By Chris Powell
The more fulminating they do, the more elected officials should be challenged and questioned by journalism. These days Connecticut’s fulminator-in-chief is Attorney General William Tong, a Democrat, yet he gets a free ride from the state’s news organizations and even from the General Assembly’s Republican minority.
Two weeks ago Tong was joined at the state Capitol by the mayors of four Connecticut cities and other political leaders as he pledged to defend all illegal immigrants in the state against deportation by the incoming Republican administration of Donald Trump, though the federal government has exclusive authority over immigration law.
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“Connecticut gets to decide how Connecticut wants to live,” Tong declared, directly contradicting the law. But no journalists asked the attorney general to explain his absurdity, even though some news organizations in the state often had denounced Trump as an “insurrectionist” for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal” rally that became a riot and briefly impeded congressional certification of the results of the 2020 presidential election, which Trump had lost.
What could be more insurrectionary than to claim that Connecticut is exempt from federal law — to claim that anyone who breaks into the country illegally and makes his way to Connecticut is above immigration law? Yet Connecticut has been obstructing federal immigration law enforcement since 2019, when it forbade its police officers from assisting federal immigration agents in most circumstances. Even before that New Haven had declared itself a “sanctuary city” and was issuing identification cards to illegal immigrants to facilitate their lawbreaking.
Connecticut also has violated federal law by purporting to legalize marijuana and managing and taxing its distribution.
While Trump’s attempt to obstruct certification of the 2020 election was disgraceful, the country seems to have returned him to the presidency because the administration that succeeded him has been so bad, in large part because of the illegal immigration it permitted.
But that doesn’t make insurrection right, and now the biggest insurrectionist in the country is Connecticut’s own attorney general. Fortunately for him, no news organizations will ask him to explain why he isn’t one.
If journalism in Connecticut ever resumed asking critical questions, it could put another one to the attorney general in response to another of his fulminations.
On the same day as he pledged to defend illegal immigrants, Tong issued a statement lamenting more rate increases by Connecticut’s two major electric utilities.
He acknowledged that the utilities were not to blame. The new rates, Tong said, “are the result of a competitive bidding process,” whereby the utilities purchase electricity from independent generators and make no profit from the transactions.
But the attorney general added: “Connecticut families need real relief from these unsustainable costs. Everything has to be on the table. I’m going to keep fighting every single day in every single proceeding before the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority.”
This was just vain chest thumping. For as was implicit in the attorney general’s statement, the rate increases were not caused by the utility company greed or mismanagement that he often rails against but by the general inflation that has been ravaging the country during his party’s administration of the federal government.
So if “everything has to be on the table,” instead of pledging to keep hectoring the utility regulators, the attorney general should examine where all this inflation has come from, especially since no one in authority in either major political party seems to be asking.
That’s because the answer would incriminate both sides. For inflation results largely from the government’s creating and distributing so much more money than the economy matches in production of goods and services. Today most new goodies from government are financed without imposing regular taxes to pay for them. So the goodies are financed by inflation, a sort of tax but one that most people don’t understand.
The attorney general could explain it to them if he wasn’t afraid that it would cost him his usual scapegoats.
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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 