By CHRIS POWELL
Empty gestures and distractions abounded last week in government and news reporting in Washington and Connecticut.
In Washington the Biden administration and White House correspondents celebrated the appointment of the first Black presidential press secretary — and not just a Black one but a member of a sexual minority. The appointment distracted from 20% inflation. Even better, now any journalist who asks a critical question about the Bumbler in Chief can be called not only racist but homophobic too.
Meanwhile in Connecticut the General Assembly voted to make a state holiday of Juneteenth, falsely described as the day in 1865 when slavery ended in the United States. In fact slavery ended on Juneteenth only in part of Texas being occupied by Union troops during the Civil War. Slavery continued in some other areas of the country until ratification of the 13th Amendment six months later.
Enactment of the holiday prompted some emotional displays at the state Capitol. But it changed nothing about the state’s awful racial disparities — in education, poverty, employment, housing, and crime. A few Black legislators did note another disparity — the hugely disproportionate incidence of abortion among Black women.
Had the legislature been interested in more than empty gestures it might have asked a few questions or even tried legislating about these disparities.
Does public education’s foremost policy — social promotion — help close or just worsen Connecticut’s notorious racial gap in education?
Is state welfare policy making poor Black women more self-sufficient or just more fatherless and husbandless and demoralizing them into seeing abortion as contraception?
Do the state’s sharply restrictive zoning rules and high taxes make it easier or harder to acquire housing and build wealth and security?
While the legislature has just enacted some tax cuts that will benefit people with lower incomes, the cuts are mostly temporary and will be more than offset by inflation, and the legislature did not confront the bigger questions, for that would have been controversial.
Designating Juneteenth as a state holiday may benefit only government employees, giving them another paid day off while services to the public are diminished. The holiday legislation is the adult equivalent of the bill some schoolkids were advocating to declare the lollipop Connecticut’s official state candy. Both bills showed that it is easy to advance the mere form of legislation but making any difference in the world is something else.
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FIRST AMENDMENT VIOLATION: While there was much insistence in the legislature last week that abortion should be a constitutional right, the legislature trampled a constitutional right that has never been in dispute: freedom of expression. That is, the legislature approved a bill to forbid advertising marijuana in Connecticut by out-of-state entities that don’t have a Connecticut marijuana retailing license.
State government has the authority to control the sale of intoxicating drugs, even if Connecticut’s state-sanctioned marijuana business violates federal law, which still criminalizes the drug. But advertising is protected by both the First Amendment of the federal Constitution and the Declaration of Rights of Connecticut’s Constitution.
The legislation is against the public interest in another respect, insofar as it will impede marijuana users from learning about better prices, products, and lower taxes across the state line.
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NOT SAFE AFTER ALL: The federal government long assured the country that the COVID-19 vaccines were perfectly safe. But they weren’t. Tens of thousands of adverse reactions to the vaccines have been reported, including many deaths, though the government didn’t start to take the adverse reactions very seriously until last week.
That’s when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration restricted the authorized use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine because it causes blood clots, a risk that was identified with the J&J vaccine a year ago, when its authorization was briefly suspended.
The other vaccines also have caused blood clots and deaths but the FDA is leaving them alone for now.
The FDA says its restriction on the J&J vaccine shows how effective the agency’s safety controls are. To the contrary, the restriction shows how unreliable and misleading the agency has been all along.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
Chris Powell column 