Rell’s capital went unspent; and choices take courage

By Chris Powell

Connecticut was very happy with Jodi Rell when she was governor. Her ascension upon John Rowland’s resignation under threat of impeachment for corruption brought relief from months of scandal and dissembling. Rell, who died the other day after eight years of retirement in Florida, was calm, cordial, reasonable, honest, and not partisan, though inclined toward Republican restraint instead of the big and dubious projects that the Democratic majority in the General Assembly would have loved to see and that Rowland, while also a Republican, was easily seduced by.

Terrible policies created Connecticut’s underclass

If free speech is criminal, there really will be ‘hell to pay’

Rallies at murder scenes aren’t stopping violence

Rell served the remainder of her predecessor’s term and with a job-approval rating of 70% was easily elected in her own right in 2006, winning 63% of the vote. But her full term was unimpressive as state government borrowed for current expenses, diverted pension fund contributions, ignored the continuing disintegration of the cities, and did nothing to control the exploding “fixed costs” of government, primarily the cost of government employees. She proposed but soon abandoned a big increase in education spending. It was embarrassing.

Having amassed more political capital than any Connecticut governor in decades, Rell declined to spend it lest she put her pleasant image at risk in controversy. To her credit she signed legislation for public financing of campaigns for state elective office, but it hasn’t changed much. The same special interests, led by the government employee unions, still rule.

Despite state government’s worsening financial position, Rell probably could have been elected to a second full term in 2010. But since an economic recession was getting worse, there would have been no more avoiding controversy, and she already had served 25 years in elective office. So she retired instead, leaving state government’s finances in disorder, and the Democrats swept back into power and have stayed there ever since. At least she might have counted on them to make people miss her.

* * *

Lefties from Connecticut to California have a tiresome rhetorical routine for rationalizing more spending on social programs — the “choose” routine. Why, they ask, should people have to choose between prescription drugs they need and putting food on their table? Why should people have to choose between going to work or staying home with a sick child? And so forth.

To some extent these are fair questions about the adequacy of the social programs, but not entirely so. For life itself is always a matter of choosing, and not all choices are good ones. When people make bad choices, how much of the expense should government cover? That is a fair question too.

Having children may be the biggest choice in life. Some people are very careful about it, having children only when sure they are prepared to support them.

But many people aren’t careful at all. They have children, sometimes many, they can’t support, and when a child gets sick and needs care at home and work has to be missed, it’s a financial disaster.

So now Connecticut pays people to miss work to care for sick children or relatives. Meanwhile the state has no program extracting any responsibility from people who have children they are unprepared to support. To the contrary, the state has been subsidizing the irresponsibility. Run by the political left, state government seems to think that this irresponsibility is OK.

For some reason the left hasn’t noticed that the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is also a choice — a choice against more socially useful things. Indeed, now that the federal government finances itself and much of state government through inflation rather than taxes, elected officials are giving people the same impression the welfare system has been giving them: that choices are no longer necessary, that everything can be afforded and no one in particular has to pay. 

A leading leftist of a century ago, Leon Blum, the Popular Front premier of France, eventually knew better. “Life does not give itself to one who tries to keep all its advantages at once,” he reflected. “I have often thought that morality may consist solely in the courage of making a choice.”

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

Terrible policies created Connecticut’s underclass

By Chris Powell

After three fatal shootings of young men in New Haven in less than two weeks, Mayor Justin Elicker gave news interviews to assure people that downtown is safe for holiday shopping, dining, and other festive activities. The mayor noted that, as with murders and shootings in other cities, most in New Haven involve people who know each other.

That is, no harm is likely to come to people visiting New Haven as long as they don’t know anyone there. As for New Haven residents themselves, most figure they’ll probably be OK as long as they’re not young men or associating with young men.

If free speech is criminal, there really will be ‘hell to pay’

Rallies at murder scenes aren’t stopping violence

Attorney General Tong succeeds Trump as foremost insurrectionist

Essentially the mayor was saying the mayhem is just a problem of the underclass. He noted that city social workers and police officers are pressing New Haven’s young men to control their impulses to violence and change their dissolute lifestyle. Good luck with that.

Of course no elective office is more difficult than mayor of an impoverished city, and Elicker was trying to protect New Haven’s image. But outsiders should worry about the urban underclass. For the policies that created and sustain it and concentrate it in the cities are state and national policies, not city policies, and they are disgracefully designed to discourage people from worrying about the underclass, designed to let people think that it’s the natural order for young men in the cities to be killing and maiming each other.

What are these policies?

They extend far beyond exclusive suburban zoning, which at least Connecticut’s political left dares to challenge.

These policies begin with the destruction of poor families with welfare subsidies for childbearing outside marriage. Such subsidies proclaim that no one needs to be prepared to support one’s own children and that fathers aren’t needed anymore, though fatherlessness correlates heavily with bad outcomes for children, especially boys. Most children in Connecticut’s cities live without fathers.

These policies continue with the repeal of standards in education and their replacement with social promotion, thereby destroying the incentive to learn for children who lack prepared and competent parents. Education is mostly a matter of parenting; without well-parented students who accept an obligation to learn, schools can’t accomplish much. So government in Connecticut pretends that education is all about teacher salaries and busies itself with raises instead. 

But having grown the underclass so large, government lacks the courage necessary even to recognize the disaster it has created. 

What politicians will try to fix the problem of family destruction when it means telling so many of their constituents — in the cities, most of their constituents — that they should not have responded to the damaging incentives government gave them? 

What politicians will try to restore education when it means telling educators, the most pernicious special interest, that it is a fraud for them to advance uneducated students from grade to grade and then to graduate them when the kids are unprepared to do more than menial work and to be citizens, and that this fraud leads them to demoralization and crime?

Destruction of educational standards worsened in last month’s election. At the urging of its teacher unions, Massachusetts voted at referendum to repeal its requirement that high school students pass a proficiency test to graduate. The test was accused of racism for being too difficult for minority students, but it wasn’t racist. The racism is the welfare system’s depriving those students of fathers.

Connecticut doesn’t dare attempt a high school graduation test or any proficiency test of high school seniors, lest the public discover that the huge amounts spent in the name of education produce so little and that most graduates never master high school work.

How can people raised in the welfare system and delivered to adulthood so uneducated be expected to support themselves? They can’t. Hence the desire for state government to appropriate more and more to subsidize people who can’t take care of themselves and their kids — more food, day care, medical care, housing subsidies, and such.

So Connecticut’s underclass keeps growing — and shooting itself.

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

-END-

If free speech is criminal, there really will be ‘hell to pay’

By Chris Powell

Even the most firmly established constitutional rights often seem to be hanging on by a thread. 

That may be the lesson of the case of William Maisano of Guilford, a retired police officer and former school board candidate who, according to Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers and the Yankee Institute’s journalism project, Connecticut Inside Investigator, could be imprisoned for as much as five years for his conviction on a felony charge of threatening and a misdemeanor charge of breach of peace.

Rallies at murder scenes aren’t stopping violence

Attorney General Tong succeeds Trump as foremost insurrectionist

Ranked-choice voting is good but Connecticut isn’t ready

Maisano’s “crime” seems to have been only his sending an e-mail to the principal of Guilford High School asserting that there would be “hell to pay” if she allowed a teacher to dye her hair in rainbow colors to show support for sexual minorities during the school’s graduation ceremony last June. Maisano saw the rainbow hair plan as more of the political propagandizing in school that he had complained about at Board of Education meetings — propagandizing that indeed is common now in schools throughout the country.

The principal told the local police she was concerned about Maisano’s e-mail. So an officer interviewed Maisano by telephone, and he said he never intended to hurt anyone. He sent another e-mail to school officials explaining that by “hell to pay” he had meant generating unfavorable publicity.

Whereupon the officer closed the case. 

But then the teacher with the rainbow hair complained to the police that she felt dreadfully threatened by Maisano’s e-mail. So this time they arrested Maisano for breach of peace, and when the case got to Superior Court in New Haven, a prosecutor added a charge of felony threatening, perhaps because Maisano insisted on his First Amendment rights and would not plea-bargain.

A trial was held and on Oct. 11 a jury convicted Maisano on both counts. Sentencing is scheduled next week.

Connecticut Inside Investigator notes that court precedents hold that to be a criminal matter threatening must be more specific and constitute more than political hyperbole. So if Maisano has the sense to find a civil-liberties lawyer — someone who does what the Connecticut chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union used to do before succumbing to political correctness — his conviction may be overturned by the first appeals court to hear it.

But a reversal of Maisano’s conviction won’t mean that the danger to freedom of speech in Connecticut has passed. For the case has demonstrated several related dangers.

First is that the case has not been widely publicized by news organizations, though it puts everyone’s rights at risk, including the rights of news organizations themselves, which routinely engage in political controversies.

Second is that the political left has discovered that the quickest way of silencing contrary views is to assert that one feels threatened by them. This is supposed to nullify free speech. Hence the increasing demands, especially in what calls itself higher education, to establish “safe spaces” where no contrary thoughts are allowed.

And third, in convicting Maisano for his disagreeable politics rather than any real danger he posed, the six members of his jury demonstrated a willingness to sign their own rights away. Lacking much appreciation for civil liberties, most people might agree with the jury.

With elegant understatement many years ago Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter noted that “the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not-very-nice people.”

For many years the political left understood this and was the courageous defender of freedom of speech and press. Not anymore. Having tasted power, the left is now more oppressive than the right used to be and enthusiastically advocates censorship by the government, while the right, finding itself on the oppressed side now, has become the defender of free speech.

If political disagreement and hurt feelings become cause for criminal prosecution, as they seem to have become in Connecticut, before long there really may be “hell to pay.” Maybe the new administration of “fascist” Donald Trump will give the left a reason to reconsider its own fascism.

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

Rallies at murder scenes aren’t stopping violence

By Chris Powell

Most shootings in Hartford are followed by rallies by Mothers United Against Violence at the scenes of the crimes. The shootings two weeks ago were especially atrocious, the victims being a 20-year-old woman and her infant son, killed in what police said was a dispute over a car, with the young perpetrator fleeing to Puerto Rico but quickly apprehended there.

The rallies always feature appeals to the “community” to stop the violence, as well as a hand-wringing harangue by a street preacher. They often get a couple of minutes on local television newscasts. But what exactly do the rally participants want everyone else to do? They don’t say, and the perpetrators aren’t listening. 

Attorney General Tong succeeds Trump as foremost insurrectionist

Ranked-choice voting is good but Connecticut isn’t ready

McMahon is qualified at last — by the shrieks of teacher unions

The rallies serve only to make their participants feel relevant and the TV stations feel as if they have covered the story when they haven’t even touched it.

At least the rally-goers notice the violence. These days even the atrocities in the cities pass without comment from the governor, state legislators, and other leaders, who behave, along with journalism, as if the social disintegration sweeping Connecticut but worst in the cities is the natural order of things. 

It wasn’t always this way. Indeed, historians say that a century ago Hartford was the richest and finest city in the country. Today atrocities like the murder of the young woman and her baby seldom occur outside the cities, an indication that society somehow can be arranged to prevent them in other places. 

People in authority in Connecticut may claim to be trying to reduce the atrocities, but their frequency indicates that whatever they are doing isn’t working any better than those hapless rallies of lamentation and hand-wringing. Government’s failure to stop social disintegration wasn’t even an issue in last month’s state election and isn’t on the agenda for the session of the General Assembly that will convene in a few weeks, though if people listen closely enough the gunshots sometimes can be heard from the grounds of the state Capitol.

* * *

RACISM DIDN’T ELECT TRUMP: Many Democrats, including some in Connecticut, are inadvertently signifying that people tend to see and hear only what they want to. These Democrats claim that Donald Trump has just been elected president for a second time because so many voters are racist and bigoted against women and as a result voted against the Democratic nominee for president, Vice President Kamala Harris, a mixed-race woman in an interracial marriage.

Of course some voters always will be racist and bigoted. But last week the nonprofit survey organization DataHaven reported that it recently polled more than 7,400 people throughout Connecticut and 40% said they are struggling financially. More people said they are worse off than they were a year ago than said they are better off.

A few weeks ago similar surveys by the United Way and Connecticut Voices for Children reported alarming increases in poverty in the state.

Connecticut is solidly Democratic but in the election last month Trump substantially increased his share of the vote in the state, even in the overwhelmingly Democratic cities. Are even many Democrats racist and misogynist?         

Or might the sharp economic decline found by those surveys and others around the country have had more to with the results of the election? While some Democratic leaders acknowledge that their party has lost touch with the working class, few admit the possibility that their party’s last four years in charge of the federal government worsened living standards.

Trump may end the U.S. proxy war with Russia in Ukraine even as he makes America nuts again in other respects, as with tariffs and more deficits and inflation. But he is going back to the White House because most voters thought he would be better than the current administration, and no one seems more out of touch on this point than Connecticut’s just re-elected U.S. senator, Chris Murphy. 

Last week Murphy told an interviewer, “I’m spending most of my time preparing for dystopia,” as if most voters hadn’t already seen enough dystopia under the senator’s own party.

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

Attorney General Tong succeeds Trump as foremost insurrectionist

By Chris Powell

The more fulminating they do, the more elected officials should be challenged and questioned by journalism. These days Connecticut’s fulminator-in-chief is Attorney General William Tong, a Democrat, yet he gets a free ride from the state’s news organizations and even from the General Assembly’s Republican minority.  

Two weeks ago Tong was joined at the state Capitol by the mayors of four Connecticut cities and other political leaders as he pledged to defend all illegal immigrants in the state against deportation by the incoming Republican administration of Donald Trump, though the federal government has exclusive authority over immigration law.

Ranked-choice voting is good but Connecticut isn’t ready

McMahon is qualified at last — by the shrieks of teacher unions

Connecticut’s nullifiers echo the old South’s segregationists

“Connecticut gets to decide how Connecticut wants to live,” Tong declared, directly contradicting the law. But no journalists asked the attorney general to explain his absurdity, even though some news organizations in the state often had denounced Trump as an “insurrectionist” for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal” rally that became a riot and briefly impeded congressional certification of the results of the 2020 presidential election, which Trump had lost.

What could be more insurrectionary than to claim that Connecticut is exempt from federal law — to claim that anyone who breaks into the country illegally and makes his way to Connecticut is above immigration law? Yet Connecticut has been obstructing federal immigration law enforcement since 2019, when it forbade its police officers from assisting federal immigration agents in most circumstances. Even before that New Haven had declared itself a “sanctuary city” and was issuing identification cards to illegal immigrants to facilitate their lawbreaking.

Connecticut also has violated federal law by purporting to legalize marijuana and managing and taxing its distribution.

While Trump’s attempt to obstruct certification of the 2020 election was disgraceful, the country seems to have returned him to the presidency because the administration that succeeded him has been so bad, in large part because of the illegal immigration it permitted.

But that doesn’t make insurrection right, and now the biggest insurrectionist in the country is Connecticut’s own attorney general. Fortunately for him, no news organizations will ask him to explain why he isn’t one.

If journalism in Connecticut ever resumed asking critical questions, it could put another one to the attorney general in response to another of his fulminations.

On the same day as he pledged to defend illegal immigrants, Tong issued a statement lamenting more rate increases by Connecticut’s two major electric utilities. 

He acknowledged that the utilities were not to blame. The new rates, Tong said, “are the result of a competitive bidding process,” whereby the utilities purchase electricity from independent generators and make no profit from the transactions.

But the attorney general added: “Connecticut families need real relief from these unsustainable costs. Everything has to be on the table. I’m going to keep fighting every single day in every single proceeding before the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority.” 

This was just vain chest thumping. For as was implicit in the attorney general’s statement, the rate increases were not caused by the utility company greed or mismanagement that he often rails against but by the general inflation that has been ravaging the country during his party’s administration of the federal government. 

So if “everything has to be on the table,” instead of pledging to keep hectoring the utility regulators, the attorney general should examine where all this inflation has come from, especially since no one in authority in either major political party seems to be asking.

That’s because the answer would incriminate both sides. For inflation results largely from the government’s creating and distributing so much more money than the economy matches in production of goods and services. Today most new goodies from government are financed without imposing regular taxes to pay for them. So the goodies are financed by inflation, a sort of tax but one that most people don’t understand.

The attorney general could explain it to them if he wasn’t afraid that it would cost him his usual scapegoats. 

——

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

‘Guardrails’ have big gaps and so don’t achieve much

By Chris Powell

There’s a big gap in Connecticut’s “fiscal guardrails,” the rules enacted in 2017 to require state government to save a big part of any budget surplus and apply it to its unfunded pension obligations. The gap was noted the other day in an essay in the Hartford Courant by the executive director of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, Joe Delong.

While the “guardrails” have slowed the increase in state spending, the governor and General Assembly lately have been producing budgets that favor state government’s own agencies and programs at the expense of the appropriations state government makes for municipal schools. That is, since the “guardrails” were enacted, state government has economized disproportionately with its share of the cost of municipal education. 

Ranked-choice voting is good but Connecticut isn’t ready

McMahon is qualified at last — by the shrieks of teacher unions

Connecticut’s nullifiers echo the old South’s segregationists

In turn, to keep school spending up, municipalities have raised their property taxes, most of whose revenue goes for schools.

Delong writes: “The national average states spend to support public education is 44%.  In Connecticut, since the enactment of the ‘guardrails,’ the state has dipped into the lower quartile at a 36% state share. This is not a sound fiscal spending control. It is a calculated spending shift out of the state budget and into the regressive and already overused property tax.” The burden of that tax falls most heavily on low- and middle-income households.  

This tax shift is not a direct result of the “guardrails” themselves but rather a result of the choice made by the governor and legislature. They can claim political credit for keeping state spending under control and avoiding state tax increases while local officials raise municipal spending and property taxes and risk the blame.

To some extent the governor and legislators may figure that they can let school aid to wealthier towns be eroded by inflation because those towns can afford higher property taxes and education aid should go mainly to poorer towns. 

But then as measured by student performance, public education in Connecticut has been declining for years without regard to spending. There may be some fairness to taxpayers in shifting school aid from wealthier towns to poorer ones, but Connecticut often has rewritten its school aid formulas since the state Supreme Court decision in Horton v. Meskill in 1977 without making any substantial difference in education. For while elected officials don’t want to acknowledge it, educational success is almost entirely a matter of parenting. Without good parenting of their students, schools can’t do much, regardless of how much they spend. 

Municipal spending and property tax increases could be avoided without increasing state aid if state government enacted controls on municipal spending, particularly by eliminating binding arbitration of municipal employee union contracts or allowing municipalities to elect their contract arbiters. But that would remove the power the teacher unions have over municipal treasuries, and the unions are far more influential than mere taxpayers.

There’s another big gap in the “fiscal guardrails,” one identified by political columnist Red Jahncke. He notes that the extra billions of dollars that the “guardrails” have been applying to state government’s vast unfunded state employee and teacher pension obligations aren’t reducing those obligations much at all. That’s because those obligations simultaneously are being increased by the big raises paid every year to state employees.

The pension obligations are based on salaries, so the cost of raises keeps increasing through the pensions. The unfunded pension obligations can’t be substantially reduced without much more restraint with payroll, as with a long freeze on salaries.

“Connecticut residents,” Delong notes, “deserve an open and honest debate over how we can experience the benefits of fiscal restraint without the continued hidden regressive tax increases that are buried within.”

Even more than that, Connecticut needs a debate about what it’s really getting for its taxes — effective public services or an amply compensated political army protecting an unchangeable and unaccountable regime. Greater progressivity in taxation does little good when the cost of government goes up anyway without a matching increase in public services; it just makes elected officials feel better about their ineffectiveness.

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

-END- 

Ranked-choice voting is good but Connecticut isn’t ready

By Chris Powell

Governor Lamont and some good-government activists want Connecticut to adopt ranked-choice voting. This is the mechanism of “instant runoff” elections in which voters rank candidates in order of their preference. Candidates receiving the fewest votes are eliminated and their votes are transferred to the remaining candidates in accordance with voter preferences until one candidate achieves a majority, not a mere plurality. 

McMahon is qualified at last — by the shrieks of teacher unions

Connecticut’s nullifiers echo the old South’s segregationists

Can Democrats ever admit the true cause of their defeat?

Under ranked-choice voting people still get only one vote but are allowed to change it prospectively. 

The governor has appointed a group to study the issue.

Ranked-choice voting might get complicated with an office for which there were many candidates, but it would be pretty simple where there were only three or four. 

Building a majority for the winner is the great virtue of ranked-choice voting. It works against candidates who represent extremes but who might win if a moderate majority is divided among two or more candidates.

In recent decades Connecticut has had some notable elections that had three or more candidates and whose winners well may not have won a runoff. 

There was the 1994 election for governor, a four-way race won by John G. Rowland, a Republican, with only 36% of the vote, the total vote being split by minor-party liberal and minor-party conservative candidates. 

The state’s election for U.S. senator in 1970 was won by Lowell P. Weicker Jr., a Republican, with only 42% of the vote, as the Democratic vote was split by Sen. Thomas J. Dodd’s independent candidacy after his party rejected him for embezzling campaign funds.

Those elections are reasons for Connecticut Democrats and liberals particularly to aspire to ranked-choice voting. But Connecticut Republicans and conservatives have a reason to aspire to it as well, though they haven’t realized it yet. 

That reason is Connecticut’s Working Families Party, which exists to push the Democratic Party to the left. The Working Families Party ordinarily cross-endorses Democrats who lean left but will threaten to run its own candidates against Democrats who aren’t leftist enough, thus splitting the Democratic vote and aiding Republicans. Ranked-choice voting would eliminate the Working Families Party’s leverage over Democrats, since people voting for a Working Families candidate almost certainly would list the Democratic candidate as their second choice over any Republican. Then moderate Democrats wouldn’t have to worry about the far-left party anymore. 

Meanwhile Connecticut has no far-right minor party to threaten Republican candidates in the same way. (Neighboring New York has both liberal and conservative minor parties that exist to push the major parties left and right, respectively.) 

Indeed, with ranked-choice voting no major-party candidates would have to worry about any “spoiler” candidates anymore. 

Unfortunately, a week after the recent election a report from Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers indicated that the state isn’t ready for ranked-choice voting and may not even be fully competent to hold ordinary elections.

Hearst’s investigation found that at least six municipalities reported to the secretary of the state voting data with gross mistakes — like more votes cast than registered voters and even more precincts reporting than real precincts. As might have been expected, Hartford failed in both respects, reporting more precincts than it had and more voters participating than votes cast.

Hearst’s investigation noticed these errors before election officials did.

There was no suggestion of corruption here, just negligence, but it may be chronic. For the Hearst report added, “Last year Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas traveled to East Haven more than 2½ months after Connecticut’s municipal elections to bestow an award for high voter turnout, only to learn that the apparent large number of voters was due to a data-entry error.”

Running an election can be exhausting, and registrars and their aides are often heroic. Connecticut’s recent conversion to early voting may make things harder. But before Connecticut tries revolutionizing more of its voting procedures, it should perfect the current ones. That’s the study group the governor should appoint.

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

-END-

McMahon is qualified at last by the shrieks of teacher unions

By Chris Powell

By conventional standards wrestling entrepreneur Linda McMahon’s qualifications to become the next U.S. education secretary are a bit thin.

She has had two years on Connecticut’s feckless State Board of Education, many years on the Board of Trustees of Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, and two years as chief of the U.S. Small Business Administration, and has run two spectacularly expensive but also spectacularly unsuccessful campaigns for U.S. senator during which she proved embarrassingly ignorant of government. She won’t be mistaken for a great educator. 

Connecticut’s nullifiers echo the old South’s segregationists

Can Democrats ever admit the true cause of their defeat?

Many Democrats are crazy too; and ‘on track’ to ignorance

Her real qualification has been the great wealth she amassed from adding grotesque crudity to the old fakery of professional wrestling. That wealth brought her close to once and future president Donald Trump.

But then almost anyone might elevate the U.S. Education Department more than has been done by its current secretary, Miguel Cardona, who was briefly Connecticut’s education commissioner before President Biden made him a national figure. Whereupon Cardona antagonized Congress with a disastrous and belated reformatting of the federal government’s application form for student financial aid, presided merrily over the Biden administration’s illegal forgiveness of college student loans, and pandered constantly to the teacher unions. 

McMahon will have to work hard to be more of an embarrassment than Cardona, whose main qualification for the president’s cabinet was just as political as McMahon’s wealth is: his Puerto Rican ancestry in an administration obsessed with identity politics.

But McMahon does have one genuine qualification for education secretary: the shrieking of the teacher unions against her. 

The president-elect would like to eliminate the Education Department, since it mainly constitutes patronage for the unions and the Democratic Party, whose army the unions provide. Since Congress is unlikely to permit eliminating the department, Trump and McMahon at least will get the department to reverse its “woke” initiatives and mandates on states and to promote school choice. That is, the new administration may break the monopoly of public education, which these days, especially in Connecticut, is hardly public at all. In Connecticut teachers are the only government employees whose job evaluations are exempt from disclosure under freedom-of-information law.

Since the Education Department is an annex of the Democratic Party, Republicans aim to find more ways of subsidizing private, church, or “charter” schools, schools beyond union control. The unions and the Democrats charge that this will divert money from public schools, but the charge is misleading, since greater government financial support for nonpublic schools will divert students as well, reducing public school expense.

In any case Connecticut’s “minimum budget requirement” law for public schools already makes it almost impossible for school systems to reduce spending even amid declining student enrollment, another law enacted to serve teachers and their unions, not students.

The trend away from public schools is not entirely to be celebrated. For many years the public schools were the great democratizers, institutions through which most children passed and met people different from them. But as the expanded welfare system of the “Great Society” began destroying the families of the poor, causing child neglect and demoralization and dragging down city schools, middle- and upper-class families realized that decent education required getting away from the underclass kids, and so the democratizing influence of the public schools diminished sharply. 

More government support for nonpublic schools will weaken low-performing public schools by drawing away their better students. Connecticut’s regional “magnet” schools have already done this to Hartford’s schools while failing to integrate them racially. But at least nonpublic schools may improve education for the students who use them to escape hopeless public schools, and this may be better than nothing.

Student performance in the United States long has been declining despite the U.S. Department of Education, even before the recent virus epidemic, on which educators seem likely to blame educational failure for the next century or two. While the teacher unions love the department for its patronage, the country easily could do without it, and who better than Linda McMahon to make it even more ridiculous than Cardona did and then body-slam it into oblivion?

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

Connecticut’s nullifiers echo the old South’s segregationists

By Chris Powell

Upon his inauguration as governor of darkest Alabama in January 1963, George Wallace famously proclaimed his defiance of the federal government on the steps of the state Capitol in Montgomery: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”

At a rally on the steps of Connecticut’s Capitol this week the state’s attorney general, William Tong, struck a similar pose of defiance. He pledged that Connecticut would never distinguish between legal and illegal immigration and would strive to obstruct enforcement of federal immigration law.

Can Democrats ever admit the true cause of their defeat?

Many Democrats are crazy too; and ‘on track’ to ignorance

Immigration racket operates from city halls

“This is the sovereign state of Connecticut,” Tong declared. “We delegated limited powers to the federal government, but beyond those powers, Connecticut gets to decide how Connecticut wants to live.”

But immigration law is entirely within the authority of the federal government. Connecticut has no sovereignty there. Connecticut doesn’t get to decide to live outside federal immigration law any more than Alabama and the other nullification states of the segregationist South got to decide to live outside federal civil rights law.

That the federal government under the administration of Tong’s political party lately has failed to enforce immigration law hasn’t changed the law, and the recent national election has prompted a change of administrations largely because most voters — even, it seems, most members of Tong’s own party — want immigration law enforced again. Most people object to the anarchic admission of more than 10 million immigrants without normal review and preparations for their housing, schooling, medical care, and policing — a policy failure inflicting much expense and social distress.

The mayors of Hartford, New Haven, Stamford, and Norwalk joined the attorney general at the Capitol in pledging to defend all immigrants in their cities, legal and illegal alike. “Going after hardworking immigrants in our communities is not going to keep us safe,” Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam said. “It’s going to lead to more fear and uncertainty.” 

How do Arulampalam and the other mayors know that every illegal immigrant in Connecticut would never do wrong and never become a public charge? How do they know that any criminals, spies, and terrorists who have entered the country illegally are staying outside the state?

Of course they don’t. This is just an article of political faith among the woke. If challenged, some of them may sputter that illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes per capita than the native-born, as if that excuses all crimes by illegal immigrants and excuses admitting anyone without rudimentary vetting.

But the attorney general, the mayors, Governor Lamont, and state legislators needn’t worry about having to make distinctions between legal and illegal immigration, since no news organizations will ask them to. 

Indeed, serious journalism would have asked them by now to comment about the immigration fraud racket reported the other day by the New Haven Independent — the marriage broker business operated out of New Haven and Bridgeport city halls by the vice chairwoman of the Bridgeport Democratic City Committee, ballot-harvester extraordinaire Wanda Geter-Pataky, who has been arranging marriages between young U.S. citizens and much older foreigners seeking the right to stay in the country, marriages of people who appear not even to know each other.

The immigration fraud story was retold by other newspapers in the state, and the attorney general, the mayors, the governor, and state legislators almost certainly saw it, but only a few Republicans expressed concern about it. Presumably the others condone what is happening.

While the attorney general and the mayors were assuring Connecticut that unlimited, unvetted immigration — open-borders policy — is nothing to worry about, the police chief of Berlin, Germany, was warning Jews and homosexuals to avoid Arab neighborhoods because, as a result of Germany’s open-borders policy, the culture there now threatens them. 

That’s how uncontrolled immigration has transported Europe back to medieval times. But in Connecticut the attorney general and the city mayors want the federal government to do nothing to restrict the entry of people who might undermine the country’s democratic and secular nature. To the attorney general and the mayors, the threat to democracy is President-elect Donald Trump, who would restore ordinary controls on immigration. 

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

Can Democrats ever admit the true cause of their defeat?

By Chris Powell

When in 1974, having persuaded Ohio’s state legislature to impose an income tax, Gov. John Gilligan, a Democrat, was narrowly defeated for re-election by his Republican predecessor, he was remarkably honest about it. He took full responsibility. The vote, Gilligan said, was simply a rejection of him.

Gilligan fairly could have made excuses. He had lost by only 11,000 votes out of more than 3 million cast, even as a leftist independent candidate got 95,000 votes that probably would have gone to Gilligan, and there was a sharp decline in voter turnout in Ohio’s most Democratic cities. (While Ohioans were sore about the income tax, among other things, they have yet to repeal it.)

Many Democrats are crazy too; and ‘on track’ to ignorance

Immigration racket operates from city halls

Republicans fake a mandate and Murphy fakes concern

Are Democrats still capable of such candor and clear thinking in their reflection on Donald Trump’s surprisingly easy defeat of Kamala Harris in this month’s presidential election? They don’t seem like it.

Some Democrats are blaming voters for not being persuaded that President Biden and Vice President Harris had given them the best economy ever, as if people shouldn’t believe the contrary evidence of their own lives. 

Some Democrats are blaming Trump’s supposed demagoguery against minority groups, though his support among those groups increased strongly.

Some, like Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, say the Democrats have lost touch with their traditional constituencies and need to “rebuild the left,” though the leftism of the Biden-Harris administration — from open borders to mandatory transgenderism and electric cars to defunding police — provided the material for the most effective Trump campaign commercials.

Far more probable is that, as with Gilligan in Ohio in 1974, most voters this month just determined that the incumbent administration had been awful. What else could explain why most people were ready to get rid of that administration even at the cost of returning the ever-troublesome Trump to the White House?

What else could explain the big decline in voter participation in Connecticut’s cities, Democratic strongholds, just like the big decline in Ohio’s cities in 1974? It seems that even many Democrats this month were profoundly discouraged by their party’s performance in power.

Especially obliged to reconsider are those Democrats and their apologists in the news media who think the economy under the Biden-Harris administration has been strong. Anyone paying attention should have noticed long ago that government’s economic and inflation data is manipulated and falsified.

A low unemployment rate is a lie when the labor participation rate is low as well. Inflation in necessities long has been far higher than the government has been reporting under its deceitful calculation criteria. Maybe the Democratic big thinkers can’t discern that rising homelessness and demand at food banks are signs of impoverishment, not prosperity. But people who live in the real world can.

What the big thinkers have missed is that the things they praise the Biden-Harris administration for were more than nullified by inflation. 

So what if, by government decree, the price of insulin has been cut and a few more people have medical insurance when all other necessities, from food to housing, have soared in price and absorbed the savings and then some?

Whatever good things the outgoing administration did, they only seemed to be free. They weren’t financed by taxes but by money creation, which, in excess, creates the inflation that has just caused so many people to decide that, awful as Trump may be, the Democrats are worse.

Who among the Democrats — especially those in the Democratic sinecure of Connecticut, where even the most obtuse and moronic Democrats enjoy long political careers — can acknowledge the obvious and act on it? Who among them can agree openly with voters that their national administration failed terribly?

At least in his reluctance to “rebuild the left” in Connecticut with the spending spree it desires, Governor Lamont may think that state government’s seemingly strong financial position is vulnerable to imminent recession and renewed inflation even if Joe Biden doesn’t start another world war, his final insult to the country.  

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