Hayes and Logan campaign ads mislead and misrepresent

By Chris Powell

Connecticut can be glad that it has at least one seriously competitive campaign for a major office in November’s election — the campaign for U.S. representative in the 5th Congressional District, where U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, a Democrat, is being challenged by former state Sen. George Logan, a Republican who almost defeated her two years ago.

But these days competitive campaigns are usually accompanied by ugly television commercials almost totalitarian in their lies or half-truths. The worst of them are usually sponsored by a national political action committee so the candidates they are trying to help don’t get quite as tainted as they should be.

In Connecticut Republicans have been broadcasting a commercial denouncing Hayes for being the only member of Connecticut’s congressional delegation who voted against legislation to classify fentanyl as a most dangerous drug. The commercial has video of Hayes smiling and laughing as if she is thinking about deadly drugs.

The commercial means to give the impression that Hayes is indifferent to the drug problem or maybe even a drug dealer herself. It presumes, probably correctly, that most viewers won’t stop a moment to think that the congresswoman must have had a better reason for opposing the bill.

So the Hartford Courant inquired of Hayes and found that better reason. 

The legislation, Hayes said, imposed mandatory minimum prison sentences for possession of any amount of fentanyl, not distinguishing between traffickers and teenagers possessing small amounts or some substance containing fentanyl. According to Hayes, the bill also allowed judges no discretion in sentencing and lacked appropriations for drug treatment or law enforcement. While she was indeed the only member of Congress from Connecticut to oppose the bill, 130 Democrats from other states did.

Agree with it or not, this was a reasonable explanation.

Meanwhile Hayes and the Democrats are doing the same kind of thing to Logan, only worse.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is broadcasting a commercial noting that Logan has said he would not vote to put into federal law the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the abortion rights case of Roe v. Wade. The commercial construes this to mean that Logan will vote with “Donald Trump and his extreme MAGA movement … to outlaw all abortions, even here in Connecticut.”

The commercial concludes: “A vote for George Logan is a vote to ban abortion.”

While the Republican anti-Hayes commercial is only misleading, the Democratic anti-Logan commercial is complete misrepresentation. Logan repeatedly has committed himself to defending Connecticut’s abortion law, which incorporates Roe v. Wade policy, and Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, doesn’t support outlawing abortion federally but favors leaving the issue to the states. 

In any case, even a Congress with a Republican majority would not have the votes to outlaw abortion nationally.

Ironically, when it comes to abortion, Hayes and most Democrats in Congress are the extremists, not Logan, Trump, and the Republicans. The Democrats support what they call the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would prohibit any government regulation of abortion. 

That is, a vote for Hayes is a vote for the abortion of viable fetuses and even for leaving born-alive children, bleeding and gasping for breath, to die on surgical tables. 

Hayes, most other Democrats in Congress, and many elsewhere don’t really want to restore Roe v. Wade. That case held that abortion prior to fetal viability was an individual right but that after viability government properly could regulate or even prohibit abortion. As constitutional law this was questionable but as politics and policy it balanced the interests at stake and gave protection to the developed fetus. 

Over the next decade or so even most anti-abortion states may incorporate Roe v. Wade policy into their law as Connecticut has done. But as the Women’s Health Protection Act shows and as the more candid among them acknowledge, Democrats want to “go beyond Roe” and give the country all abortions all the time. Strangely, the only moderates left in congressional politics on the abortion issue are Republicans.   

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

Voter fraud may be rare, so Connecticut Democrats want more

By Chris Powell

Fourteen days of early voting began this week in Connecticut for the Nov. 5 federal and state elections, and since this early voting must be done in person, there’s nothing really objectionable about it. Early voters risk being unable to respond to late developments in election campaigns, but they may avoid long lines at their regular polling places on Election Day — if municipalities adequately staff their early-voting places and don’t cause long lines there too.

While early voting was used for primary elections a few weeks ago, participation was minimal and so the procedure remains experimental. So election officials will adjust it as seems appropriate.

But early voting could be the preface to much greater risk, a risk that voters are being asked to approve in this election: a proposed state constitutional amendment that is on the ballot. The amendment would empower the General Assembly to authorize everyone to vote by absentee ballot, eliminating current restrictions, which allow absentee balloting only for people who on Election Day are on active military duty or expect to be out of town or confined by sickness, disability, or religion.

That is, the absentee ballot amendment will invite the legislature to tell voters that there is no compelling reason for them to vote in person. 

This couldn’t be more mistaken.

Of course many people will be glad to accept the convenience of voting without having to appear anywhere. But Connecticut’s Constitution has had a good reason for restricting absentee ballots: election security. 

Elections are most secure when voters appear in person, show identification, and cast their vote directly. Their completed ballot never leaves their hands before it is cast. Absentee voting — which is mostly voting by U.S. mail or insecure drop boxes — separates voters from the casting of their ballots and potentially puts those ballots in the hands of any number of intermediaries. Absentee voting also allows political people to solicit and cajole ballots from the frail, indifferent, and politically vulnerable.

Practically every recent election in impoverished and corrupt Bridgeport has had absentee ballot fraud or improprieties. In the city’s most recent mayoral election there was evidence that the campaign of Mayor Joe Ganim sought to get a list of residents of city-subsidized housing for use in obtaining absentee ballot applications — a list of people who could be told that voting for the mayor would help them keep their apartments.

Sure enough, though Ganim served seven years in federal prison for corruption committed during his first stint as mayor, his second stint has been achieved repeatedly by big pluralities in absentee ballots.

The danger isn’t just in Bridgeport. In 2022 the former chairman of Stamford’s Democratic City Committee was convicted on 14 counts of forgery and making a false statement involving absentee ballot fraud in a city election.

An opponent of the constitutional amendment, Southington state Rep. Gale Mastrofrancesco, the ranking House Republican member of the General Assembly’s Government Administration and Elections Committee, notes that the mass mailing of absentee ballot applications during the recent virus epidemic showed that Connecticut’s voter rolls are poorly maintained and excessively vulnerable to fraud. That’s because 184,000 applications were undeliverable through the mail and more than 50,000 absentee ballots that were sent were never returned. 

“Our voter rolls are a mess,” Mastrofranceso says. “Our voter rolls are not updated.”

Most advocacy of the amendment for unrestricted absentee voting comes from Democrats, who contend that voter fraud is rare. Maybe it is, but Democrats seem to want it to become common. For Democrats are the party of massive illegal immigration, open borders, and “sanctuary cities” that nullify federal immigration law — cities including New Haven and Hartford, which, like Bridgeport, provide huge Democratic pluralities. 

The Democrats are also the party that opposes requiring voters to show identification, and many urban Democrats want to allow non-citizens to vote. 

The Democrats are against election security. 

Connecticut’s early voting provides more than enough additional convenience in voting. The proposed constitutional amendment risks corruption and should be defeated.

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

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Even awful school systems must play the hand they’re dealt

By Chris Powell

School officials in Meriden are sore that this column recently included the city in a list of Connecticut cities whose schools have serious problems, a list with New Haven, Hartford, Waterbury, and Bridgeport. These problems include chronic absenteeism, an influx of immigrant students who don’t speak English, parental neglect, and other pathologies of poverty. 

While the column was correct, Meriden educators construed it to imply that their schools perform as poorly as those of the other cities listed. Other readers may have construed it the same way. After all, maybe only the schools of Baltimore, Chicago, and Philadelphia might not feel insulted to be cited in the same sentence with the schools of New Haven, Hartford, Bridgeport, and Waterbury.

But in recent years Meriden’s schools have made progress. While the city’s student test scores are still low, they are significantly higher than scores in New Haven, Hartford, Bridgeport, and Waterbury. Scores in Meriden’s lower grades have been rising, and five city schools recently won awards.

School administration is often terrible, especially in cities, but then all school systems have to play the hands they are dealt. Education is mostly a matter of parenting, and all Connecticut school systems with awful student performance have awful demographics — many poor households with fatherless and neglected children and growing numbers of immigrant children who don’t speak English.

If the student populations of Connecticut’s impoverished cities were exchanged with the student populations of the state’s middle-class or wealthy suburbs, suddenly the cities would have the best-performing schools and the suburbs the worst, regardless of administration.  

Connecticut policy long has been to concentrate poverty in the cities and — with social promotion, tenure, and binding arbitration of union contracts — to prohibit accountability for educators, students, and parents alike. Meanwhile under the Biden-Harris administration federal policy has presumed cruelly that the increase in poverty that has been caused by high inflation is acceptable, and that, quite without substantial expansion, the country’s schools, hospitals, and housing should accommodate millions more impoverished immigrants every year so Democrats can gain control of more congressional districts.

Under these circumstances little educational success can be expected.

Of course it might be nice if school administrators, teachers, and their unions complained loudly — or at all — about these destructive policies and weren’t so easily quieted by the usual pay raises. But then everybody has to make a living, even if it’s hard to imagine how journalists will make a living when public education leaves most of the population illiterate.

LOGAN’S TIMIDITY: In his debate the other day with Democratic U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, who is seeking re-election in Connecticut’s 5th Congressional District, Republican nominee George Logan demonstrated that he still hasn’t mastered the basic question about Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Pressed by Hayes about whether he supports Trump, Logan couldn’t speak Trump’s name. Instead Logan said he supports his party’s ticket.

Logan seems to think that voters don’t know about Trump’s troublesome character and demeanor. So Logan won’t acknowledge them, won’t assert that in this election policy issues are much more important than character and demeanor, and won’t note that elections often pose the challenge of determining the lesser of two evils.

Would Trump’s supporters really vote for Hayes, an extreme-left Democrat, to punish Logan for acknowledging what most of them already know?

REGULATORS WON’T EXPLAIN: If, as the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority likes to suggest, electricity prices in Connecticut are too high because of the greed of the big, bad electric utilities — Eversource and United Illuminating — why are no power generators offering to sell electricity any cheaper in the state? 

According to the list posted on the internet by state government, no generator comes even close to undercutting the “standard offer” price for which Eversource and UI provide electricity. Apparently Eversource and UI are actually Connecticut’s least expensive electricity providers.

Last week a PURA publicist refused to answer this writer’s questions about this situation or make the agency’s chairwoman available to answer them. Legislators should try to get an explanation.

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

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Poverty devours Connecticut but who will ask its cause?

By Chris Powell

Rising homelessness. Growing demand at food and diaper banks. Chronic absenteeism at schools. Brawls at high school football games. Schools closed by threats of violence. Street takeovers and car thefts by young hooligans. More drug abuse, mentally ill children, teen suicides, and abandoned pets.

Such news reports indicating worsening poverty and social disintegration in Connecticut may be dismissed as anecdotal or sensationalist. But last week the state’s United Way organization published a report documenting the increase of poverty in the state and estimating that as many as 39% of its households live in poverty.

High inflation is much to blame, since wages for many have not kept up with prices, especially for necessities.    

Also last week the Hartford Courant reported that more than half Connecticut’s students have “high needs.” That is, they qualify for free or discounted school meals, have disabilities, or are unable to speak English.

Three weeks ago the Connecticut Mirror reported about a girl who recently graduated from high school in Hartford and has been admitted to the University of Connecticut though she can’t read or write. 

And last week the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities (CCM) issued a report on a study it undertook with Dalio Education about the state’s estimated 119,000 “disconnected” young people. The report called for spending another $700 million on primary education.

Unfortunately the study expressed no interest in the causes of worsening poverty. It sought only to remediate problems poverty causes for young people. 

Thus the study was trying mainly just to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, as with its proposal to refine high school graduation requirements, which are and would remain a polite fiction, having long ago been nullified by social promotion, Connecticut’s primary policy of public education. Social promotion explains not just the illiterate Hartford graduate but also the longstanding failure of most state students to perform at grade level throughout their schooling. It explains their lack of qualification for more than menial work after graduation.

Where is all this poverty, alienation, and social disintegration coming from?

The response from officialdom has been not to ask about the causes of these problems but just to throw more money at their symptoms. 

Don’t ask where inflation comes from; just give the poor more welfare. 

Don’t ask why most students are never really educated but given diplomas anyway; just keep pretending that education correlates with teacher salaries.

And don’t be horrified about the illiterate Hartford graduate. Indeed, only two state legislators seem to have responded with any relevance to that story. Other legislators and educators construed the story as demonstrating only a lack of spending and transparency in spending. So there will be no risk of accountability for anyone in Hartford’s schools and city government, nor in state government.

The crucial lack of transparency is with results. Connecticut has no proficiency tests for advancement from grade to grade and graduation. Educators and legislators don’t want the public to know the results of their education spending, for that would be even more horrifying.

Educational failure and social disintegration have less to do with schooling and more with a lack of parents and parenting — that is, more to do with child neglect. A third of Connecticut’s children live with only one parent, yet the CCM study doesn’t even mention parenting. 

What has broken the family, and why is this breakdown assumed to be the natural order of things? No one in authority asks.

Social promotion doesn’t improve education and job skills; it destroys the incentive for children to go to school at all and the incentive for parents to get them there. Seventeen percent of Connecticut students are chronically absent; in the cities it approaches and sometimes exceeds 30%.

Those who would remediate these problems don’t mean to solve them but just to find a more comfortable way of living with them — with bigger and more expensive government, of course. Connecticut has been doing it for decades and it hasn’t worked yet.

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

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Mistakenly doubled salary explains state government

By Chris Powell

Miracle of miracles, Connecticut’s Correction Department has arranged to recover a total of nearly $164,000 spent in 54 mistaken salary overpayments to an employee who was the highlight of a report by the state auditors in August. 

Correction Commissioner Angel Quiros disclosed the repayment plan the other day in a letter to two state legislators who had inquired about the embarrassing case: the Senate Republican minority leader, Brookfield’s Stephen Harding, and Sen. John A. Kissel of Enfield, the ranking Republican senator on the General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee.

The commissioner said the overpaid employee, Lt. Devone Bishop, already has repaid $42,000 with about $122,000 still due and to be repaid in payroll deductions. The deductions began last year and are to continue for another five years.

Of course there always will be occasional mistakes with payroll in any organization as large as the Correction Department, but the auditors’ report said the department has much more trouble with money than it should. In his letter to the senators, Commissioner Quiros blamed the overpayments on complicated collective bargaining agreements covering many bargaining units, high turnover in payroll positions, and the classification of those positions as merely entry level.

But there are many unspoken problems here too. 

1) The overpayments to the lieutenant, each more than $3,000, were made in 54 bi-weekly checks, which means they extended over nearly two years before they were caught. This suggests not only negligent payroll handling but also negligent budgeting. In effect for two years the department was paying for an extra employee who didn’t exist.

2) The lieutenant took the mistaken money for nearly two years without reporting it to a supervisor. The mistaken money nearly doubled her salary, so she couldn’t have been unaware of the problem. As a lieutenant she was and — in what may be a wonder of collective bargaining — remains a supervisor herself. How can the commissioner and Governor Lamont still have confidence in the integrity of such an employee?

3) The commissioner’s letter to the senators hints that he doesn’t need to have such confidence — that even if he didn’t have confidence in the lieutenant, given the restrictions of collective bargaining, he couldn’t fire her anyway. Indeed, the situation is more absurd insofar as the lieutenant, in what may be another wonder of collective bargaining, appears to have been given a raise even after her taking the mistaken money was discovered, and to recover the money she dishonestly accepted for two years the department has guaranteed her employment for another five.

4) What exactly did the lieutenant do with all that money that has prevented her from repaying more of it by now? 

5) Things this wild would not happen and just be shrugged off in any organization trying to be efficient. In an organization trying to be efficient there would be consequences. But the commissioner told the senators that, apart from the lieutenant’s six-year repayment plan, the only consequences in this case were that some payroll personnel were “counseled and retrained” — not fired, demoted, penalized financially, or even merely reprimanded. 

This failure of accountability is apparently another result of collective bargaining, since any actual discipline could be appealed to the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration, whose purpose usually seems to be to ensure that no unionized state government employee is ever held accountable for misconduct or incompetence.

6) Finally, the case of the sticky-fingered lieutenant was only the most sensational part of the audit of the Correction Department. The audit also found that financial mismanagement in the department is pervasive, involving payments for compensatory time, overtime, workers’ compensation, union leave, and raises awarded prior to evaluations. But the audit has passed without any acknowledgment or comment from the governor, a Democrat, or from Democratic state legislators, who overwhelmingly control the General Assembly. 

That is, even the grossest mismanagement in state government seems to bother only a couple of Republican legislators. When mismanagement benefits unionized state employees, a politically active and pernicious special interest, most elected officials in Connecticut wave the public interest goodbye. 

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

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Much delusion in Connecticut about a ‘two-state solution’

By Chris Powell

This week as Connecticut marked the anniversary of Gaza’s invasion of Israel and the slaughter, rape, and abduction of hundreds of Israelis, there were more calls for a ceasefire not only between Gaza and Israel but also between Israel and Lebanon, whose de-facto government, Hezbollah, has joined Gaza’s war, launching hundreds of rockets into Israel’s north.

Some ceasefire calls in Connecticut came from Jews, including members of Jewish Voice for Peace, who accused Israel of genocide for defending itself and urged that U.S. military supplies to Israel be stopped.

In calling for a ceasefire members of Jewish Voice for Peace joined other protesters in Connecticut and around the country in blaming Israel for the latest carnage. Few of them protested last October after Gaza’s attack on Israel. Apparently that slaughter of innocents didn’t strike them as genocide. Indeed, those calling for a ceasefire are not really calling for peace at all. The history of Israel and its neighbors since Israel’s re-establishment by the United Nations in 1948 has been a history of ceasefire after ceasefire — that is, constant war. 

Ceasefires in the war against Israel are just pauses allowing the aggressors to restock and regroup for their next attack. Tired of the ceasefire racket, Israel now may strive to settle the conflict forever by destroying all those committed to its destruction, though about half of Israelis seem to be as deluded as Connecticut’s Jewish Voice for Peace.

For the conflict’s only issue has been Israel’s simple existence. No peace is possible until Israel’s right to exist is guaranteed by those who have sworn to destroy the country, and it seems that no one among Israel’s proclaimed enemies — Gaza and Hamas, Lebanon and Hezbollah, and their patron, the theocratic fascist regime in Iran — will ever make peace rather than a mere ceasefire.

That’s because any leader of Israel’s enemies who sincerely offers peace — that is, recognition, legitimacy, and security — will soon be assassinated by the irreconcilables in his own ranks, just as Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981 by Egyptian irreconcilables, religious crazies, for making peace. 

Of course Israel has its irreconcilables and religious crazies too, one of whom assassinated Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin in 1995 for trying to make peace with the Palestine Liberation Organization and its leader, Yasser Arafat. But irreconcilables aren’t yet a majority in Israel, even if Palestinian irreconcilables soon may make them a majority. 

President Bill Clinton crafted a peace plan that gave Arafat and the PLO almost everything they demanded. Israel’s government accepted it but Arafat still rejected it, knowing that if he signed it he would be signing his own death warrant.

So the war and ceasefires continue — in large part because the United Nations, Iran, and even the United States subsidize the people ruled by the irreconcilables in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. Those people have no incentive to demand peace from their rulers as long as their rulers don’t have to provide basic services to them and instead can devote their resources to war.

Just as thoughtless as the calls for another ceasefire are the calls — echoed by all members of Connecticut’s congressional delegation — for a “two-state solution.” These calls are misdirected at Israel, which long accepted a “two-state solution” in principle while Hamas and Hezbollah always rejected it and still do.

Those calling for a “two-state solution” seem not to have noticed that prior to last October two states were already in effect, since Israel had evacuated Gaza in 2005. Indeed, since Hezbollah long has been the de-facto ruler of southern Lebanon, prior to last October a three-state solution was in effect. But in 2006 Gazans elected Hamas, which quickly resumed its war against Israel. Even now Gazans prefer their own destruction by Israel to letting Israel have peace within any borders.

Israel’s enemies are unlikely to accept any peace of co-existence until their own states are leveled and the world stops subsidizing their incorrigibility.

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

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Getting electric rates down requires more natural gas

By Chris Powell

Connecticut has nearly the highest electricity prices in the country in large part because it lacks a good mix of sources of energy for electrical generation. The Millstone nuclear power station in Waterford is the biggest source of the state’s electricity, with natural gas second. This year electricity from natural gas has been cheaper than electricity from nuclear power, and Connecticut might have used more gas if gas lines into the state could carry more. 

Operators of two major natural gas pipelines serving Connecticut propose to expand them, but last month environmental extremists, led by the Sierra Club, went to Governor Lamont’s office to deliver a letter opposing more pipeline service to the state — and, implicitly, opposing any use of natural gas. More natural gas, they argue, means more “fracking” to obtain it and more “greenhouse gases.” Expanding the pipelines, they wrote, “will lock us into unreliable, unaffordable, unhealthy, and unjust energy.”

This is nonsense.

Maybe someday solar, wind, and water will be able to power Connecticut inexpensively, but people have to live in the present, so what is “just” about the state’s high electric rates? Since electricity is a necessity of life, high rates fall most heavily on the poor. What is “just” about that? 

Natural gas has a long and successful record as an energy source and will be as reliable as government wants it to be, as by encouraging production and facilitating delivery. 

By contrast, the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow, and rivers don’t always flow enough to provide hydroelectric power. While solar, wind, and hydro don’t produce air pollution, they damage the environment in other ways. Connecticut already has controversy about solar farms devouring farmland and destroying forests.

No energy source is perfect, but in respect to air pollution and “greenhouse gases,” natural gas is a great improvement over its predecessors, coal and oil, and may be preferable to nuclear power as well, at least while nuclear power creates deadly radioactive waste for which the federal government has failed to establish a safe repository. Indeed, it is strange that Connecticut’s environmental extremists are so alarmed about natural gas but silent about the risks of nuclear power, the state’s leading source of electricity.

Getting more natural gas into Connecticut and building more gas-fired electricity-generating plants are the most practical means of reducing the state’s electricity rates and increasing the state’s energy options.

Most state legislators and legislative candidates, along with the governor, are bemoaning high electricity prices, and the Republican minority in the General Assembly has asked the governor to call a special session to address the issue. The governor, a Democrat, and the leaders of the legislature’s Democratic majority have opposed a special session, arguing that nothing can be done about electricity prices quickly, before the legislature convenes for its regular session in January.

That’s not quite right, since a special session could reallocate state government money, particularly from surplus funds, which are nominally high now, to the electric utilities for crediting to customer bills. 

But the state budget surplus is mainly a matter of how much state government wants to keep cheating on its pension funds by maintaining or even increasing their unfunded liabilities, thereby charging future taxpayers for services they never received. Columnist Red Jahncke has noted that the big pay raises for state employees in recent years have driven up their pension entitlements and nullified most of the supposed gains made by extra deposits to the pension funds.

Besides, as the governor says, using the state surplus would not be a long-term solution for electricity rates, just a political gesture.

The long-term solution is to facilitate more use of natural gas for electricity in Connecticut until the Nirvana expected by the environmental extremists arrives: perfectly clean and free energy. So obtaining more natural gas should be an issue in the current campaign for the General Assembly, and the governor and legislative leaders should pledge to put it high on their agenda.

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

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Overgenerous pension system is politically impossible to fix

By Chris Powell

An angry reader notes that after 24 years as a judge, the Connecticut Supreme Court’s chief justice, Richard A. Robinson, has just “retired” while joining a big national law firm, Day Pitney, which has five offices in Connecticut. “So now,” the reader writes, “he will be getting a full pension from state taxpayers plus another full-time paycheck. Why should the state pay him a pension if he is still working? This is why the state is virtually bankrupt. It’s crazy. How come the press doesn’t report this part of it?”

Maybe what’s left of journalism in Connecticut doesn’t report the pension angle because it’s an old story, not that it ever has been told very well.

Robinson’s immediate predecessor as chief justice, Chase T. Rogers, retired six years ago after 20 years as a judge and then went to work at Day Pitney too. She now draws an annual state pension of more than $160,000, quite apart from her salary at the law firm. Since Robinson had four more years as a judge than Rogers, his state pension may be a bit larger. Since both retired judges are in their mid-60s, with continued good health they probably will have quite a few years earning at the law firm at least as much as their pensions.

But such opportunities are not peculiar to retired Connecticut judges. Virtually all retired state employees are eligible to do the same kind of thing — that is, to collect an excellent retirement pension from state government even as they launch second careers. 

The practice is especially popular among state troopers and municipal police officers, who typically can retire with great pensions at a young age — in their late 40s or early 50s — and then qualify for other good jobs to take them into their actual retirement.

Sometimes it’s a bit of a racket, as was shown in 2020 by the internationally notorious case of State Trooper Matthew Spina. The trooper was video-recorded by a motorist he stopped in New Haven and the video was posted on the internet. It showed the trooper hysterical with rage, screaming at the motorist, ordering him out of his car and handcuffing him, bullying and threatening him, searching his backpack, and stomping on his possessions before uncuffing him and letting him go without even ticketing him, since he had done nothing wrong, or at least nothing actionable.

While inflicting this abuse Spina declared that he hated his job and the public and was eager to retire in 14 months.  

Spina appeared to be middle-aged and a little journalism revealed that for five years he had been working so many extra hours that his overtime pay exceeded or nearly equaled his base annual salary of almost $100,000. That is, like many other troopers he was risking burning himself out and driving himself crazy to attain the magical threshold of the state pension system — three extremely high-earning years from which his pension would be calculated.

State police management readily obliged his mad pursuit of a pension bonanza.

Spina indeed retired the next year and now draws an annual state pension of more than $116,000. If he has another job now, his pretend retirement may be almost as comfortable as that of the retired judges.

Of course Connecticut’s state employee pension system isn’t a racket for everyone, but it is often excessively generous. It is a fair question as to why state government should pay large pensions, or any pensions, to people earning substantial amounts in second careers.

But there is a simple explanation. It’s that Connecticut has many more politically active state and municipal government employees and retired employees than it has politically attentive and engaged citizens.

Anyone who sees extravagance here should try putting the pension question to his state legislators. Few legislators are likely to express any criticism, lest they alienate a powerful special interest. If Connecticut is ever to have a better public life, it will need a better public.

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

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Throwing money at schools is a policy needing an audit

By Chris Powell

Like public education in most American cities, public education in Connecticut’s cities has been chaotic and ineffective for decades. Ever since the enactment of the Education Enhancement Act in 1986 the state’s response to this failure has been to throw money at schools and particularly at teacher salaries, on the premise that teacher salaries and student performance are correlated. 

But student performance has not improved. Indeed, as measured by standardized tests, student performance has steadily worsened, to the point where many educators now want to eliminate standardized testing, claiming that it is somehow racist, though then there would be no measurement of results and no chance of accountability for both students and schools.

So educators and the elected officials who defer to them keep clamoring for more money, as New Haven’s did this week at “September Surge” rallies held at three schools in the city. Though New Haven’s schools received $127 million in emergency funding from the federal government during the recent virus epidemic, city educators and Mayor Justin Elicker said the schools need many millions more. They demanded that schools be “fully funded.”

What exactly does “fully funded” mean? No clear numerical answer has ever been offered. As a practical matter it means only a lot more, every year forever.

Mayor Elicker said New Haven has been doing its part, having increased its school appropriation by 42% over the last five years. He contended that the city should get more education aid from the state and federal governments because it spends slightly less per pupil than the state average even as the city’s students have greater needs, 75% coming from poor households and many not speaking English well or at all.

Many New Haven students have been traumatized by unstable upbringing, and many are immigrants, legal and illegal. To hear educators tell it, nearly every student in New Haven needs his own social worker, “paraprofessional” (that is, assistant teacher), psychologist, and English tutor — and maybe a nanny and chauffeur as well, since the chronic absenteeism rate of students in New Haven’s schools is 37.5%, highest in the state. (How extra services will improve education for children whose parents can’t or won’t get them to school is also yet to be explained.)

Besides, to some extent the greater need of the city’s students is New Haven’s own fault, since the city long has declared itself a “sanctuary city,” a brazen nullifier of federal immigration law.

In any case Connecticut has a right to resent the theater some New Haven teachers attempted during this week’s rallies as they marched through one of the targeted schools. According to the New Haven Independent, the teachers crouched, held up their hands, rubbed their thumbs and forefingers together as if holding dollar bills, and shouted: “Show me the money!”

A skeptical reader of the Independent responded incisively: “Show me the education.” He might have added: “Show me what is causing all this expensive and everlasting poverty, and how, amid this poverty, decades of throwing money at schools have improved student achievement.”

If only a similar demand came from anyone in authority — the governor, state legislators, mayors and municipal school board and council members, and state Education Department officials. If only state residents generally wanted to know why student performance falls as spending rises. Throwing money may salve the public’s conscience about chronic educational failure, but since that policy doesn’t work, uneducated kids will still be destined for lives of menial labor, financial hardship, unhappiness, poor health, drug abuse, crime — and more poverty. 

New Haven’s schools may be the most badly administered in the state, but similar problems plague schools in Hartford, Bridgeport, Waterbury, Meriden, and other poor cities and towns.

So Connecticut’s policy of throwing money at education and hoping for the best needs to be audited. Is auditing never attempted because most children not being educated are members of racial or ethnic minorities? Is it because an audit might threaten the careers of thousands of government employees? Is it both?

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

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Murphy commercial hints at the issues against him

By Chris Powell

Connecticut got its nickname as “the land of steady habits” in part because of its resistance to political change and its inclination to keep the same people in elective office for a long time. Comments made by Thomas Jefferson about Connecticut politics in 1801 have been aphorized as “few die and none resign.”

Now that Connecticut has lost most political competition, with Democrats long having held all major state and federal offices in the state, change seems more unlikely than ever. A television commercial for U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy’s campaign for a third term acknowledges this resistance to change even while suggesting it’s needed. 

The commercial shows the senator on another campaign walk around the state. He says: “What I find on this walk is that the things people care about here in Connecticut really don’t change: the cost of living, how much money are they making, how much are they paying in taxes, are their neighborhoods safe?”

Would people keep expressing such concerns if they were satisfied? Or has the cost of living been outpacing wages for many? Have taxes decreased or has inflation made them more burdensome? And when social disintegration makes news in the state every day, how can anyone believe government’s claim that crime is down?

Of course if people’s major concerns never change, eventually they might figure out that re-electing officials who never change anything won’t help. 

But then where are the alternatives in Connecticut? Ken Dixon of the Connecticut Hearst newspapers reports that six of the 36 state Senate elections and 43 of the 151 elections in the state House of Representatives next month are essentially uncontested.

Only one of the six Republican candidates for Congress is well known and will raise enough money for a plausible campaign. It’s not enough for candidates to have a message. They also need the means to publicize it.

Meanwhile the Republican candidate for president is terribly unpopular in the state and will be of little help to the party’s other candidates here.

But any campaign at least starts with a message, and Republican campaigns in Connecticut might do well to take Senator Murphy’s inadvertent hint. That is, the cost of living is too high, as is the cost of government, and the social order is coming apart without any acknowledgement by those in charge. Something must be done. But what exactly?

The administration the senator supports has worsened the awful trends. Will Connecticut Republicans offer voters more than the opportunity to cast protest votes?

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IS SEGREGATION GOOD NOW?: U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, the former Connecticut education commissioner and Meriden school superintendent, will be remembered mainly for botching the redesign of the federal college financial aid application, causing a national scandal. Even Democratic members of Congress doubt that Cardona could be considered for reappointment if the party keeps the presidency.

Cardona also spends much time using social media to pander to the teacher unions, the Democratic Party’s biggest constituency.

But the other day Cardona said something on social media that might actually be good for Connecticut residents to ponder. He wrote: “The Biden-Harris administration has invested over $17 billion in historically Black colleges and universities, more than any other administration in history. Now that is investing in Black excellence.”

Many state residents may remember what they were told by Cardona’s colleagues in the state education bureaucracy during the years of litigation in the school integration case of Sheff v. O’Neill: that Black students learn best in a racially integrated environment and that Connecticut’s de-facto segregation of Black students should be considered unconstitutional. Now the same big thinkers claim that Black students need other Black students and Black teachers.

So how does racial segregation become “excellence” when, with the federal government’s encouragement and financing,  Black students enter “historically Black” colleges and universities? After the billions of dollars of expense resulting from the Sheff case and the regional schools it spawned, Connecticut residents might want to know.

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

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