By Chris Powell
As a practical matter President Trump’s pardon of Connecticut’s disgraced former governor, John G. Rowland, means little beyond restoring his right to possess firearms.
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Rowland already completed his two federal criminal sentences for various acts of political corruption and faced no additional punishment that could be rescinded. Having been released, he already had regained his right to vote in Connecticut, and since he is an elector again, the state Constitution would qualify him to hold any elective office in the state, though the state Supreme Court, contrary to the state Constitution, pretends that only lawyers who have practiced law for 10 years can serve as attorney general.
While Rowland remains popular in his hometown, Waterbury, and it’s not impossible to imagine the city electing him mayor, he has moved to Clinton and it is impossible to imagine Connecticut electing him to state office again.
Of course the pardon can’t restore to Rowland the more than three years he spent behind bars. It can’t make anyone forget his offenses, or remove from the historical record the disgrace he inflicted on Connecticut as the state’s first governor to be convicted for offenses in office.
The pardon is just a proclamation of forgiveness by the federal government under the administration of a president who may be even more challenged ethically than Rowland was. Presumably Rowland’s pardon, like the many other questionable pardons Trump has issued in the first few months of his second term, makes the president feel powerful and magnanimous and will make Rowland feel better about himself, though there was nothing unfair about his convictions and he didn’t deserve the formal forgiveness of a pardon more than any other former offender.
That is, Trump pardons people not so much because they deserve it but because he can.
Trump isn’t the first president to use his pardon power for political patronage rather than for redressing injustice. In recent decades presidents of both parties increasingly have turned pardons into patronage. After repeatedly promising he wouldn’t do it, Trump’s immediate predecessor, Joe Biden, notoriously pardoned his dissolute son, Hunter, the central figure in the Biden family’s corrupt influence-peddling business.
This bipartisanship in pardons doesn’t make them right; it just further disgraces the people for electing such grifters to the country’s highest office.
Nor will the pardon relieve Rowland of having to live with himself. But he is a healthy 68 and still has time to earn more forgiveness than Trump’s pardon can convey, even if few Democrats in Connecticut will forgive anyone these days simply for being a Republican.
More charitable people will not hector Rowland but instead will wish him luck in avoiding a third conviction and prison term.
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Shepherding another big and expensive social-services bill to passage in the state Senate last week, Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven, made an acknowledgment that was stunning coming from a Democrat: that neglect of children at home is the primary cause of educational failure.
“Five-year-olds who come to school without adequate preparation,” Looney said, “are in effect isolated and doomed to failure except in a few rare cases where there may be an intervention in their behalf that might help them catch up. It’s a terrible thing to see.”
He added: “My daughter-in-law and my niece both teach in inner-city schools and they have seen heartbreaking cases of young children whose preparation is so deficient, coming from homes where there is inadequate parenting.”
This was Looney’s argument for big new state appropriations for pre-school and “special education.”
Of course Democrats see every social problem as a reason for enlarging government rather than correcting mistaken policies. But the legislation Looney was advocating is at best remedial. It doesn’t get to the cause of the problem, the cause the senator acknowledged: inadequate parenting.
So what is the cause of inadequate parenting? And since, as Looney says, “it’s a terrible thing,” why doesn’t government treat it as child neglect or abuse?
It wouldn’t have cost anything to ask — and maybe that’s why it wasn’t asked.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 