Many are above the law, especially in Connecticut

By Chris Powell

Responses from leading Connecticut Democrats to Donald Trump’s conviction for falsifying business records were mostly along the lines of “nobody is above the law.” U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy and U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, both seeking re-election, Democratic State Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo, and others couldn’t be bothered to examine their tedious cliché, nor could journalists be bothered to challenge them about it.

Meanwhile President Biden, the Democrats’ presumptive candidate again, has been boasting of the college student loan forgiveness he has been bestowing on hundreds of thousands of people in defiance of a Supreme Court ruling that he has no such authority. 

Ever since he became president Biden also has been refusing to enforce federal immigration law, creating a class of millions who are above the law.

Biden also has been refusing to enforce federal law against marijuana. While the law is questionable, the failure to enforce it proclaims that everyone is potentially above the law.

As a “sanctuary state” that forbids its police from cooperating with federal immigration officers, Connecticut also has designated tens of thousands of its residents — illegal immigrants — as being above the law. This is nullification, the mechanism used to defend slavery and thwart enforcement of civil rights. Back then nullification was considered treason. Today it is politically correct.

Connecticut has undertaken similar nullification by licensing the sale of marijuana while the drug remains prohibited by federal law.

As a recent state legislative report found, most people who commit gun crimes in Connecticut are above the law, their charges reduced or dismissed in exchange for guilty pleas on other charges.

A few days ago the General Assembly suspended enforcement of the state law requiring racial balance in municipal public schools. West Hartford, Fairfield, Greenwich, and Hamden were in violation but now are above the law.

Reveling in the conviction of demon Trump, Connecticut’s Democrats have lost perspective about law and justice. As a practical matter law and justice are seldom absolutes but rather full of discretion and compromise. The Democratic administrations in Washington and Hartford are compromising the law and justice all over the place in favor of their friends and political causes, but Trump is to be taught a different lesson.

Despite all the logistical trouble his conviction will cause him, Trump may have the last laugh.

For starters, his conviction seems to have prompted a tidal wave of financial contributions to his campaign, and an early poll suggests that public opinion of him has actually improved slightly. Since the prosecutions of Trump are Democratic operations, they are starting to strike some people as persecutions.

In any case Trump’s longstanding bad character, going back to his grifting in the real estate business in New York, may have inoculated him politically against mere criminal convictions.

For could anyone really think worse of Trump as a person just because he falsified business records to conceal a dalliance with a pornography actress?

Few big businesses in the country couldn’t be convicted of falsifying records, and pornography has become a big and very public business, especially, it seems, in Connecticut. A few days ago a survey reported that, on a per-capita basis, the state has more producers of homemade pornography on the OnlyFans internet site than any other state.

Trump himself long has sensed that his disgraceful conduct helps build the support he gets for embodying public resentment and contempt of government and politics.

He marveled at this phenomenon as he campaigned in Iowa in January 2016, remarking famously: “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”

Today he might add: “Or I could get convicted of 34 contrived felonies.”      

Trump has been leading in recent polls not because of good character but because the Biden administration is so bad on the big issues — inflation, illegal immigration, declining living standards, social disintegration, and liberalism’s mental breakdown. If the issues have overwhelmed concerns about character, Trump’s conviction changes nothing.  

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

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