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)

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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.)

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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)

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

By Chris Powell

Supporters of Donald Trump have a reputation for being crazy. Of course some are, but the reputation is strong mainly because supporters of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris run most news organizations and the U.S. Justice Department and have made sure that Trump crazies are well publicized.

Now maybe the country is starting to see that political craziness is bipartisan. Deranged supporters of Harris’ failed campaign for president are broadcasting their mental breakdowns in videos on social media — screaming, cursing, weeping, gesticulating, and forecasting a Nazi nightmare for America. Some women among them are pledging to withhold sex from their husbands and boyfriends to punish them for voting for Trump, as if Trump didn’t also win the votes of tens of millions of women and as if most demographic groups didn’t increase their support for Trump since the 2020 presidential election.

Immigration racket operates from city halls

Republicans fake a mandate and Murphy fakes concern

Stop the doom mongering and the abortion hysteria

Last week news organizations in Connecticut noticed that a special-education teacher in Cheshire posted on social media a video in which she acted deranged and threatened violence against any Trump supporters she might encounter.

Complaints to the Cheshire school administration prompted her suspension with pay, as some townspeople who supported Trump didn’t want their children near her. A few days later the teacher resigned. 

Since the teacher’s freakout occurred off the job and since her threats were not specific enough to be criminal, the school administration might have had much trouble disciplining her if she hadn’t left voluntarily. Because of state law and union contracts, firing teachers is almost impossible in Connecticut. 

The state Education Department can revoke teaching licenses for professional unfitness and “other due and sufficient cause.” But most people who might have had a role in judging the Cheshire teacher’s case — from the town’s school board to the Education Department to the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration — probably would have sympathized with her politically. Indeed, don’t be surprised if another school system surreptitiously hires her or even if she wins Cheshire’s next award for “teacher of the year.”

*

Since it didn’t involve hysteria and threatening, a report the other day in the Connecticut Examiner about the state’s high school graduation rates won’t get as much attention as the Cheshire case, but it should.

The Examiner said the percentage of high school freshmen considered “on track” to graduate — that is, having earned the number of class credits appropriate for their grade — remains 3.5% lower than in the 2018-19 school year just before the virus epidemic, when schools were largely closed. That is, since 2018 the percentage of freshmen “on track” has fallen from 88% to 84.5% though the epidemic is long over.

The declines in “on track” students in the state’s cities are disastrous, like 64% to 59% in New Britain, 85% to 70% in Danbury, and 80.7% to 66.4% in New London.

The “on track” rates are even worse than they seem, for they signify mere attendance, not actual learning. In Connecticut no student has to learn anything to be “on track.” Since the state’s only academic policy is social promotion, everybody advances each year and gets a high school diploma no matter what. Then educators and legislators dishonestly equate a high school diploma with education and assure the public that all is well, though Hartford notoriously just graduated a girl who is illiterate.  

In any case the cities have excuses — high illegal immigration and worsening poverty and student transiency. New London Superintendent Cynthia Ritchie says more than half the city’s ninth-grade students last year had only recently enrolled in the school system, many after the school year had already begun, and many were not fluent in English, needed special education, and lacked transcripts from previous schooling.

These children will be a huge burden on New London’s schools, which were already overwhelmed by disadvantaged kids. 

Who in the federal government — besides all Democrats, of course — thought that New London and other cities were prepared for such a burden when the borders were opened? And who in state government has any idea for spreading the burden beyond the cities?

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

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Immigration fraud racket operates from city halls

By Chris Powell

Having stuffed absentee ballot boxes for Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim and the city’s Democratic machine only to be caught on surveillance video and charged criminally and belatedly fired from her patronage job as official greeter at City Hall, Wanda Geter-Pataky has found what may be a more lucrative racket. 

The New Haven Independent reported this month that Geter-Pataky had become a marriage broker. She was bringing to City Hall in New Haven older foreigners, apparently legal but time-limited visitors, together with much younger U.S. citizens, getting them marriage licenses, and then, as a justice of the peace, performing marriages in the hall outside the office of Mayor Justin Elicker.

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Country decides that Democrats are even worse than Trump

Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers then reported that Geter-Pataky long had been doing similar business at City Hall in Bridgeport.

How much she has charged for these services is not known.

The couples involved have no obvious connection to their betrothed. According to the Independent, the 114 couples whose marriages Geter-Pataky facilitated in New Haven included many people from India and some from Tajikistan, Georgia, Turkey, Russia, Egypt, and Jamaica. 

Geter-Pataky told the Independent that the couples live in New Haven, but the newspaper found that only three included a city resident. When the Independent asked a young woman about to be married if she was being paid to do it, Geter-Pataky told her to say no.

If such a marriage is genuine, the foreigner would be entitled under federal immigration law to stay in the country. And if such a marriage is a fraud for evading immigration law, who in authority in New Haven or state government would care? 

After all, New Haven is a “sanctuary city,” Connecticut a “sanctuary state,” and a New Haven city clerk who got suspicious about similar marriage licenses early this year and told immigration authorities was suspended for violating the city’s “sanctuary” ordinance. (So much for “If you see something, say something.”) The clerk retired rather than be fired.

After the Independent discovered Geter-Pataky’s racket in New Haven she moved it back to Bridgeport City Hall. Though she is awaiting trial in connection with her former racket, she remains vice chairwoman of the city’s Democratic committee.

As the Independent was compiling its report about the racket conducted in the hall outside his office, Mayor Elicker issued a statement lamenting Donald Trump’s election as president.  

“Just like when Donald Trump was president before, we will once again come together as a city to stand up for what is right and just,” the mayor said. “We will continue to work together to ensure New Haven is a city where all are welcome and where all can thrive.” 

By “all” the mayor presumably means even those who contrive and profit from fake marriages to break immigration law. How “right and just”!

Three Republican state senators reacted to the Independent’s story with alarm. (Democratic state legislators seemed to ignore the story.) The Republicans urged state Attorney General William Tong to investigate the matter. Journalists at the state Capitol should press Governor Lamont about it too. 

But since, like the segregationists of old, the governor and attorney general seem happy to be nullifiers, maybe they will construe Geter-Pataky’s racket as a great new way for Connecticut to boost tourism, as with abortion.

R.I.P., PEANUT AND FRED: People not on government’s payroll may say a prayer of thanks for social-media star Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon, the indoor pets of animal rescuer Mark Longo of Pine City, N.Y.. As the country prepared to vote for president, Peanut and Fred were seized from Longo’s home in a five-hour raid by six agents of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, killed, and tested for rabies, which they almost surely didn’t have.

Their martyrdom has given the country a metaphor for its government — assiduously intervening in trivia while failing catastrophically with its most important responsibilities, like immigration and public safety. 

Yet some people still wonder where all those votes for Trump came from.

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

Republicans fake a mandate and Murphy fakes concern

By Chris Powell

Having won the presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, Republicans think they have a great mandate to remake the federal government. While there is indeed much to remake, the election’s vote totals, while shocking to many, don’t show anything close to a mandate.

When all votes are counted Donald Trump probably will have won the popular vote by a margin of only 2%. While that is notable because two recent Republican presidents — George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump himself in 2016 — were chosen by the Electoral College without winning the popular vote, it’s common for presidents to win both.

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The new Republican margin in the Senate will be only 53-47, on the smaller side of recent Senate margins. Republicans flipped only four of the 34 seats up for election.

The new Republican margin in the House probably will be 222 to 213, also on the small side historically, the Republicans having flipped only two seats more than the Democrats did.

Of course Republicans might have done much better for Congress if the campaign had been waged entirely on a policy agenda and not also on the personal defects of their presidential candidate. But “might have” isn’t a mandate either.

Nevertheless, if they hope to make lasting changes, Trump and congressional Republicans should move fast, acting as if they have a mandate while the Democrats remain stunned.

Deporting the millions of migrants who entered the country illegally under the Biden administration will not be easy or pretty. It will take years, and “sanctuary states” — that is, nullification states, Democratic states like Connecticut — may engage in furious obstruction. Along with the Biden administration these states bet heavily on changing the country’s demographics in time for the next federal census and congressional redistricting so they could create another 20 or 30 permanently Democratic districts, districts full of people ineligible to vote but still counted for districting.

Other urgent Republican objectives may be achieved more easily — like requiring that all voters produce photo identification and evidence of citizenship, and defunding the political left, especially higher education, where the estimated $1.75 trillion in college loan debt is not a subsidy to students but to educators, the indoctrinators who constitute the biggest part of the Democratic army. 

These objectives will become harder to achieve if the new administration doesn’t produce a stronger economy and end inflation in its first year, and that seems unlikely amid Trump’s enthusiasm for deficit spending and tariffs.

Easily re-elected, Connecticut’s big-thinking U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy has joined the chorus of Democratic leaders asserting that it’s time to “rebuild the left.” But the left remains strong, supported by the partisan and propagandizing news media, the cultural and business establishment, millions of unionized government employees, and many government-funded entities. What’s weak is the private sector.

Murphy and those other Democratic big thinkers have noticed that Trump built a surprisingly diverse coalition and that the Democratic Party has alienated the working class, as if this is some great insight. Really, what did they think would happen after years of soaring inflation and unchecked illegal immigration, policies that spectacularly drove up the cost of living and drove down wages for less-skilled people?

Murphy had little to say about those things in his campaign but he often broadcast a commercial in which he cited “gun safety” legislation he got passed and said he’d “do anything to keep our kids safe.”

But he didn’t say what his gun law did, and shootings among fatherless and uneducated young men continue daily. Indeed, there are so many guns in circulation in the country that “gun safety” is meaningless, just a political distraction. Only mandatory life sentences for gun crimes would make any difference, and Democrats refuse to put more people in prison. Run by Democrats, Connecticut refuses even to prosecute most gun crimes.

If Murphy really would do anything to keep kids safe, he should examine social disintegration and find them some parents. They get little from the pretend government he conjures for them.

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

-END-

Stop the doom mongering and the abortion hysteria

By Chris Powell

Democrats should knock off the doom mongering in which many are wallowing. 

Yes, in winning the presidency Republican Donald Trump made surprising gains among constituencies long allied with the Democrats, especially Blacks, Hispanics, and union members. But most members of those groups remain inclined toward the Democrats, and the defections resulted largely from dissatisfaction with the economy and illegal immigration. There is no guarantee that the economy will improve or illegal immigration be stopped during a Trump administration; those problems may actually worsen. Of course other problems will develop too.

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National politics is full of abrupt and extreme changes in direction, some of them having occurred in living memory. 

In 1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, won 61% of the popular vote and carried 44 of 50 states. The Republican Party was thought to be finished. Four years later, in 1968, Johnson was so unpopular that he declined to seek re-election and a Republican, Richard Nixon, was elected to succeed him.  

In 1972 Nixon led the Republicans to a sweeping victory, also winning 61% of the popular vote and carrying every state but Massachusetts. Just two years later Nixon resigned under threat of impeachment for corruption and the Democrats won big majorities in Congress.

So politics can turn around quickly, especially if a political party doesn’t keep insisting on being stupid and arrogant.

Democrats should knock off the hysteria about abortion rights, lately euphemized as “reproductive rights.”

Democrats contrived the abortion issue in the recent campaign because they needed a distraction from their national administration’s failures with the economy and illegal immigration.

But since two years ago the Supreme Court reversed its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade and returned abortion policy to the states, last week’s election also included 10 state referendums on proposals to liberalize abortion law, and seven of them were approved. One of the three referendums that failed — Florida’s — got a 57% vote in favor, failing only because it was about a state constitutional amendment and Florida’s Constitution requires referendums on amendments to win a 60% majority. 

Liberalization proposals already had passed in referendums in other states, undoing highly restrictive abortion laws. 

With the trend of state law running plainly in favor of more abortion, not less, the Democratic hysteria on the issue is deliberately misleading. If people think their state’s abortion law is too strict, they can change it through the usual democratic procedures. In any case states that have outlawed or tightly restricted abortion have done so only because many of their women have wanted it that way. Democrats should try persuading them to change their minds. 

Democratic campaign commercials that were recently broadcast in Connecticut claimed that if Trump was elected president and Republicans took Congress, they would outlaw abortion. The commercials were aimed at the Republican nominee in Connecticut’s 5th Congressional District, George Logan, who was defeated by a much greater margin than the margin he lost by two years ago. The commercials said Logan would outlaw abortion. They were lies.

Logan supports Connecticut’s liberal abortion law. Trump supports letting states make abortion law. There is no movement in Congress to outlaw abortion, and many Republicans in Congress are against outlawing it. It’s not going to happen.

When the General Assembly reconvenes in January the Republican minority should tweak the Democratic majority by proposing to withdraw the state from the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which, if it ever took effect, would require the state to award its seven presidential electors to the winner of the national popular vote.

When Democratic state legislators put Connecticut into the compact in 2018, they thought it would work in favor of Democratic presidential candidates, since two recent Republican presidents, George W. Bush and Trump, had won the Electoral College without winning a majority of the national popular vote. Trump, supposedly the reincarnation of Hitler, did get a majority this time, vaporizing the partisan rationale for the compact here. But if Connecticut Democrats had their way, the state now would be helping to put Trump back in the White House. Whoops! 

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

-END-

Country decides that Democrats are even worse than Trump

By Chris Powell

Dawn Wednesday slammed many Democrats with the question: How could this have happened? How could the country have returned to its highest office a man of such terrible character and demeanor as Donald Trump? 

Democrats should look in the mirror.

For the country’s willingness to risk a second Trump administration is just the measure of the disaster of the last four years of Democratic administration, a measure of the country’s desperation for change. All elections for high office are continuation or change elections, and this one was a change election that became grotesque because of the excesses on both sides.

Wethersfield quickly tires of flagpole propaganda

Case of illiterate Hartford girl should become a national scandal

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The country knew perfectly well about Trump’s character and demeanor. But it also sensed that the prosecutions of him were really political persecutions, and that at some point policy outweighs character in politics and government. Jimmy Carter had a sterling character but as president four decades ago he gave the country a disastrous term as president and was overwhelmingly defeated for re-election by a former governor many regarded as a right-wing kook.

This week the country decided that even if, as the Democrats said, Trump was a kook, a crook, a rapist, a fascist, and a Nazi, he was still much better than the Democratic alternative: ruinous inflation and unprecedented and essentially treasonous illegal immigration that has driven the wage base down and housing costs up, thereby devastating the working class, all topped with another stupid imperial war, sanctimonious wokeness, transgenderism, and, in Vice President Kamala Harris, an empty-headed product of the looney left who wouldn’t or couldn’t answer a serious question.

Trump is unlikely to end inflation. As Harris did, he supports the virtually unlimited deficit spending and borrowing that are weakening the dollar and pushing the world away from it. Since the federal government now is incapable of any financial restraint because voters themselves have been falsely taught that everything can be free, the dollar will continue to be inflated away. Thus Democrats eventually may be glad they lost this election. 

But at least Trump may reduce illegal immigration, start deporting people who entered the country unvetted, end the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, discard environmental extremism, and stop government from putting men into women’s sports, restrooms, and prisons.

Will Democrats ever recover enough from their Trump Derangement Syndrome to reflect on their defeat, not just for president but also for the Senate and probably for the House as well?

Having lost the Senate, Democrats shouldn’t need to reflect much on their desire to repeal the filibuster rule, which they dreamed of doing after Harris’ election. Indeed, for the next two years the filibuster may become the last lever of national Democratic power. The Democrats will quickly swallow their hypocrisy and move on.      

Democrats and liberals generally did little reflecting a week ago when 250,000 of them canceled their subscriptions to the Washington Post because its publisher, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, prevented publication of an editorial endorsing Harris. Such an endorsement from the Post would have been routine and have changed few if any minds. But by slanting its news coverage the Post has been a major propagandist for the Democrats. Cancelling their subscriptions, the Post’s former readers have weakened their own side.

Though Connecticut went heavily Democratic again, the state embodies much of what the country has just rejected. 

The state nullifies federal immigration law by giving identification documents and medical insurance to illegal immigrants and prohibiting police from cooperating with federal immigration agents. The state promotes and coddles transgenderism in schools, pushing boys into girls’ sports and restrooms and requiring boys’ restrooms to stock feminine hygiene products.

With policy identical to Connecticut’s, Minnesota famously has Gov. “Tampon Tim” Walz. Less famously, Connecticut has Gov. “Napkin Ned” Lamont. 

These “woke” policies almost certainly do not have majority support in Connecticut. But even with such easy targets the state’s Republican Party remains too weak to provide consistent and coherent opposition. So the state keeps lurching left.   

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

Wethersfield quickly tires of flagpole propaganda

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s cities and towns might do well to take note of Wethersfield’s experience this year with the use of government flagpoles for political propaganda.

At the start of the year the Town Council had a policy of allowing only government flags to be flown on town government flagpoles. But in February the council changed the policy to oblige a request to fly the “pride” flag on the pole at Town Hall to show support for sexual minorities. Some council members foresaw the problem this would cause — that the council soon would have to choose among controversial and politically propagandistic requests. 

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Indeed, in voting to fly the “pride” flag, the council didn’t inquire seriously into what the flag represents. Was it representing only the rights enjoyed by all people under our constitutions and laws? Or did the flag also represent the claims of men to participate in women’s sports, use women’s restrooms, and, if imprisoned, to be held in women’s prisons? The “pride” flag is flown by many advocates of transgenderism.

But the council voted anyway to change the policy so the “pride” flag could be flown, and, sure enough, a another flag request became controversial in June. The family of a Wethersfield native who became a Hartford police officer and was killed there in the line of duty asked the council to fly the “thin blue line” flag at Town Hall in his memory. The “thin blue line” flag is a U.S. flag with its middle white stripe colored blue to honor police officers.

Whereupon a council member complained that the flag would be construed as racist because some police are racist and some people who wave the flag are racist.

The complaint was a wild stretch, but it was made by a Democratic member of the council, the council has a Democratic majority, and Democrats are easily intimidated by complaints of racism, no matter how crazy. So the council’s majority rejected the request to honor the Hartford officer by flying the “thin blue line” flag at Town Hall. 

Dozens of Wethersfield residents were enraged, as were many other people throughout the state. The town got lots of unfavorable publicity for seeming to be advocating transgenderism while disrespecting cops.

So the other day the council decided unanimously to revert to the old policy: Now only government flags are to fly on Wethersfield town government flagpoles.

Council member Emily Zambrello explained her reversal. “This isn’t something I wanted to change back,” she said, “but circumstances have changed, and we can now see that this is way too much to continue to deal with. We can’t keep having ideological discussions on flags. It’s not a good use of anyone’s time, and it’s ultimately not helping people more than it’s hurting them.”

That is, like most municipal councils, many of which also have had to confront the flag issue, Wethersfield’s has plenty of ordinary work to do without enlisting on one side or the other in the culture war. The culture warriors can carry their flags into battle everywhere, parade with them and fly them on their own property, but government flagpoles should remain neutral ground — if not to be fair to all, then at least to spare elected officials from becoming casualties of the culture war.  

* * * 

WHAT ABOUT ABORTION REGS?: In early September the state Public Health Department held a hearing on its strange proposal to repeal three regulations that impose small impediments to abortion, regulations consistent with the principles established by the U.S. Supreme Court’s famous decision in the case of Roe v. Wade and the principles of Connecticut’s own abortion law. 

The proposal seemed inspired by state legislators who say they want to “go beyond Roe” — that is, to authorize late-term abortion, the abortion of healthy and viable fetuses.

The department has yet to decide on repeal of the regulations, and refused to reply to this writer’s inquiry as to whether it was delaying a decision to avoid renewing the controversy while candidates were campaigning for the General Assembly.

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

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