Patronage for higher education is one-sided campaign financing

By Chris Powell

Even people skeptical of the bloat of the federal government may not have fully appreciated its discretionary political patronage until, upon his return to the presidency in January, Donald Trump began to reduce it.

Who outside the universities themselves knew that Columbia University has been getting more than a billion dollars a year in grants and contracts from the federal government, Yale University almost $900 million, and Harvard University almost $700 million, or that the University of Connecticut has been getting more than $400 million and the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities System about $150 million?

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Connecticut Democrats insist on open borders or secession

Rule of law and democracy are abused by Trump’s foes in Connecticut too

Now some of that money is in jeopardy as the Trump administration scrutinizes universities for the renewal of their traditional hostility to Jews and for their unconstitutional racial preferences dressed up as “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Of course federal student loans also extravagantly subsidize higher education, with $1.7 trillion in loans outstanding.

Higher education has reciprocated by providing almost unanimous support for the party of bigger government, the Democrats. Higher education infiltrates government with what it supposes to be its expertise but what increasingly is merely political correctness.  

Having recently been caught discriminating against applicants of Asian descent, Harvard has just announced that it will offer remedial math courses to students, supposedly to help them recover from learning deficits suffered during the recent virus epidemic. Such deficits might have been easily discovered by Harvard prior to any student’s admission if the university had not abandoned standardized testing for applicants because it was getting in the way of racial preferences in admissions.

This doesn’t mean that research financed by the federal government in higher education has not had beneficial results. It means that those beneficial results help camouflage the vast political patronage, higher education’s reciprocation of it, and leftist political indoctrination of students. Indeed, with new programs and subsidies every year, government now finances not only the government class but that class’ political party. To a great extent federal aid to higher education has become a one-sided form of government financing of political campaigns.

The indoctrination involved was exposed in Connecticut the other day when a conservative civil liberties group, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), reported that four years ago the University of Connecticut Medical School rewrote the Hippocratic Oath it administers to students to make them pledge “to promote health equity,” “support policies that promote social justice,” and “work to dismantle policies that perpetuate inequities, exclusion, discrimination, and racism.”

Exactly what do the new elements of the oath mean? What exactly are the inequities, exclusion, discrimination, and racism in medicine in Connecticut?

The rewritten oath doesn’t explain, but its new elements are the jargon of political correctness. 

Rather than explain the new elements when FIRE challenged them, UConn announced that taking the oath would no longer be mandatory for students. Thus the university devalued the basics of medical ethics as laid out by Hippocrates in ancient times.

In the General Assembly similar forces are operating on medicine, where more legislation is advancing to reduce parental responsibility for children.

The bill would authorize doctors to provide contraceptives and pregnancy-related treatment to minors without the consent of their parents. Connecticut law already allows minors to obtain abortions without parental consent, thereby protecting rapists from exposure and prosecution and worsening the alienation of children from their parents.

But political correctness in Connecticut considers abortion to be the highest social good, far more compelling than deterring child rape. 

Connecticut law still upholds parental responsibility in one respect. A parent’s approval is required for children to get tattoos, since state government thinks that the superficial appearance of children is more important to parents than their children’s health and morals. 

This is the kind of stuff that sustains Donald Trump with millions of people despite his awfulness. That is, to many people Trump’s adversaries are often even more objectionable than he is, and as was said a century and a half ago about Grover Cleveland, Trump’s supporters “love him most of all for the enemies he has made.” 

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

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Plenty of money for political patronage despite danger to state budget

By Chris Powell

Is state government in Connecticut in a financial emergency because of its likely loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal assistance under the Trump administration?

Most Democratic state legislators think so. Led by House Speaker Matt Ritter, they want to remove the “fiscal guardrails” that have restrained state government spending and helped to amass a large surplus, though that surplus only reflects the continuing underfunding of state pension funds.

Welfare continues to hide in Connecticut’s electricity bills

Connecticut Democrats insist on open borders or secession

Rule of law and democracy are abused by Trump’s foes in Connecticut too

Republican legislators acknowledge the possibility that reductions in federal aid might rip big holes in the state budget but don’t want to alter the “guardrails.” The Republican stance may be as close as anyone in elective office comes to hinting that state spending should be cut.

Governor Lamont seems to feel strongly both ways. He’s worried about federal aid reductions but he is against weakening the “guardrails” even as he’s still supporting state government’s award of grants for politically connected organizations and inessential local projects.

The Yankee Institute notes that the General Assembly’s recent $3 million “emergency” appropriation, passed without public hearings and approved by the governor, was bestowed mainly on leftists, including sexual minorities, illegal immigrants, and Planned Parenthood.

The other day the governor, Speaker Ritter, and Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney announced $77 million worth of state bonding for 35 “community development” projects in 21 municipalities. Among them: 

— $5 million for Danbury for rearranging the city’s downtown.

— $2 million to renovate the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport.

— $250,000 for the Connecticut Humanities Council to assess the needs of hundreds of “cultural organizations,” as if their primary needs aren’t all the same: more money.  

— $1.5 million for the Hartford Region YWCA to renovate its headquarters to house what will be called the Center for Racial Justice and Gender Equity but what might as well be the Center for Political Correctness.

— Another $2 million for Planned Parenthood, this time to renovate its office in New London.

Those projects were hardly necessities. Other projects on the bonding list were more compelling, like homeless shelters. But most projects were mainly matters of local Democratic political patronage, not necessary like raising reimbursements for Medicaid providers, renovating old schools in Bridgeport, Hartford, and New Haven, and saving money to protect against losing federal aid. 

In a way it’s funny. While state government has just found $250,000 to spend to discover that “cultural organizations” need more money, it has found no money for auditing the effectiveness of the main drivers of state spending — like primary education, state and municipal government employee union contracts, and welfare. 

Is primary education raising or lowering student achievement? Does collective bargaining for government employees improve their performance and public administration or just increase costs and destroy accountability? Is welfare policy increasing self-sufficiency or worsening dependence?

Would even Trumpian chainsawing of federal aid prompt state government to try to answer those questions? Or, down to its last several hundred million dollars, would state government just pay raises to its employees and forget about everything else?

BANKRUPT HOSPITALS: Connecticut has a major problem with three formerly nonprofit hospitals. A private equity company, Prospect Medical Holdings, the owner of Waterbury Hospital, Manchester Memorial Hospital, and Rockville General Hospital, has filed for bankruptcy after essentially looting the hospitals and forwarding the proceeds to its shareholders. Other private equity companies have done the same to hospitals elsewhere in the country.

Getting the hospitals out of bankruptcy with a new owner is proving difficult. Yale New Haven Health has withdrawn its bid. State government, which can hardly manage itself, may have to take over the hospitals for a while. 

Legislation proposed in the General Assembly would require hospital executives to obtain a state license and hold a college degree in hospital administration. This won’t fix the problem and could worsen it. For the problem is not unqualified local managers but ill-intended ownership. 

Connecticut never should have let nonprofit hospitals be acquired by profit-making entities — and despite the scandal, the state still hasn’t outlawed that. That’s the first legislation needed here.

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

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Welfare continues to hide in Connecticut’s electricity bills

By Chris Powell

Why should Connecticut’s electricity grid be incorporated into the state’s welfare system? Why are electricity users in the state who pay their own electric bills being charged extra to subsidize discounts for electricity used by poor people who don’t pay? Why aren’t those subsidies financed by general taxation?

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Those questions were prompted by a recent report from Connecticut Inside Investigator’s Marc E. Fitch, who discovered that the Low-Income Discount Rate Program of the state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority is giving $137 million in electricity discounts ranging from 10 to 50% to low-income electricity users. They are automatically enrolled for the discounts through the authority’s data-sharing arrangement with the state Social Services Department.

Everyone classified by the welfare department as being poor in one respect or another is identified to the state’s major electricity distributors, Eversource and United Illuminating, and then the companies are required to reduce bills accordingly. 

The discounts are recovered through higher rates to everyone else.

This exploitation of electricity customers has been going on in Connecticut in various forms for a long time. The Low-Income Discount Rate Program, begun last year, is just the most extreme form, since, predictably enough, it has turned out to cost many millions more than estimated. The program is one reason why the “public benefits” surcharges on electric bills are so high.

Republican state legislators argue that welfare expenses should be transferred out of electricity bills and into the state budget. Democratic legislators, who hold a large majority in the General Assembly, oppose such transparency but have never clearly explained why. 

That’s why the questions reiterated above remain compelling even though their answers can be inferred. Democratic legislators like hiding taxes in electricity bills, for then the public blames the electric companies for high electricity prices instead of the mistaken and deceptive government policies that actually have driven them up.

TOILETS ON THE GREEN: Homeless people and their political advocates gathered at a school in New Haven the other day to berate Mayor Justin Elicker for not yet having turned the city’s downtown green into a homeless encampment complete with plenty of sparkling-clean portable toilets.

The mayor was at the school to discuss his city budget proposal but dutifully explained that the portable toilets already installed on the green are hard to maintain because people sometimes use them for prostitution, drug injections, and disposal of hypodermic needles and other trash. Elicker noted that toilets in city libraries are free for the homeless to use. But maybe those toilets are not as suitable for everyone because libraries expect decent conduct. 

Nevertheless, the homeless people and their advocates urged the mayor to add $500,000 to his budget for more portable toilets on the green.

Homelessness is a worsening problem in Connecticut. Part of it is the state’s shortage of housing, the result of long-negligent state government policy, and part of it is the mental illness of the homeless themselves.

But Mayor Elicker isn’t responsible for the problem. To the contrary, his administration is greatly facilitating housing construction in the city. Meanwhile Governor Lamont’s administration plans a substantial increase in “supportive housing” for people recovering from addiction.

One of the homeless advocates berating the mayor the other day asked why the city doesn’t get more money to spend by taxing Yale University, which owns much tax-exempt property in New Haven. The mayor said he’d like to tax Yale but the city doesn’t have that authority. He might have added that state government, controlled by members of his party, has the power to tax Yale but has left the university as one of the few things in Connecticut that isn’t taxed, and that the homeless might go to the state Capitol and ask about that.

Better still, the mayor also might have asked the homeless what they plan to do to help themselves and the city. They didn’t volunteer to keep the portable toilets clean and as usual seemed to think that the world, or at least the city, owes them a living. 

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

Connecticut Democrats insist on open borders or secession

By Chris Powell

Rage and indignation again are sweeping the state Capitol and the People’s Republic of New Haven, this time because the city’s “hometown airline,” Avelo, which has revived Tweed New Haven Airport, has contracted with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to fly illegal immigrants out of the country from Arizona.

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Mayor Justin Elicker calls this “antithetical to New Haven’s values.”

State Attorney General William Tong bellows that Avelo will “profit from and facilitate President Trump’s inhumane and unlawful atrocities.” 

Leading Democratic state legislators are proposing legislation to prohibit state support for Avelo if it assists federal immigration authorities.

What exactly are New Haven’s values and state government’s values here? 

Only nullification, insurrection, and secession. 

Since 2007 New Haven has been issuing city identification cards to illegal immigrants to facilitate their lawbreaking. First the city and then state government forbade police officers from assisting federal immigration agents in most respects.

As for the “atrocities” Tong attributes to Trump, while some deportations are flawed, the federal government always has been empowered to deport people whose presence in the country is illegal. Few deportations are atrocities, unless one believes that open borders are a moral imperative.

That’s what Mayor Elicker, Attorney General Tong, Governor Lamont — all Democrats — and Democratic legislative leaders are saying. They maintain that anyone who enters the country illegally and makes his way to Connecticut should be exempt from immigration law, and if the country doesn’t revert to open borders, Connecticut will no longer be part of the United States.

If, as the Democrats maintain, the federal government is now so contaminated by its renewed enforcement of immigration law, will state government and city government in New Haven start refusing the many millions of dollars of federal financial aid they still receive?

Do the Democrats really think the state has the right to decide which federal laws it will obey and the right to determine the terms on which the state remains in the United States? Or were those issues settled to the contrary at Appomattox in 1865 and again at Little Rock in 1957?

The concern of Connecticut’s nullifiers for people whose presence in the country is illegal distracts from the state’s longstanding neglect of its own residents and especially the children in its cities. Most are fatherless, a third or more are chronically absent from school, their academic performance is horrible, and few of those who graduate from high school have more than a middle-school education.

The Democrats blame these failures on state government for not spending enough money, as if money equals education, even as they clamor for government to spend more money to support people living in the state illegally.

The ironies and hypocrisies are manifest but Connecticut’s news organizations don’t publicize them lest political correctness be disturbed and state residents get the idea that they should rejoin the United States.

BLAME, SHAME, AND QUESTIONS: Newborns have been abandoned since the time of Moses and probably before, but 25 years ago this month Connecticut undertook to minimize the damage. The state enacted its “safe havens” law, requiring hospitals with emergency rooms to receive newborns from mothers unconditionally and without interrogation. 

Last week the law was celebrated at the state Capitol by the state Department of Children and Families and current and former legislators. The department said the law has been used 57 times, twice last year, so it probably has saved many babies and the department wants to keep publicizing it. The department said the law allows troubled new mothers to seek help “without any stigma attached — no blame, no shame, and no questions asked.”

Of course such a stance is necessary to protect newborns at risk of being abandoned, but social disintegration is exploding — neglectful parenting, much of it encouraged by government policy; stupid life decisions by young women; and men betraying and abandoning the women they have exploited and impregnated. There are actually plenty of blame and shame, and many questions to be asked, but no one in authority asks them.      

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

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Rule of law and democracy are abused by Trump’s foes in Connecticut too

By Chris Powell

While Donald Trump is reckless, a bully, and sometimes worse, his return to the presidency was caused in part by the sort of hypocrisy shown by the thousands of people who last week protested him in Connecticut and across the country.

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First more than 20 leftist organizations in the state issued a statement denouncing the president and his administration for disregarding the rule of law — particularly for criticizing federal judges who have issued injunctions against administration policies, for dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, and for firing or laying off thousands of federal employees.

Of course none of those organizations could be found five years ago when Senate Democratic Majority Leader Charles Schumer, enraged by the Supreme Court’s prospective reversal of pro-abortion precedent, endangered the rule of law by threatening two of the justices by name. Schumer raged: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch — I want to tell you, Kavanaugh — you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” 

By contrast, Trump has suggested only that some judges who have ruled against him should be impeached, a fully constitutional procedure. Schumer seemed to threaten the judges physically, a criminal offense. But that was OK with most leftists in Connecticut and probably still is.

Then over last weekend more leftists gathered in Hartford, New Haven, and elsewhere at rallies aiming to “save democracy” from Trump. Some protesters were the same people who last year insisted that President Biden was sharp as a tack; that his son Hunter’s laptop computer, packed with proof of the Biden family’s influence peddling, was a Russian forgery; and that the 10 million or more illegal immigrants who entered the country during the Biden administration were nothing to worry about — that democracy was perfectly safe with Biden and his grifters in the White House and the country’s borders wide open.

If the leftists who protested last week see any threat to democracy in the political violence and oppression being perpetrated by their fellows — the people vandalizing Teslas, the colleges shutting down Republican or conservative events or failing to protect them from crazed professors and anarchists — they didn’t mention it. Mainly they seemed afraid of losing government jobs and subsidies.

Some of Trump’s budget recissions are indeed questionable, but they are being litigated, and many recissions can be justified. The Agency for International Development has been full of bloat and nonsense while providing camouflage for U.S. espionage, and the growth of the federal Education Department has correlated mainly with the collapse of public education. More spending isn’t more education; mainly it is more government employment.

But democracy remains in position to work these things out. Indeed, the political margins in Congress are so narrow that getting much done still may require courtesy and compromise.

In any case, the federal government is in debt by the almost incomprehensible amount of $36 trillion, which lately has required spending 13% of federal revenue on interest, more than is spent on the military and medical care for the poor. The debt has gotten so large that other countries already were reducing purchases of U.S. government bonds even before the turmoil caused by Trump’s gambit with tariffs.

It has been many years since the federal government felt obliged to finance itself with taxes rather than borrowing and inflation, so now most Americans have come to think that everything they get from government is and should be free — from subsidies to a mad proliferation of programs to stupid imperial wars. It’s not free; its costs are high interest payments and inflation, a tax that is heaviest on the poor. 

The sooner the country starts auditing government’s effectiveness and substantially reducing spending, the better. Of course Trump’s choices are not always careful; they may be mainly malicious. But his adversaries, including last week’s protesters, are obliged to specify alternative ways to economize. They offer nothing. They just demand more.

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

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Who’d want to be governor amid what’s lurking ahead?

By Chris Powell

In an interview the other day Governor Lamont sounded unenthusiastic about seeking a third term.

He complained that legislators and municipal officials parade through his office asking for goodies at state government expense even as the Trump administration is slashing away at financial aid to Connecticut, punching big holes in state government’s finances.

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The aid cuts don’t seem well-reasoned, or reasoned at all. They may be merely malicious. But having long been persecuted by Democrats, even as Democrats concealed and dissembled about the corruption and incompetence of their own national administration, Trump now can exact enormous revenge. 

Just as Democrats long have thrived on the patronage power they invested in the presidency, losing that power is going to hurt.

A national economic recession and even a worldwide one may be coming, possibly triggered by Trump’s leap into tariffs.

As a “sanctuary” state with several sanctimonious “sanctuary” cities, including New Haven, Connecticut may expect special hostility from the Trump administration, especially since the hostility is mutual here, as with the three Yale University professors who recently publicized their departure for Canada and attributed it to their detesting Trump. (Since Yale long has propelled Connecticut toward the looney left, these departures may be a good start.)

Lamont keeps saying he thinks Connecticut is in good shape, but developments contradict him. 

Remarking the other day on the human needs state government addresses, the governor noted that about 40% of the babies born in Connecticut are born to mothers on Medicaid — medical insurance for the indigent. But he didn’t grasp the bigger significance of that data. 

That is, people who can’t support themselves shouldn’t be having children — or else these are people who recently have fallen out of the middle class as times get harder.

Homelessness in Connecticut is rising again along with rents and housing prices, which have been driven up by rampant inflation and state government’s failure to clear the way for less-expensive housing. 

Connecticut’s food pantries are experiencing much heavier demand. 

Student proficiency in the state keeps declining as schools graduate illiterates and near-illiterates without prompting concern from anyone in authority. The failing, insolvent, and poorly managed school systems in Hartford and Bridgeport are undergoing financial audits by a state education bureaucracy that seems almost as large, inscrutable, and disconnected as the failing school systems themselves. But the educational results of those school systems are not being audited.

These developments don’t suggest that Connecticut is in good shape. They suggest that the state is sliding deeper into poverty and ignorance.  

The more the Trump administration slashes federal financial aid to state government, the more cautious the governor properly becomes about state spending. But the legislators, municipal officials, and special interests parading through his office with their hands out still can’t imagine financial restraint. They think state government has a large budget surplus and they want to spend it regardless of whether big cuts in federal aid will have to be covered. But they refuse to see that the surplus is only technical, the flip side of state government’s still grossly overcommitted pension funds. That is, the surplus is really just money borrowed from pension obligations, money that, if spent, will increase the heavy tax burden of the pension funds.

Lamont is often portrayed as a moderate Democrat. But he is moderate only insofar as he fears that overspending will produce state budget deficits and tax increases that will alienate voters. He is firmly part of his party’s far left in support of illegal immigration, transgenderism, racial preferences, and manufacturing and coddling poverty.

Other than the blindly ambitious, who would want to be governor amid what lurks ahead?

Even so, Trump’s slashing of federal aid just might be the tonic Connecticut needs to force audits of everything in state government and compel hard but necessary and ultimately beneficial choices. As long as state government remains primarily a pension and benefit society for its employees — the only people state government guarantees to take care of — it won’t even be trying to serve the public. 

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

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Connecticut’s elections can’t be secure without proof of citizenship

By Chris Powell

Having fallen in love with executive orders even more than his predecessor did, President Trump is coming down with a bad case of megalomania. He has little authority to command the states to follow any particular election procedures, as he presumed to do with another executive order the other day. Congress can do that but not the president on his own. 

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Connecticut Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas properly called the order “another unlawful and unconstitutional overreach into our electoral processes.”

But as a matter of policy in regard to the order’s most important component, Trump is right and Thomas is wrong.

Trump wants people to be required to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote. While the law requires citizenship for voting in federal and state elections, Connecticut and most other states don’t require proof of it — a birth certificate, passport, or naturalization document. Registrants are required only to affirm their citizenship under penalty of perjury. 

Of course nobody checks, though many millions of foreigners entered the United States illegally during the Biden administration in a Democratic scheme to gain advantage in redistricting the U.S. House of Representatives.

Thomas echoed the weak objections to requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration: Many people don’t have or have misplaced their birth certificates. Many don’t have passports. Many have changed their names but not updated their identification documents.

While these are fair concerns, conscientious people can address them easily enough, even as government already often requires people to produce identification for purposes far less important than voting. 

These days in Connecticut even grizzly old graybeards are being “carded” in the supermarket when buying beer. In Connecticut you can’t legally drive a car without registering it with the state and obtaining insurance, and those things require producing identification. So does boarding an airplane. Such requirements are inconveniences, especially for the poor people Democrats prattle about, but there are good reasons for them and Secretary Thomas hasn’t proposed repealing them.

Being a good citizen requires some effort. It is not too much to ask people to maintain proof of citizenship in the face of the devaluation of citizenship that was undertaken by the previous national administration and continues to be advocated by most Democratic officials in Connecticut, whose belief in illegal immigration has made the state a “sanctuary” obstructing enforcement of immigration law.          

Many Democrats in Connecticut and elsewhere advocate letting non-citizens vote, at least in municipal elections. Indeed, in 2022 New York City, a Democratic bastion and “sanctuary city,” enacted an ordinance to allow non-citizens to vote in city elections, contradicting New York’s state constitution. Last month the state’s Supreme Court nullified the ordinance.

Secretary Thomas says Connecticut already has “strong and secure elections,” but that claim is undermined by recent election fraud involving prominent Democrats in Bridgeport and Stamford. Many municipalities in Connecticut seem unable to tabulate elections fully in less than two or three days, leaving plenty of room for fiddling with close results when observers have gone to sleep.

Republicans in Congress support legislation to require proof of citizenship for voting, but it will be blocked by Democrats in the Senate, just as similar legislation would be blocked in Connecticut by the big Democratic majority in the General Assembly. 

As long as Connecticut refuses to confirm the eligibility of voters, its elections won’t really be secure.    

WHY THE EXTRA GRADES?: A state legislator has noticed the disaster of social promotion in Connecticut’s public schools. State Rep. Tami Zawistowski, R-East Granby, has introduced a bill to require high school graduates to show they can read at an eighth-grade level.   

Of course there are 12 grades in public education, but even the low bar proposed by Zawistowski may terrify educators. Her bill might have a better chance if it linked graduation to a fourth-grade reading level.

Zawistowski’s honesty about education raises a good question: Whether the standard is to be eighth grade or fourth grade, why is Connecticut bothering with all those extra grades? 

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

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Waterbury child-abuse case imperiled by local TV news

By Chris Powell

While local television news in Connecticut is usually trivial and patronizing, it isn’t always harmless. In recent days it has been creating a great danger with its coverage of the case of the 32-year-old man alleged to have been held prisoner since boyhood by his stepmother at their home in Waterbury.

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Last week TV stations were covering the story incessantly though there were no significant developments. The stepmother remained charged criminally and free on bond. But some TV coverage included interviews with people who proclaimed her guilt and denounced her though they had no original knowledge of the case.

It’s typical for local TV news reporters to stick a microphone in the faces of people having no original knowledge of what is being reported and to ask them for comment. These bystanders dutifully concur that awful events are awful, adding nothing to the story but sparing the reporter the trouble of finding someone who does have some original knowledge and is willing to talk.

Broadcasting such coverage day after day without adding new information is horribly defamatory and there may be no recovering from it. Last week the stepmother’s lawyer waxed indignant about it, complaining that it had already convicted his client in the public mind prior to the fair trial to which she is entitled.

If the case is not resolved by a plea bargain and goes to trial, the defendant’s lawyer almost certainly will request a change of venue from court in Waterbury. But there may be no place in the state where a court can find jurors who aren’t already prejudiced against the defendant. Such prejudice can drag out a case, weaken the prosecution, and facilitate a plea bargain more favorable to the defendant than a trial would be.

This doesn’t mean that sensational criminal cases shouldn’t get news coverage. It means that they shouldn’t get disproportionate coverage — that when there is nothing new to report, reiteration is unnecessary and unfair, just piling on, and that speculation on a defendant’s guilt should not be reported at all.

News is telling people what they don’t know, not what they have heard many times, and there is always plenty of important local news to report. Local TV news sometimes is capable of finding it, as WFSB-TV3 in Hartford did admirably last week as it disclosed the steadily worsening response times of the two ambulance companies serving Hartford, incompetence that may have led to the death of a child.

The Waterbury child abuse case may continue for a long time. Connecticut doesn’t need it to become the local equivalent of the death watch that 50 years ago national TV news maintained for months for Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, a death watch that went on so long that the first season of “Saturday Night Live” was able to parody it with great success on its “Weekend Update” segment: “Franco still dead.”

When the Waterbury stepmother goes to trial or enters a plea, it won’t be a secret. The prosecution and defense will have something new to say. Until then local TV news should try to find some news.

STILL FAILING ON DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: For many years women’s rights advocates and some state legislators in Connecticut have prattled about the state’s failure to take domestic violence seriously. State policy still considers court-issued “protective orders” to be adequate, though nearly every woman murdered by her former lover seems to die clutching one.

Connecticut still doesn’t realize that the only defense for women against domestic violence is speedy justice, though another proof of the necessity of speedy justice was apparent last week when a New London police officer was charged for the fourth time with harassing his former girlfriend and disregarding another useless protective order. 

The officer was jailed only after his third arrest, and then only because he couldn’t make bond. Why didn’t he get a trial immediately after his first or second arrest? Women’s rights advocates and legislators should knock off the prattle and ask.

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

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Connecticut’s most neglected children are public-schooled, not home-schooled

By Chris Powell

Connecticut has just seen another case, this time in Waterbury, of what appears to have been the horrific abuse of a child who had been withdrawn from school, supposedly to be educated at home, but who wasn’t being educated at all, just abused.

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Past cases of child abuse that were concealed by false claims of home schooling got some attention from the General Assembly a few years ago but no action. The state Department of Children and Families is said to have looked into the Waterbury child’s situation twice at his home many years ago but not to have found any abuse, and no one in authority checked on the boy again. Last month, having turned 32 and weighing only 68 pounds, the young man sought attention by setting a fire in his room and was rescued by firefighters. 

His stepmother faces serious criminal charges.

The House chairman of the legislature’s Committee on Children, state Rep. Corey Paris, D-Stamford, says the Waterbury case shows the need to make sure “no child falls off the radar.” Paris wants to gather the state agencies involved with child protection to consider what must be done to prevent claims of home schooling from concealing neglect and abuse.

It is a compelling issue, since child neglect and abuse cause the nation’s worst social problems — generational poverty, educational failure, alienation, and physical and mental illness.

But of course the problem isn’t home schooling itself but government’s failure to ensure that children who are not attending public school are really being educated and raised properly. 

Remedying that problem wouldn’t be complicated. Parents home-schooling their children could be required to register with the state and to present their children every year to take an academic proficiency test. Such parents also could be required to accept a visit at home from child protection workers every year or two. Those workers could intervene against neglect or abuse.

Such accountability might be resented by home-schooling parents, and it might be expensive, since as many as 20,000 Connecticut families may be educating their children at home. The potential resentment and expense are probably why the legislature has not yet pressed the issue. But as child neglect and abuse proliferate, there may be no other way of checking on children who don’t attend school.

Resentment of such a system by home-schooling parents would be fair, for they would find themselves being held accountable by a government that grossly neglects tens of thousands of children in its own schools but never holds itself accountable for educational failure. Indeed, neglect of children in public schools is far more common than neglect of home-schooled children.

Last September Hartford was found to have graduated from high school a girl who could not read or write. For the six months since then city school administrators and the state Education Department have just shrugged it off. But following disclosure of the Hartford graduate’s illiteracy, current and former teachers throughout the state admitted confidentially that advancement from grade to grade and graduation of grossly uneducated students are common in Connecticut, especially in the cities, since the state’s only firm policy of public education is social promotion and since a quarter to half of city students lack parenting and are chronically absent.

If a law is enacted to regulate home-schooling, presumably home-schooled children would have to meet a certain achievement standard on state proficiency tests. But state government and municipal governments don’t dare to enforce any proficiency test standards with public school students. The results of the few proficiency tests Connecticut requires to be given in its public schools suggest that if any proficiency standards were enforced, more than half the students would have to be held back every year until word got around that social promotion was over and henceforth learning would be required for advancement and graduation.

This is the spectacular irony of the home-schooling issue: Children in public school are far more neglected than children schooled at home, yet no one in authority will consider doing anything about it.

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

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Connecticut leads Trump in privatizing government

By Chris Powell

Democrats throughout the country, including Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, are charging that the Trump administration wants to privatize government. By “privatize” the Democrats really mean that the Trump administration is cutting off their vast patronage from the federal government, as if elections mustn’t be allowed to change things. 

Can Murphy and other Democrats discern yet why Trump won?

Political correctness flusters response to assault in school

Plenty of ideas for taxes but few for economizing

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has acknowledged a desire to strengthen the national economy by enlarging the private sector while shrinking the federal government. That’s a good objective, and shrinking the government is quite different from privatizing it. 

Besides, to a great extent the federal government long has been privatized under both Democratic and Republican administrations, with major industries achieving “regulatory capture” and government failing to enforce antitrust law vigorously.

Despite the complaints from Connecticut Democrats about “privatizing” government, the state has led the country in privatizing government in a crucial respect: education.

This privatization has occurred not with charter schools and vouchers redeemable at church and other private schools but with ordinary laws that hobble administration of public schools.

Connecticut’s teacher tenure law is so strict and its processes so expensive that few teachers are ever fired. Now the state’s teacher unions are advocating legislation to make firing teachers even more difficult. The legislation would require a school administration to have “just cause” for firing a teacher, not just the “due and sufficient” cause now required. A “just cause” requirement would impose more impediments on schools and take the firing decisions away from a school board and place them with an arbiter.

Meanwhile binding arbitration for teacher union contracts gives the unions great control over teacher salaries and working conditions, again diminishing the authority of school boards. 

A state law demanded by the unions 50 years ago exempts teacher evaluations from disclosure under state freedom-of-information law, the only government employee evaluations so exempted. In Connecticut you have no right to know how well your child’s teachers are performing.

That is, the big problem with public education in Connecticut is that it really isn’t public at all. It has no accountability. It has been privatized by the people it employs.

Ironically, charter and church schools are far more accountable, since, unlike public schools, they have no guarantee of students. To stay in business, private schools have to be better than public schools, which get more money each year regardless of performance.

DEMOCRATS AGAINST DEMOCRACY: Many Democrats in Connecticut prattle about saving democracy from the Trump administration, but some of those Democrats also are advocating a state constitutional amendment that would sharply curtail democracy.

It’s being called the environmental rights amendment, and it would establish “an individual right to clean and healthy air, water, soil, ecosystems, and environment, and a safe and stable climate.”

Exactly how clean and healthy, safe and stable would Connecticut have to be? The amendment doesn’t say.

So in the absence of clear definitions in the constitutional amendment, law, or regulations, lawsuits would ask the courts to produce the definitions. The environmental rights amendment would invite many lawsuits to establish public policy. Courts also would be asked to determine how violations of “clean and healthy” and “safe and stable” would be remediated, and the means and costs of remediation.

Thus the governor and General Assembly — the elected branches of government — would be relieved of their responsibilities by the unelected branch, the judiciary, as every claim made on behalf of a “clean and healthy” and “safe and stable” environment would be dressed up as a constitutional right.

The amendment is platitudinous and politically correct posturing, wishful thinking, and reckless government.

Like most other undertakings of government, environmental protection requires a lot more than platitudes and posturing. It requires the continuous balancing of interests, attention to changing details, and compromise — the essence of democracy. So if Connecticut really wants to put the judiciary in charge of the environment, it should add another amendment to its constitution: to elect the state’s judges every two years, just like state legislators, since the judges will be the state’s new legislators.

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

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