by learning. As a practical matter there is no requirement for students even to attend elementary and high school, since the requirement is not enforced seriously. 

So it’s no wonder that chronic absenteeism is so high among students in Connecticut’s poor cities — 33% in Hartford, 30% in Bridgeport and New Britain, 28% in New Haven, 25% in Norwich and New London, and 22% in Waterbury. Children who can’t reliably get to elementary and high school are not likely to get to college or even learn enough to qualify for more than menial jobs.

The indifference of elected and school officials to the pernicious results of welfare and educational policies underlies Connecticut’s longstanding and disgraceful educational performance gap between white and minority students and the state’s continuing failure to elevate the poor. 

The country needs diversity, equity, and inclusion. But rewarding people for their race is mere discrimination, political patronage, and evasion, not education and achievement. 

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

Exposing the poverty business; and will property taxes shift?

By CHRIS POWELL

Poverty is a big and profitable business in Connecticut and throughout the country and yet poverty keeps worsening. Part of that is caused by high inflation, whereby government grows without the formal taxation needed to pay for it, inflation being informal taxation and poorly understood. But part of it is also caused by the failure of the programs and policies government undertakes to ameliorate poverty.

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Last week Connecticut got a good look at that failure from the Connecticut Mirror, which reported that an independent audit commissioned by the state Department of Economic and Community Development of the late Blue Hills Civic Association in Hartford could find no documentation for $2.4 million of state government money given to the association for distribution to what were said to be community-service organizations. Some recipients refused to cooperate with the audit.

The audit was commissioned in response to last year’s scandal about the “earmarking” of millions of dollars in state grants to organizations selected by Democratic state legislators — patronage pork — and particularly about the grants arranged by Hartford state Sen. Douglas McCrory, which he routed through a close friend. Partly because of the scandal, McCrory was defeated last month in a primary for renomination by the Democrats.

Hartford remains desperately poor but as the scandal showed, the poverty business there continues to do well.

Embarrassed by the scandal, the General Assembly and Governor Lamont enacted a new policy requiring patronage grant recipients to report more about what they do generally as well as how they spent their state money. But being in the majority, Democratic legislators will continue to arrange patronage grants, and requiring recipients to submit more documentation won’t necessarily mean that their grants accomplish anything of value for the public. For there is no guarantee that anyone will check on what was actually done.

Indeed, six decades of the “war on poverty” in Connecticut suggest that the only result that matters is the political support generated from the poverty business.

Why are Connecticut’s cities still so poor and dysfunctional? It’s not because of Donald Trump, nor even because so much money has been siphoned away into the graft and waste of poverty pimping, as with the Blue Hills Civic Association. The cities remain so poor and dysfunctional because, as the patronage scandal merely reiterates, no one in authority really cares about the results of poverty policy as long as the poverty business itself thrives.

* * * 

In a few weeks the hundred-member “Citizens Assembly” convened by the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities plans to release recommendations from its study of municipal property taxes. But the study isn’t likely to tell the governor and legislators anything they don’t know. CCM is just trying to motivate them to transfer the burden of property taxes elsewhere.

The property tax is the state’s largest, collecting about $13 billion a year, a little more than the state income tax collects. But the property tax may be more bothersome politically since most income taxes are paid by the wealthiest few while property taxes are borne widely by the homeowning middle and upper classes. While property taxes are said to be regressive, in fact they are to a great extent taxes on unearned wealth, especially now that inflation and restrictive zoning have produced huge unrealized capital gains for homeowners.

Maybe the most obvious mechanism of property tax relief and fairness would be to have state government assume all costs of “special education,” which should be an expense of general social welfare, not municipal government. Another obvious possibility would be to enact a limited homestead exemption.

But where is the money for such a tax shift to come from? Proposing tax cuts is easy; replacing the revenue is hard.     

The Citizens Assembly almost certainly will not propose seriously economizing in municipal government and particularly in local education, the biggest municipal expense. School enrollments keep falling while school costs keep rising, but no one in politics in Connecticut can acknowledge the irony or stand up to the teacher unions. 

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

Student scores rise marginally but remain the usual disaster

By CHRIS POWELL

Whoopee! Last week the state Education Department cheerfully announced that Connecticut public school students in Grades 3 through 8 showed marginal improvements on the most recent state proficiency tests in English and math. 

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Students from poor households, who constitute 44% of the student population, had an increase of seven-tenths of a percent in English and four-tenths of a percent in math. Students from non-poor households increased their proficiency by four-tenths of a percent in both English and math.

There were similar marginal gains for Black and Hispanic students but the performance gaps between them and white students remain huge.

The Education Department’s chief performance officer, Ajit Gopalakrishnan, said that while the improvements seem small, “they translate to thousands of students statewide who are performing at a higher level.”  

But celebrating these marginal improvements just distracts from the disaster that the new proficiency levels are. 

For among the students from poor households, only 32.5% now meet grade-level proficiency in English and only 27% are proficient in math. 

Even among the non-poor students, only 66% are deemed proficient in English and only 62.5% in math. That is, even among the non-poor students, more than a third are not proficient in either subject.

Of course this is a distressingly old story and explains why state government administers so few proficiency tests to students. National tests sometimes given to Connecticut students report similarly appalling results — that most students are proficient in neither English nor math even when they graduate from high school. 

The closing of the state’s schools during the Covid-19 virus epidemic in 2020 is widely blamed for the decline in educational performance since then, though performance was declining much earlier. 

“Covid was such a gut punch for a lot of these kids,” the president of the state’s largest teachers union, the Connecticut Education Association, Kate Dias, said in response to the new test scores. “They came out of Covid a little more cynical about their education.”

Indeed, and why shouldn’t they have become more cynical about education? For if they hadn’t already discerned it, the closing of schools during the epidemic emphasized that they didn’t have to go to school to keep being advanced from grade to grade and graduate from high school even if they were generally ignorant. That policy — social promotion — was in force in Connecticut long before the epidemic and it remains in force. 

Chronic absenteeism of students from school in Connecticut recently was reported to be down to an average of 16%, and Dias predicts that proficiency test scores will rise if chronic absenteeism continues to fall. But correlating with household poverty, chronic absenteeism remains far higher in the cities — between 25% and 33% there — probably in large part because social promotion remains policy and demoralizes children and parents into doubting the idea of going to school at all.

The marginal increase in test scores prompted performance officer Gopalakrishnan to declare: “Success is possible in any district and for any child. All students should be achieving these standards.” 

He wasn’t asked: So why do most students not meet proficiency standards, and why don’t schools require them to meet those standards as a condition of grade advancement and graduation? What is the policy incentive for students to meet proficiency standards and for their parents to get them to school and value their education?

If even the state Education Department has so little regard for its product and its results are so marginal, why does the product cost so much and keep costing more every year?

For the money keeps flowing in. Last week Governor Lamont and Education Commissioner Charlene Russell-Tucker announced the state’s receipt of a $10 million federal grant to train teachers to teach reading better in kindergarten through third grade. The grant’s implication is that the teachers aren’t so good at it now because they use mistaken techniques. 

The awful new proficiency test results suggest that one of those mistaken techniques is simply social promotion.

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

Most in poll disapprove Lamont; could election be competitive?

By CHRIS POWELL

Maybe Connecticut isn’t yet in the mood for competitive politics, but the most recent Nutmeg State Poll from the University of New Hampshire’s Survey Center reports enough political dissatisfaction that, if it continues, might  be the precursor of change.

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For the first time in years, according to the poll, more respondents disapprove than approve of Governor Lamont’s performance in office — 44% approving and 52% disapproving. With a large sample, 917 participants, the poll is plausible, as are the issues on which respondents say they are most dissatisfied with the governor: the state’s high cost of living, its high taxes, its weak economy, and expensive housing.

The decline in the governor’s standing might be partly a consequence of the rough primary he nevertheless won overwhelmingly for renomination by the Democrats just a few days before the poll was taken. Lamont’s challenger, far-left Hamden state Rep. Josh Elliott, spent heavily on advertising depicting the governor as the plutocratic “King Ned” striving to protect “the rich” against “fair share” taxes. Despite what has seemed like the Democratic Party’s frantic rush to the left, Elliott’s appeal to class war won him less than a third of the primary vote. But it also may have helped to legitimize grievances against state government generally.

The new poll still shows the governor with a substantial lead over his Republican challenger, Greenwich state Sen. Ryan Fazio, 52-37%. But Fazio has just started running television commercials, and the traditional Republican vote in recent elections for governor has been closer to 45%. 

Of course the megalomania of President Trump, a Republican, will weigh heavily on the party’s candidates in Connecticut. But if, as the poll suggests, people are blaming not just Trump but also the governor for the high cost of living, Fazio may have a few things to talk to them about.

In any case the governor is seeking a third term at age 72 amid signs that many people want change. Not that change is always good, but what if people ever realize that it is seldom accomplished by re-electing people?

RAW PATRONAGE PORK: With a personal fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars to draw on for his campaign, which he again is financing all by himself, and with Connecticut remaining a heavily Democratic state, the governor probably isn’t worried much about his prospects. 

A sign of that confidence, if not arrogance, may have been the governor’s unannounced hiring of Miguel Cardona, the former state education commissioner and former U.S. education secretary, to be a highly paid consultant to an advisory commission the governor created this year to devise new ways of helping people find jobs in a changing economy. Cardona will chair the group as well as get paid to consult for it.

Since, upon his departure from the Biden administration, Cardona was widely regarded as the worst Education Department secretary in history, he may have needed help finding a job himself. The Connecticut Mirror reports that the Lamont administration will pay him $250,000 for consulting and that no other applicants were sought.

Cardona’s soft landing is the rawest patronage pork, confirmed by the governor’s attempt to hide its cost. 

WORK, NOT WELFARE: Hysteria is sweeping the welfare and hospital business in Connecticut now that the federal government has directed state governments to enforce work requirements on Medicaid recipients who are able-bodied adults without dependents. They could lose their medical insurance unless they work at least part-time — 80 hours per month — or pursue job training.

State welfare and hospital officials fear that many Medicaid recipients won’t comply with the new policy and instead will crowd hospital emergency rooms when they lose their insurance, with their unpaid bills classified as “uncompensated care” having to be paid by state government or insured patients.

But the new requirements are reasonable. For as Theodore Roosevelt said, the first duty of a citizen is to pull his own weight. With the federal government $40 trillion in debt, able-bodied adults without dependents should pull their own weight and then some.

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

Outrage about Danbury arrests shows Democrats want open borders

By CHRIS POWELL

Dozens of immigration arrests in the Danbury area last week sent Connecticut’s Democratic leaders into fits of hysteria and hypocrisy.

Governor Lamont complained that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents “are not trying to coordinate with us. They’re just picking people up.” 

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The governor seemed to have forgotten that with his support the state enacted a law forbidding its police officers from cooperating with ordinary immigration enforcement.

The governor issued a statement detailing the rights of illegal immigrants and how they should act if arrested. He has yet to issue a statement saying they should obey immigration law, nor a statement informing them that the federal government will pay them $3,000 and arrange their transportation if they deport themselves. Deportation doesn’t have to be cruel and abrupt for those who want to obey the law.

State and municipal officials and opponents of immigration law enforcement complained that illegal immigrants were scared by the arrests. But why shouldn’t people be scared of breaking the law?

Danbury Mayor Roberto L. Alves, who is also Democratic state chairman, said he and other Democrats were “demanding accountability” from ICE and wanted to know what it was doing in the Danbury area. But they knew very well what was going on. ICE was “demanding accountability” from people in the country illegally.

The governor and other Democrats also complained that ICE was not limiting immigration enforcement to “violent criminals.” This complaint approached the heart of the matter.

For while the governor and other Democrats will never put it plainly, their position is that people who enter the country illegally and reach Connecticut should be forgiven their lawbreaking and left alone unless they are caught committing another crime. State government’s position to that effect is well known — thanks to state government’s granting driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants and its law forbidding state and municipal police from assisting ordinary immigration enforcement. So Connecticut is understood to be a “sanctuary state.” 

That is the origin of the cruelty being complained about. For Connecticut invites people to take their chances breaking immigration law rather than to try to enter the country through the normal legal procedures. Connecticut invites them to gamble that eventually the federal government will lose its will to defend the country and instead will grant a mass amnesty to illegal immigrants — that it will open the borders retroactively.

ICE has serious defects. Among them, its officers are not identified by name and badge number and the agency fails to provide prompt public identification of those it has arrested.

But those defects are not why the governor, Mayor Alves, and other leading Democrats are so upset with the agency. They are upset most because they don’t want any ordinary illegal immigrants deported, as they make clear frequently when they say they welcome all immigrants, always failing to distinguish between the legal and illegal, and as they made clear in July when they objected to the arrest in West Hartford of an illegal immigrant who had violated a final order of removal for many years of repeated lawbreaking.

Ordinary immigration law enforcement like last week’s in the Danbury area will impair the national Democratic scheme to use illegal immigrants to rig federal and state legislative districting in the party’s favor. The problem is not, as President Trump hallucinates, that illegal immigrants are likely to try voting in great numbers soon. The problem is that most illegal immigrants are drawn to the “sanctuary” jurisdictions Democrats have established for them and will be counted in the federal censuses on which congressional and state legislative districting is based, thereby increasing the number of solidly Democratic districts at the expense of Republican and competitive districts. 

There is also cruelty here to legal Connecticut residents — great financial costs, especially in housing, already in short supply and high in price, and in the education of thousands of children who don’t speak English. The Democrats never frankly appropriated for these costs, for that would have required being honest about them.

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

State scorns addiction business while operating two of its own

By CHRIS POWELL

Every individual and business in the news and entertainment media tries to entice an audience to return — to addict it, more or less. Meta Platforms, operator of the Facebook and Instagram social media outlets, last week agreed to pay nearly $17 billion to settle multi-state federal lawsuits charging that the company has been too successful enticing young people, addicting them and causing a national epidemic of mental illness.

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Since they are by nature self-absorbed, insecure, and neurotic, young people surely would do better to be less involved with social media. But almost any product can be abused, and blaming social media companies for the abuse of their products is a stretch that disregards First Amendment rights even as the best solution is close to home.

After all, social media companies don’t give mobile telephones, computers, and internet connections to minors and then fail to monitor what they make of them. Their parents do. The settlement with Meta Platforms is essentially a substitute for parenting.

The likely disposition of the $265 million Connecticut is expected to receive from the settlement suggests as much. Governor Lamont says the money will be spent on “mental health and crisis intervention, after-school and summer school programming, and implementation of phone-free school zones.” 

There is much mental distress among young people in Connecticut, but with about a third of the state’s children living in single-parent households — in the cities the figure is 60% or more — little of that distress begins with social media. Rather, youthful obsession with social media may be more a consequence of that distress, a consequence of parental neglect.

In any case state government’s concern about social media addiction is laughably hypocritical.

Connecticut has legislated some restrictions on how social media companies engage with minors but they will have little effect if parents fail to monitor their children’s activity on social media and internet. The restrictions Connecticut has enacted are just substitutes for parenting.

Meanwhile state government itself has thrown itself into the addiction business — first with casino gambling and internet gambling, from which it collects tens of millions of dollars each year through tribute from Connecticut’s two Indian tribal casinos, and second through licensing retailers of marijuana products and taxing their sales.

Gambling addiction has devastated thousands of lives in the state and has caused much embezzlement and theft. 

Frequent use of marijuana is addictive and often leads to addiction to more dangerous drugs. 

But now that state government itself is in the gambling and drug business, the only addiction about which the governor, Attorney General William Tong, and state legislators get indignant is addiction to social media. With the settlement of the Meta lawsuit, state government soon will be making money off social media addiction as well.

The most timely and compelling question in American society may be: Where are all the disturbed kids coming from? Some of Connecticut’s windfall from the Meta lawsuit settlement could be used to investigate that issue — or maybe to hire some parents for the many kids who lack them.

ELICKER’S COWARDICE: Another New Haven police officer accused of misconduct and hastily fired for his role in the Randy Cox case four years ago, Luis Rivera, has been reinstated by the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration, which found that the officer was not to blame for Cox’s crippling injury. The board already had reinstated Officer Oscar Diaz for the same reason. The appeal of a third fired officer is pending while the firing of a fourth has been upheld.

The board found that Cox’s injury almost certainly had nothing to do with how he was handled by police after his arrest but was entirely a matter of the lack of seatbelts in the police van in which he was being transported when it stopped abruptly to avoid a crash.

Cox is Black and there were false shrieks of racism when he was injured, and Mayor Elicker lacked the courage to stand up to them and insist on due process.

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

Polite society mustn’t discuss transgender players in sports

By CHRIS POWELL

Polite society isn’t supposed to talk about whether the women’s national professional basketball league, the WNBA, should admit transgender players — that is, men who “identify” as women. 

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A few weeks ago a WNBA player, Sophie Cunningham, calmly expressed opposition to letting males participate in women’s sports. While there was nothing hateful about what she said, she was denounced around the country and within the league itself.   

Many people who seemed to know that transgenderism in sports is crazy, or who seemed to know at least that most people consider it crazy, argued that it isn’t worth discussing because the WNBA’s labor contract restricts participation to women. But the contract doesn’t define “woman.” Can biological men become women just through thoughts and feelings?

That’s the heart of the issue — an issue U.S. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson purported to be stumped by during her Senate confirmation hearing in 2022. Jackson testified that she couldn’t say what a woman is because she’s “not a biologist,” even as tens of millions of Americans who are neither biologists nor judicial nominees can give an adequate answer.

Prominent among those who want to avoid discussing the substance here is the University of Connecticut’s women’s basketball coach, Geno Auriemma. In a recent interview he lamented that the issue distracts from the achievements of WNBA players, and he dismissed it as a mere “hypothetical.”

But it is far more than hypothetical. 

For starters, two former players in the National Basketball Association — the men’s league — are pranking the WNBA by declaring themselves transgender and candidates for the women’s league’s draft. They may figure that with their stronger frames they could demolish female competitors. 

The prank may prompt the WNBA to take courses in biology and political correctness. Even if the league peremptorily dismisses the pranksters, it will be making a decision, if an incomplete one.

And surely Auriemma is aware of Connecticut’s own recent controversy over transgenderism in high school girls track — the victories in 2018 of two transgender runners. A federal lawsuit brought by the girls who otherwise might have won is challenging the policy of the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference to allow biological males to compete as girls.

Always politically correct, state Attorney General William Tong has put state government on the side of the transgender athletes. After all, it is said, there are only a few problems like this in Connecticut high schools, only a few girls were deprived of championships by biological males, and those girls are somebody else’s daughters whose rights to equal protection of the law may be sacrificed to the fashionable belief that biology and gender are mere fictions.

The audiences of high school track events may be too small to worry about politically. But the more that transgenderism in sports is indulged, the more there will be, and there are already many transgender issues in bathrooms and prisons around the country.

No one involved in this issue, especially not in Connecticut, a socially libertarian state, is attacking transgender people. They have the same rights as everyone else. But biological and gender differences are real, males have physical advantages over females, and girls and women will not have equal opportunity in sports if they don’t have their own leagues or divisions. That’s why federal law was enacted to require as much.

The transgender issue is narrow: gender separation in sports and gender privacy and safety in bathrooms and prisons. Transgender athletes can compete in sports with their biological gender.

Most people know as much even as they don’t want to risk being called names. But politically the issue may not be settled sensibly in Connecticut until a transgender player applies for the UConn women’s basketball team or joins one of UConn’s rivals. Then the issue will make national television and games will hinge on it. Women’s basketball is big in Connecticut and gaining adherents nationally, and transgender players will make it ridiculous.

If that is what is required to restore sense and fairness, may it happen soon.

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

Hartford mayor’s solution is to wait for more bailouts

By CHRIS POWELL

Despite the claim made by former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin’s congressional campaign that he had “straightened out” the city, his successor, Arunan Arulampalam, has found himself with a lot more straightening out to do. Hartford’s financial condition remains dire even after the $500 million state governor bailout enjoyed by Bronin’s administration.

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Arulampalam fears that the city’s property revaluation, due to take effect in October, will devastate what’s left of Hartford’s homeowners, whose numbers city government is striving to increase.

The problem isn’t Arulampalam’s fault. It’s mainly a matter of inflation, technology, and state government’s mistaken policies. 

Inflation has driven up residential property valuations, which homeowners like in theory until they realize that they can’t benefit from a higher valuation until they sell their homes, until which time they must pay more in property taxes.  

State government’s long failure to facilitate enough housing construction has also driven up residential property values. After all, everyone who owns residential property has a financial incentive to keep housing scarce.

Then there is the simultaneous collapse of commercial property values as white-collar workers increasingly work from home. Downtown Hartford’s office towers are now half empty and while demand for housing is high, converting office buildings to housing is difficult and expensive. 

The collapse of office building valuations might not be so bad in Hartford if the Lamont administration hadn’t just defaulted again to the state employee unions about “telework,” failing to achieve a new master union contract that would have authorized state agencies to require employees to come back to their offices. The Lamont administration’s nominal policy is that state government employees are so efficient that they don’t need in-person supervision. The administration’s real policy is that it must capitulate to the unions on anything important to keep them supporting the Democratic Party in an election year.

Then state policy — collective bargaining for state and government municipal employees and binding arbitration of their contracts — makes it almost impossible for Hartford city government and all municipal governments to economize with their biggest expense, employee compensation. In effect state government policy is that when times get tough economically, financial sacrifice must fall exclusively on taxpayers. 

When he was Hartford’s mayor Bronin tried to get financial concessions from city employee unions, and he was denounced for it by his rival in the recent primary campaign for Democratic nomination for Congress in the 1st District. Bronin was called an enemy of organized labor for seeking those concessions, as if the only labor that counts is members of government employee unions, not people who work in the private sector, unionized or not. Bronin easily survived the charge and won the primary.

Quite apart from the impediments in state labor law, Hartford city government doesn’t try too hard to reduce its own expenses, as shown by the recent scandal in City Hall, where the recently resigned treasurer spent tens of thousands of dollars on luxury junkets. 

But Mayor Arulampalam’s solution to the looming disaster of Hartford’s property revaluation is just to delay it by a year. State government has authorized the delay and now it’s up to the City Council. This would perpetuate the unfairness to owners of business property, risk more real estate bankruptcies, and discourage business relocations to city properties whose valuations remain artificially high. 

Since business owners are a minority, they are easily sacrificed to solve the political problem. But sacrificing them won’t solve the city’s financial problem. The city always operates at a loss, dependent on frequent bailouts from state government through increased financial grants, often euphemized as “aid to education.” 

Arulampalam seems to think that if the revaluation is postponed a year, safely past this November’s state election, the city will get more bailouts from state government without having stirred up controversy and taxpayer fears and resentment during the campaigns for governor and the General Assembly, thereby helping the Democrats to retain power. The mayor may be right, if not courageous or imaginative. But then no hardly anyone in authority in Connecticut is.

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

Behind chronic absenteeism; and two mistaken rebuttals

By CHRIS POWELL

Chronic absenteeism in Connecticut’s schools fell substantially in the school year just ended, state officials announced last week. But their data shows the problem remains at what should be appalling levels in many places, especially the state’s cities, and the official diagnosis of the problem is incomplete.

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Students are classified as chronically absent if they miss 10% of their school days, and the new state average for chronic absenteeism is down to 16.4%. Officials attribute the decline in part to the state’s Learner Engagement and Attendance Program, in which school employees visit the homes of chronically absent students, inquire about problems, and offer help. It’s basically social work. This is said to address the “root causes” of chronic absenteeism.

As might be expected, the new data shows that chronic absenteeism correlates heavily with a community’s poverty. Hartford’s rate is 33%, New Britain and Bridgeport are at 30%, New Haven 28%, Norwich and New London 25%, and Waterbury 22%. In turn poverty correlates with family dysfunction and demoralization.

But Connecticut and the country have always had poverty, and today’s high levels of chronic absenteeism are new. So what changed?

First, government stopped enforcing student truancy laws and policies. Today there are no penalties for parents who fail to see that their children get to school. 

And second, educational standards were eliminated and replaced with social promotion. Now there are no tests for advancement and graduation. Nearly all students are advanced from grade to grade and given high school diplomas irrespective of learning, and they and their parents know this. While schooling grows ever more expensive to taxpayers, there are no reprimands or penalties for treating it with contempt.

So why should the demoralized attend school consistently if advancement and graduation will follow anyway if they don’t? This policy may be the biggest “root cause,” but educators and elected officials don’t dare to address it.

* * *

Two recent columns of mine were criticized falsely last week in replies by elected officials.

The first column, questioning whether southeastern Connecticut is ready for the massive expansion of employment for submarine construction at Electric Boat, was criticized in an essay by U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney. Courtney’s essay stressed the region’s efforts with workforce training. But my column never cited workforce training. Its references to unpreparedness involved only housing and transportation.

The second column, criticizing Connecticut’s new law restricting police officers from getting near polling places, was denounced in an essay by Stamford state Rep. Matt Blumenthal.

Blumenthal wrote: “Powell writes that our new law ‘forbids police officers from getting within 250 feet of a polling place.’ Not so. State and local police can do their jobs just as they always have. The law’s catch-all exception says just that: All a department or officer needs is the permission of the moderator or the secretary of the state.”

But the column explicitly acknowledged the exception. It said: “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.” Blumenthal deceptively omitted the latter part of that sentence.

Continuing, Blumenthal claimed that the new law has no application to state and local police. He wrote: “What does the law actually do? It stops federal agents and troops — people with no lawful role in Connecticut elections — from being stationed at polling places to intimidate voters.”

But Blumenthal simultaneously noted that Connecticut Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas issued state and local police a partial exemption from the law. She wouldn’t have done that if the law didn’t apply to state and local police, an application Blumenthal now strangely denies.

In any case state law can’t restrict the disposition of federal agents and troops, since the Constitution establishes the supremacy of the federal government in such matters. Otherwise General Sherman never would have taken Atlanta and the South would have won the Civil War with a simple court injunction.

There was nothing inaccurate or misleading about either column.

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