By Chris Powell
When are Democratic elected officials in Connecticut going to be stricken by the cognitive dissonance they long have deserved? That is, when will they recognize their policy contradictions?
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The question is prompted by last week’s news reports about police officers in New Haven and Manchester whose dismissals for lying were reversed by the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration. In both cases the board agreed with police department management that the officers had lied but concluded that dismissal was too severe as punishments and ordered that suspensions be substituted instead and the officers be reinstated.
Manchester’s police department is appealing its reinstatement order to Superior Court, but New Haven is accepting its reinstatement order and will give its reinstated officer tens of thousands of dollars in retroactive pay.
The reinstatement orders are likely to be permanently damaging to both departments. First, because now any arrests the reinstated officers make may be challenged in court on grounds that the officers have no credibility, having been found by their own departments and the arbitration board to have lied. Second, because other officers in the New Haven and Manchester departments and throughout the state will see that Connecticut thinks lying by police is no big deal.
Cognitive dissonance should arise here because in recent years Democratic state legislators and other Democratic elected officials in the state, purporting to recognize that members of racial minorities have been disproportionately the victims of police misconduct, have enacted tougher police accountability laws and policies. But as the New Haven and Manchester arbitration cases suggest, police accountability is easily undone by the state arbitration board when another Democratic policy kicks in: subservience to government employee labor unions, whose members constitute the Democratic Party’s army.
The Democrats are sure that the racial minorities will never notice how police accountability is being undone, just as they are sure that the government employee unions do pay close attention and will withdraw their support if accountability in government employment is ever really enforced.
It might help if, amid the New Haven and Manchester case, members of the Republican minority in the General Assembly reduced a little their reflexive support of police. It also might help if news organizations aggressively challenged the arbitration board’s frequent destruction of accountability. Like the Democrats, most news organizations like to pose as the friends of racial minorities — as long as this posing as friends doesn’t risk making enemies elsewhere.
Cognitive dissonance also should afflict the three members of Connecticut’s congressional delegation who last week joined the picket lines of the International Association of Machinists outside the Pratt & Whitney factories in East Hartford and Middletown.
Pratt & Whitney, the jet-engine division of RTX Corp., offered the union a new contract with substantial improvements — a first-year pay increase of 4%, increases in subsequent years, a $5,000 bonus for ratifying the contract, and better pensions. The union rejected the company offer as inadequate, and maybe it is. That’s for union members to decide.
But U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal and U.S. Reps. John B. Larson and Rosa DeLauro, all Democrats, did not join the picket lines because they had made a detailed study of the contract offer and the productivity of Pratt & Whitney workers and had determined which side was right. No, the members of Congress joined the picket lines reflexively, simply obeying the Democratic Party principle that organized labor is always right, though these days most of organized labor consists of government employees rather than people who work in the private sector.
Indeed, since Pratt & Whitney and RTX are major military contractors, the machinists at Pratt & Whitney are indirectly government employees as well. There’s not much left of organized labor in Connecticut’s private sector.
Of course when Blumenthal, Larson, and DeLauro aren’t joining the machinists’ picket lines, they are doing their best in Washington to arrange more military contracts for the big, bad company their friends the machinists say is cheating them.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 