Democrats think Trump is a worse enemy than Iran

By Chris Powell

Members of Connecticut’s congressional delegation are probably right that President Trump should have sought the approval of Congress before launching last weekend’s attacks on Iran’s nuclear bomb-making infrastructure. That is the clear implication of the Constitution’s placing with Congress the power to declare war, and it is the command of the federal War Powers Act. 

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But then most of Connecticut’s members of Congress, all Democrats, were in office and offered little objection when Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, both Democrats, went around the world bombing stuff. Without formal congressional approval, Clinton ordered attacks on Kosovo, Sudan, and Afghanistan, and Obama ordered attacks on Libya and Syria.

But Trump is a Republican.

Of course in principle democracy requires the public’s ratification of decisions to go to war, and the United States now is openly at war with Iran. Vice President J.D. Vance’s contention that the United States is not at war with Iran but with its nuclear bomb-making program is a distinction without a difference, just an articulation of war aims. More to the point, as a practical matter Iran has been at war with the United States for many years, insofar as Iran, as Trump noted last weekend, is the world’s main sponsor of terrorism and this terrorism has killed many U.S. citizens.

Also as a practical matter, Congress retains control over the war with its power of the purse. It can pass legislation forbidding spending for war against Iran. 

But the legal questions are separate from the question of what the U.S. position toward Iran should be. So far the Connecticut delegation has failed on that question.

U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy says Iran poses no immediate threat to the United States. That is contradicted by the many years of Iran’s sponsoring terrorism against Americans and others. Additionally, if the United States has an interest in a stable and peaceful Middle East, where so much of the world’s oil is produced and where the United States has formal or informal allies, Iran’s long campaign of subversion there is very much a threat to this country.

Criticizing Trump’s attack on Iran, U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney quotes Gen. David Petraeus’ query about the second war with Iran’s neighbor, Iraq: “Tell me how this ends.”

This is not really profound. For the second war with Iraq was an invasion, a land war of conquest with thousands of soldiers pursuing imagined “weapons of mass destruction” as well as “regime change.” No one, at least not yet, is advocating the conquest of Iran, whose regime is built on oil installations that can be easily destroyed from a distance with bombs and missiles without conquest.

Yes, there’s no telling how far Iran will go with retaliation. But there long has been good reason to fear that the end sought by an unmolested Iran would be mass murder, especially in Israel, whose destruction the ayatollahs long have pledged and have been very tempted by, Israel being so small geographically, a “one-bomb country.”

Trump says the war with Iran ends with Iran’s capacity to make nuclear weapons, but that is wishful thinking. Even without nuclear weapons Iran’s theocratic fascist regime may remain in power, continuing its terrorism and subversion, chanting “Death to America” along with “Death to Israel,” and pursuing an objective that is broader still — the forced religious conversion of the entire world. If the ayatollahs stay in power, they are sure to continue their war even without nuclear weapons.

The United States is a continental country, not a one-bomb country. But even one nuclear bomb — detonated in Washington or New York or another city — could inflict catastrophic damage that might last a century. Democratic leaders, most still supporting open borders, through which such a bomb might pass, should reflect on this danger, as the Israelis long have been reflecting on it while being attacked by Iran’s proxies. 

At last the Israelis have drawn the proper conclusion. But the only conclusion Connecticut’s Democrats seem able to draw is that if Trump did it, it must be wrong.   

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

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If only Connecticut Democrats hated crime as much as gun rights

By Chris Powell

Most prominent Democrats in Connecticut hate the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment and its right to bear arms. They blame the Second Amendment for gun crime and strive to impair gun rights in any way they can. They have yet to notice that Section 15 of the Declaration of Rights in Connecticut’s Constitution is even more emphatic about gun rights: “Every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state.”  

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The Democrats characterize the most commonly owned semi-automatic rifles as “military-style assault weapons,” and, with their longstanding control of the General Assembly and the governor’s office, have outlawed them, though these guns are seldom used in crime. Nearly all guns used in crime are handguns, and nearly all handguns are just as semi-automatic as “military-style assault weapons,” if not as scary-looking. 

Nor have the Democrats paid much attention to the survey done two years ago by the state Office of Legislative Research. It found that two-thirds of the gun crime prosecutions brought in Connecticut from 2013 to 2022 had been dropped, most in plea bargains for convictions on other charges deemed more serious. Any elected official who really believed his rhetoric about the awfulness of guns would be working to change the law so that use of a gun in commission of a crime would be the most serious charge short of murder. But it hasn’t happened.  

Meanwhile 40% of offenders released from prisons in Connecticut are convicted and imprisoned again within three years, and many serious crimes are committed by repeat offenders, many of whom are not caught. But Governor Lamont and Democratic legislators often boast about the decline in the state’s prison population. 

Rather than get tough on gun crime, the Democratic majority in the General Assembly has just passed legislation that the governor expects to sign to try to put gun manufacturers, distributors, and retailers out of business by letting them be sued for failing to take “reasonable” precautions against selling guns to people who use the guns in crime or give them to others for use in crime.

Gun manufacturers and licensed retailers are highly regulated and are not the cause of wrongful gun possession. The problem is the country’s huge informal market in guns and the huge number of guns in private hands. This market is impossible to control short of aggressive prosecution and severe sentences for gun crime — exactly what Connecticut has refused to undertake lest the prison population be increased with a sharply disproportionate number of offenders from impoverished minority groups.

Instead of increasing prosecutions, convictions, and imprisonments, Connecticut’s new law will incentivize gun haters and opportunistic lawyers to contrive lawsuits against gun makers and retailers and win enough financial damages or settlements to bankrupt them or drive them out of state. This won’t reduce gun crime but it may make the gun haters feel better about themselves and their failure to reduce gun crime and the generational poverty that leads to it.

Connecticut’s U.S. senators, Democrats Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, are pursuing a similar agenda in Congress. They want to repeal the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, enacted in 2005, which exempts gun manufacturers from lawsuits brought by victims of gun violence. Repealing the law and unleashing more damage lawsuits is another way of putting gun makers out of business and impairing the right to bear arms.

An argument can be made for repealing the Second Amendment and Section 15 of the Connecticut Constitution’s Declaration of Rights. But Democrats are too dishonest to make it. The Democrats want to nullify the Second Amendment and the gun rights provision of Connecticut’s Constitution but they don’t dare pursue their objective plainly, since honesty would arouse much more opposition than their indirection and would call attention to state government’s refusal to prosecute most gun crimes.

Amid their dishonesty, the Democrats should remember that, at least for the next few years, when guns are outlawed, only outlaws — and Donald Trump — will have guns.

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

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Housing bill will do little when state could do so much more

By Chris Powell

Opponents of the wide-ranging housing legislation recently passed by the Democratic majorities in the General Assembly have been loud enough to induce Governor Lamont to equivocate on the bill. Will he sign it, veto it, or try to negotiate its revision?

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Many of the bill’s opponents, including municipal officials, contend that its enactment would be the end of local control over development.

Arguing to the contrary, the bill’s leading advocate, House Majority Leader Jason Rojas, D-East Hartford, insists that the bill wouldn’t require any municipality to build any housing at all.

There’s much wrong with both sides of the argument and with the bill itself.

Rojas makes the bill seem like another of the meaningless poses struck by the legislature — big talk implying bold action that never comes. The bill will produce little housing and, by extending rent control to every municipality, may prevent more housing construction than it achieves.

Connecticut’s housing costs are so extreme, grinding the poor and middle class down, that action is needed urgently to build at least 100,000 multi-family units — apartments and moderately priced condominiums. 

But opponents of the housing bill want to continue worshipping local control and exclusive zoning, a big cause of the shortage.

Fears of more “affordable” housing in the suburbs long have been justified. The suburbs are full of people or the children of people who fled the cities as pernicious federal and state welfare policies turned them into poverty factories. People don’t want city pathologies following them. 

But even many of the gainfully employed young-adult children of suburbanites can’t find suitable housing in their hometowns or nearby. Connecticut seems to believe they should live in their parents’ basements or leave the state.

As long as building housing in Connecticut remains a matter of asking the permission of 169 municipal governments, little housing will be built. That’s the state’s recent history. While the country’s housing supply has increased 9.4% in the last decade, Connecticut’s has increased by only 3.9%. Not so coincidentally, the state’s economic growth has badly lagged the nation’s as well. 

The only way to get housing built is to push the obstacles aside and build it.

Fortunately Connecticut has many opportunities to build housing without tearing up the countryside with more suburban sprawl. The state abounds with vacant industrial, office, and commercial properties in the cities and inner suburbs, properties already served by the necessary infrastructure — roads, sewers, utility lines, and schools. Recent news reports have highlighted the scores of vacant lots in Bridgeport and Hartford.

But can inexpensive housing for people of modest incomes be built without creating instant slums, as housing opponents long have feared?

Yes, but it requires a central authority to take the whole situation in hand and put the interest of the entire state first, not the interest of the people who have their housing and don’t care if others go without. It also requires giving the poor and struggling a chance for property ownership. 

That is, the situation requires a state government housing construction authority to purchase unused properties and auction them to developers to pursue housing plans approved by the authority. The authority could be run by a board drawn from all parts of the state.

Of course state government often fails to demonstrate the competence and integrity to do much of anything right. Yet the city-state of Singapore somehow has found the necessary competence and integrity with housing.

In Singapore the government arranges housing construction and then finances people who want to buy their units. As a result 80% of the population lives in housing built by the government and 90% of its residents own their units. In such a scheme people gain and respect property and become middle-class. With adequate housing for all, the cost of living is reduced and prosperity grows. While multi-ethnic and multi-lingual, Singapore has social stability, little poverty and crime, great prosperity, and high educational attainment.

Couldn’t Connecticut at least experiment with this model, starting with its many decrepit factories, vacant shopping centers, and half-empty office buildings?

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

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Democrats aren’t against kings, they just want a new one

By Chris Powell

Last weekend’s “No Kings” rallies in Connecticut and around the country, protesting what were said to be President Trump’s excesses, were as hyperbolic as the president himself, and, insofar as most of the protesters were Democrats and liberals, largely hypocritical.

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Yes, the president is laughably vain and has ridiculous megalomaniacal tendencies, exemplified by the military parade he ordered in Washington, purportedly to salute the Army on its 250th birthday, coincidentally also the president’s 79th birthday. Associating with the military is much more fun for Trump now than it was years ago, when he escaped military service with a claim of bone spurs.

But Trump, a Republican, isn’t the first president to enjoy ruling by executive order. His two immediate predecessors, both Democrats, issued many such orders — indeed, some of Trump’s just undo them — and many of his orders have been stalled by court injunctions that themselves exceed law or precedent.

It would be great if Democrats and liberals are starting to see some virtue in limited government. But if presidential powers have become too large and tempting, the Democrats themselves legislated or consented to them when they were available to Democratic presidents.

It would have been nice if the people protesting Trump’s supposed lawlessness last weekend had also protested when President Joe Biden refused to enforce immigration law, followed his predecessor Barack Obama in refusing to enforce federal marijuana law in states that don’t want it enforced, and forgave student loans without legal authority. But Democrats liked that lawlessness. Similarly, most people at the “No Kings” rallies refused to acknowledge any difference between legal and illegal immigration, since breaking immigration law is fine with them and enforcing it an outrage.

The Democrats’ hypocrisy hints that their hysteria about Trump arises less from his recklessness and overreach than from his attempt to take away the government patronage, employment, subsidies, and grants the Democrats and the political left have come to consider their birthright. Government in the United States has grown vastly in recent decades, financed by a spectacular increase in the national debt, an increase that has rocketed inflation and is prompting the world to withdraw from financing American overconsumption.

Americans are living far beyond their means, and Trump and the Republican majority in Congress have just produced a federal budget that will keep increasing debt and devalue the dollar. But the policy objective originally articulated by Trump’s treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, was sound: to shrink the government sector, much of which is mere overhead, and grow the private sector, which produces wealth. 

No one seriously aspiring to be a king would aim to shrink the government he controlled, and the people protesting last weekend don’t want to shrink the government either. They like it big. They’re not against kings as much as they just want a different one.

JOURNALISM QUICKLY FORGETS: Last year’s most important investigative journalism in Connecticut was done by the Connecticut Mirror’s Jessika Harkay, who wrote about a recent graduate of Hartford Public High School who was illiterate, an example of the social promotion that is destroying public education.

Last week the Mirror happily noted that Harkay had won a national journalism award for her report and was leaving for a job with an internet site covering education nationally.

But the Mirror and all other news organizations in Connecticut had forgotten Harkay’s prize-winning story. For while the illiterate graduate is suing Hartford’s school system, no one in journalism has followed up. 

When the scandal broke, Hartford’s school superintendent and the state education commissioner promised investigations to fix responsibility and address the problem, but they have produced nothing. Rather than fix responsibility, Hartford’s superintendent will retire in a few weeks. Months ago the education commissioner told Republican state senators that she might have something to report about the case … next year.

Governor Lamont seems to have said nothing about the case, nor to have been asked.

Questions abound here. Harkay’s award is a reminder that no one in journalism is asking them.

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

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Illegal immigration’s backers in Connecticut never get critical questions

By Chris Powell

Immigration law enforcement agents must be compelled, by congressional action or court order, to identify themselves conspicuously during arrests, to display their badges, and to make prompt public reports identifying the people they have detained, why they have been detained, and where they are being held. A free country cannot allow secret arrests. The necessity of such accountability in government goes back centuries to the Magna Carta.

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Democrats in Congress should press this issue instead of simply decrying all immigration law enforcement. Most of the country will agree, and Republicans in Congress who disagree will risk being exposed as totalitarians.

Police in Connecticut already are obliged by law to follow similar procedure, though they sometimes neglect to report arrests promptly and news organizations fail to notice.

But the greater failure of Connecticut journalism lately involves its reporting of complaints against immigration law enforcement. Reporters can’t be blamed when they can’t reach or get responses from immigration law enforcers, but they can be blamed when they quote officials, activists, and others in the immigration controversy without posing critical questions.

Last week’s arrest by immigration agents of a woman as she was driving her children to school in New Haven provoked outrage. Some of it verged on hysteria, like the statement issued by Mayor Justin Elicker.

“To arrest a mother in front of her two young children while taking them to school is simply unconscionable,” the mayor said.

So what is the appropriate time to arrest and detain someone with children who is suspected of being in the country illegally? Will such a suspect necessarily cooperate in scheduling her arrest and detention, or might she flee instead? Do New Haven’s own police always give notice to the targets of their arrest warrants?

Mayor Elicker wasn’t asked.

He continued: “We condemn this deplorable act of family separation and call upon the Trump administration to stop its inhumane approach and cruel tactics.”

But don’t arrests in New Haven and elsewhere routinely separate people from their children, or are children brought to jail with their parents? 

The mayor wasn’t asked.

“New Haven,” the mayor said, “is a welcoming city for all, and our immigrant neighbors are a part of our New Haven family.”

Does New Haven really welcome legal and illegal immigrants, the well-intentioned and the ill-intentioned, and the self-supporting and the dependent alike? Does New Haven distinguish among them, or is that properly the work of immigration authorities? Or should no one do that work and should the nation’s borders be opened again?   

Mayor Elicker concluded: “New Haven will continue to stand up for our residents and our values, and we will continue to fight back with every resource available to us against the Trump administration’s reckless immigration policies.”

What exactly does “every resource available” mean? Even as the mayor was so upset about that immigration arrest, New Haven’s school system was facing a deficit of $16.5 million and was preparing to lay off scores of employees, and the chronic absenteeism rate of its high school students stood at 50%. Since New Haven can hardly take care of itself, how can it afford to be a “sanctuary city,” accepting, housing, concealing, and trying to educate unlimited numbers of illegal immigrants? And since state government covers so much of New Haven’s expenses, how can Connecticut afford to let the city assume unlimited liabilities like these?

Nor were compelling questions posed last week amid outrage in Meriden about the immigration arrest and detention of a city high school student and his father a few days before the boy’s graduation. 

The two were reported to have been arrested at a scheduled meeting with immigration authorities, so presumably they knew there was something wrong about their presence in the country.

Protesters in Meriden chanted that they want immigration authorities to get out of Connecticut. But wouldn’t that leave the borders open again? Is that what the protesters want?

Though they were surrounded by journalists, the protesters were never asked.

——

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

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Murphy sees Democrats’ problem but not that he’s part of it

By Chris Powell

Speaking the other day to a friendly liberal audience in Washington at the Center for American Progress, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy put aside his usual bombast about President Trump and offered some candor.

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“When we talk about Trump’s corruption,” Murphy said of fellow Democrats, “we’re not terribly credible, because the public looks at Democrats and assumes that we’re just as corrupt. And we obviously have had some pretty high-profile problems in our party in the last decade. …

“I think young people believe that the Democratic Party is just as corrupt as the Republican Party is, and so while they’re noticing Trump’s corruption, they don’t see it as a reason to come out on the streets, because the alternative doesn’t look much better.”

Indeed. But Murphy himself is a reason Democrats don’t look much better. 

Last month the senator admitted to Politico that there is “no doubt” that President Biden’s mental faculties declined in office. Unfortunately Murphy, like most Democratic leaders, could not bring himself to acknowledge Biden’s mental decline before last November’s election or the Democratic National Convention last August. Nor could the senator and most other Democratic leaders acknowledge back then the corruption of the Biden family’s influence-peddling business.

Of course it would have been plausible to argue that Biden’s senility and his family’s influence peddling were preferable to Trump’s intemperance, character, and business practices. Elections for major offices usually require ascertaining the lesser of two evils. 

But Murphy did not acknowledge this when it counted. He could acknowledge his president’s flaws only once the public took them for granted. He didn’t dare to level with the public when it might have made a difference. 

Now, in the hope of becoming the leader of the party’s far left, the senator is touring the country trying to rile up Democrats who are already foaming at the mouth, precisely when, to increase its appeal, the party needs reflection, rationality, moderation, and civility, not leftist Trumpism.

From a Connecticut perspective, it’s hard to imagine moderation returning to the Democratic Party. Its majority in the General Assembly has just approved unemployment compensation for strikers. While he is a Democrat, Governor Lamont says he will veto the bill as he did once before. 

Connecticut’s other U.S. senator, Democrat Richard Blumenthal, is riding the same bandwagon to the far left. He has just proposed legislation to prohibit employers from suspending medical insurance for striking employees, as Pratt & Whitney did during the recent strike there by the machinists’ union. 

Blumenthal says it was “cruel and callous” for the company to stop compensating employees who had stopped working. If so, then the world is cruel and callous for not owing people a living. 

Among the state’s Democrats only the governor seems to have noticed that Pratt & Whitney, which was founded in Connecticut a century ago this July, has only half as many employees in the state as it once had, because the company long has been expanding elsewhere — in places where taxes and living costs are lower, government is smaller and less intrusive, and striking is not an entitlement to unemployment compensation and medical insurance financed by the employer being struck.  

But opposition to unemployment compensation for strikers is about the extent of Lamont’s moderation. 

While the illegal immigration controversy is raging in the state and around the country and the people rioting in California to obstruct immigration law enforcement are waving the flags of Mexico, other Latin American countries, and Palestine, not the flag of the country they are rioting in, Lamont still maintains that legal and illegal immigration are the same. 

The governor says he wants all immigrants, legal and illegal, well-intentioned and ill-intentioned, to be welcome in Connecticut — which is to say that the borders should be open again as they were under the Biden administration and that people living here don’t need any loyalty to the country.

Even coming from calm and cordial Ned Lamont, that is national suicide.

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

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Connecticut’s best schools aren’t those getting credit

By Chris Powell

Anyone asked to guess the 10 best public high schools in Connecticut would probably select some of those chosen by the internet site Niche, which connects high school graduates with colleges.

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Nine of the 10 high schools chosen by Niche are in Westport, New Canaan, Darien, Greenwich, Wilton, Ridgefield, Avon, Farmington, Glastonbury, and Norwalk. All but Norwalk are prosperous communities that spend a lot of money on their schools and get good results. The high school in Norwalk cited by Niche is a regional school drawing especially motivated students, many from outside the city.

According to Niche, all 10 of the best public elementary schools in the state are in three of the towns with the best high schools — Greenwich, New Canaan, and Westport — and nine of the 10 best middle schools are in the towns with the best high schools.

Of course educators will conclude from these rankings that per-pupil spending correlates with student performance — spending up, education up. This is self-serving and completely wrong.

For while not everyone in the towns with the supposedly best schools is rich, most people there are at least middle class and most children there have two parents, either living with them or involved in their lives. Their parents spend time with them. Most know their letters, numbers, and colors when they first arrive in school. They know how to behave. They have some interest in learning. Their attendance is good because their parents see to it.

Most such children are easy to teach — not because per-pupil spending is high but because per-pupil parenting is.

Of course circumstances are much different in high schools in municipalities with terrible demographics, municipalities with high poverty and low parenting. Here many children live in fatherless homes, homes with only one wage earner and a smattering of welfare benefits, homes over which a stressed, exasperated, and sometimes addicted mother presides. These children get much less attention and many are frequently absent from school. 

In New Haven, the city that is always lecturing Connecticut about how to live, high schools have a chronic absenteeism rate of 50%, highest in the state. Good luck to teachers and administrators trying to educate children who frequently don’t show up and, when they do, often disrupt classes, get into fights, or suffer mental breakdowns, but whose general discipline or expulsion is forbidden.

That’s why the Niche school rankings are so misleading. 

For schools and teachers play the hands they are dealt by community demographics. 

Any school dealt four aces is almost certain to win regardless of its resources and the competence of its staff. Any school dealt mostly jokers will resort to clamoring at the state Capitol for more money, as if the great increase in state financial aid to schools since the Education Enhancement Act was passed in 1986 has made any difference in educational results, and as if the clamor for more money isn’t just an excuse for ignoring the parenting problem, which seldom can be discussed in polite political company.

Connecticut’s best schools are actually the ones that get the best results from the students who are hard to teach — the students neglected at home — not those who are easy to teach. Nobody seems to compile such data, perhaps because it would impugn the premise of education in Connecticut — that only spending and teacher salaries count and educational results are irrelevant.

For many years in Connecticut the only honest justification for raising teacher salaries has been to induce teachers to stick around with the demoralized, indifferent, and misbehaving kids about whom nothing can be done until government finds the courage to restore academic and behavioral standards. These days teachers are given raises mainly to secure labor peace and union support for the Democratic Party.

It’s the same with police departments. Cities, where poverty is worst, struggle to keep officers not so much because suburbs often pay better but because, like city teachers, city cops increasingly want to escape the worsening social disintegration and depravity around them.

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

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Much poverty in Connecticut arises from bad state policy

By Chris Powell

Poverty has three causes. First is bad luck, like diseases and accidents that are not the fault of the sufferer. Second is bad personal conduct. Third is public policy that incentivizes bad conduct.

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But nothing about poverty will be examined by the study state legislators want to commission on whether Connecticut should enact a program of universal basic income.

The idea is nutty, doubly so on the state level. For any state with such a program would risk drawing thousands of shiftless people from states without universal basic income.

The idea is also nutty insofar as Connecticut and most states have many social-welfare programs that, together with federal programs, already constitute universal basic income — welfare stipends for the indigent, Medicaid medical insurance, food and housing subsidies, and unemployment compensation

These programs aren’t perfect or comprehensive. But Connecticut could do much more for its poor people simply by increasing rates paid to providers of medical care under Medicaid, rates so eroded by inflation that many people on Medicaid have trouble finding doctors. Improving Medicaid to improve life for the poor would require legislators to find a lot of money, while authorizing a study on a grand concept like universal basic income lets legislators strike a lovely pose while expending and accomplishing little. 

Some state legislators and members of Congress are open to the idea of consolidating welfare programs into a universal basic income stipend. But that would be troublesome, since many poor people can’t manage their own affairs. If government didn’t send their welfare money directly into medical care, housing, and food, many people would waste it and become poorer.

But many poor people are competent to manage their own affairs, or would be if government insisted. That’s why the slim Republican majority in Congress wants to impose modest work requirements on able-bodied, childless Medicaid recipients between 18 and 64 years old. 

Everyone receiving financial benefits from the government owes something in return. For as a great liberal, Theodore Roosevelt, said a century ago, the first duty of the citizen is to pull his own weight.

Congressional Republicans also think work requirements for able-bodied Medicaid recipients would reduce fraud in the program, of which there is a lot, as Connecticut should acknowledge. 

In February an eye doctor in Bristol, Helen Zervas, pleaded guilty to federal charges of defrauding Medicaid and Medicare. Governor Lamont’s former deputy budget director, Konstantinos Diamantis, and former Bristol state Rep. Christopher Ziogas have been indicted in connection with a $100,000 bribe allegedly paid to Diamantis to persuade the state Department of Social Services to cancel an audit of the eye doctor upon her repayment of $600,000 she had overcharged the state. The department’s commissioner, Deidre Gifford, recently retired when it became known that she had presided over the audit’s cancellation.

Of course the Republican administration in Washington may not be any more competent to root out Medicaid fraud than Connecticut’s Democratic administration is. But until there is much more pressure on Medicaid spending, few people will bother looking.

Connecticut has plenty of self-inflicted poverty facilitated by bad state policy.

About 40% of births in the state are to women on Medicaid — that is, women who cannot support themselves but choose to have children anyway. In the era of government-funded contraception and abortion, these pregnancies are not accidents. Most would not happen without the promise of government medical insurance and welfare stipends.

Indeed, nearly every news report on the shortage and expense of housing in Connecticut ridiculously takes as an example of the problem an unmarried, low-skilled woman with three or more children by different men complaining that her life is too hard and her landlord is to blame.

Life in Connecticut is too hard, insofar as government has fueled high inflation, obstructed housing construction, and demolished public education and personal responsibility with social promotion and welfare for childbearing outside marriage, and then taxes electricity, a necessity of life. And still government proceeds on the premise that the solution to poverty is more of the same. 

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

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Clash on school library books shows Connecticut Democrats hate democracy

By Chris Powell

What is both most laughable and scariest about the Democratic Party in Connecticut is its hatred for democracy, which came up this week as the state House of Representatives debated the state budget written by the Democratic majority’s caucus.

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To avoid debate on their bill to obstruct challenges to sexually themed, vulgar, and graphic books in public school libraries, the Democrats had tried to hide it in their budget bill. Rep. Anne Dauphinais, a conservative Republican from Killingly, wasn’t fooled. She rose to complain about such books and began quoting sexually vulgar dialogue from one, “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” a book that became controversial in Guilford’s school system two years ago. 

Deputy House Speaker Juan Candelaria, D-New Haven, who was presiding, interrupted Dauphinais and asked her to make her point without words that shouldn’t be used around faint-hearted people and children such as those present in the Hall of the House or watching on television.

If Dauphinais had meant to bait Candelaria, he quickly fell into her trap, making her point for her by trying to shut her up. She replied by noting that the sexual vulgarity she had read aloud and to which Candelaria had objected was the same sexual vulgarity that school librarians in Connecticut were already providing to children of all ages. If this was objectionable in the House, how could it be less objectionable in school?

For years similarly ironic incidents have been happening around the country at school board meetings as parents have objected to sexually explicit, vulgar, and graphic books stocked in school libraries. It’s a perfectly fair issue: Exactly what sexual content is appropriate for what ages, and who decides?

Of course there is a big difference between reading silently and reading aloud, as Dauphinais did. But that wasn’t the objection Deputy Speaker Candelaria made. He declared the words objectionable in themselves for young audiences, though Dauphinais had no other effective way of sharing them with the House and the public.

Even so, conservatives should acknowledge that sexual and even racist language may have a place in literature, especially “coming of age” literature for older children. 

Indeed, what may be the most moving passage in American literature, from Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” involves the “N word” even as the character uttering it repudiates racism. Yet some people who consider themselves politically liberal want “Huckleberry Finn” removed from school libraries as much as some conservatives want “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” removed.

The stocking of libraries is a matter of judgment. The issue lately before the General Assembly has been something else: Whether the public should have the right to influence such judgments, either directly or through elected school boards, or whether school librarians should be formally declared unchallengeable experts, answering to no one, as Democrats wanted to arrange with their legislation.

The Democratic bill signified the party’s hatred of democracy. Drunk with arrogance in their one-party state, the Democrats want to stifle political incorrectness everywhere just as Deputy Speaker Candelaria did with Representative Dauphinais.

If democracy is to be sustained in a big federal republic like the United States, some school libraries will stock not just “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” but also homosexuality manuals and paeans to transgenderism, and some won’t. Meanwhile, in another irony missed by Democratic legislators, the biggest censors or “book banners” aren’t people who complain about particular books but librarians themselves.

For librarians have limited space on their shelves while the number of books is practically infinite. So librarians have to choose, and a librarian’s choosing which books to exclude is no different from a parent’s objecting to a sexually explicit, vulgar, and graphic book that might get into the hands of a 6-year-old. School and public libraries should answer for their choices. 

Librarians may have degrees in library science and may be members of the American Library Association, but, in the end, as George Bernard Shaw said, all professions are conspiracies against the laity — that is, against democracy. 

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

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Rowland’s pardon means little; and Looney cites bad parenting

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.

*

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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