Democrats abruptly reverse their pose on illegal immigration

By Chris Powell

With Governor Lamont playing a big part, Democrats across the country have abruptly reversed their posture on illegal immigration, moving from support or indifference to indignant opposition and blaming Republicans for the problem.

In national television interviews the governor said immigration policy should be much stricter, Democrats had been slow to face the problem, and President Biden should close the Southern border. The governor added that he had offered the president the use of the Connecticut National Guard for securing the border but the president had declined.

Then Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat who had been co-chairing bipartisan negotiations in the Senate over border security legislation, denounced Republican senators for not supporting the bill the negotiations produced. Republican senators, Murphy charged, want continued chaos at the border to help the campaign of the likely Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump. 

The reply of Republican senators was more relevant. They noted that the proposed legislation didn’t secure the border at all — that it would have continued to allow at least 5,000 illegal crossings per day, hastened work permits for many illegal immigrants, and greatly increased issuance of visas. The Republican senators also noted that the president is already fully authorized by law to close the border to illegal immigrants and has failed to do so, and that his administration has even sued to prevent Texas from obstructing illegal crossings with razor wire. 

That is, the legislation wasn’t border control at all. It was just cover for still more illegal immigration.

But those details were not as widely reported as Murphy’s demagogic injection of Trump into the issue. Murphy and other Democratic leaders consider the former president’s name to be a powerful epithet that closes any inconvenient discussion. Most major news organizations concur and cooperate.

If the Democrats were sincere President Biden would immediately stop illegal and asylum-claim crossings at the southern border as he already has the power to do. He would approve Texas’ own efforts. Murphy’s bill would be stripped of its loopholes. Illegal immigrants convicted of crimes would be promptly deported. 

But what prompts the Democrats’ change in pose?

Most observers figure it’s because public opinion has turned overwhelmingly against them on immigration and the issue is likely to prevent the president’s re-election. But there may be other reasons, like a calculation that illegal immigration has been so vast recently that, regardless of the results of this year’s elections, illegal immigrants now are sure to determine the country’s political future.

This is not just because Democrats think they eventually they can achieve voting rights for non-citizens. More so it’s because under current U.S. census policy — set by Biden, who reversed the Trump administration’s policy — non-citizens are to be counted for congressional redistricting. 

Since most of the 6 million or so people who have entered the country illegally or with bogus asylum claims in the last several years have been settled “temporarily” in cities, which are heavily Democratic and will provide the non-citizens with welfare benefits for a long time, the next round of redistricting will create at least 15 more solidly Democratic districts in the U.S. House of Representatives at the expense of all other districts. This will assure long-term Democratic control of the House and sharply reduce the chances of electing Republican senators in states with large cities.

This will also increase the number of sure Democratic votes in the Electoral College, which chooses the president.

The country was built on immigration and few people claim that it’s bad in itself.

No, the objections are about immigration’s current nature, uncontrolled — the admission of far more people than the country can screen for security and health risks, assimilate into a secular and democratic culture, shelter amid a disastrous shortage of housing, pacify amid an explosion of urban crime, employ at decent wages amid a faltering economy, and school amid the collapse of public education.

How are such concerns addressed by Murphy and other Democrats? Hardly at all, and then only with epithets: Racism! Bigotry! Trump!

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

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No magic wand is needed for medical debt relief

By Chris Powell

Governor Lamont is acting as if he has a magic wand that can eliminate $650 million or more in medical debt owed by unfortunate state residents. He has been waving that wand for more than a year and waved it again this week in his address to the new session of the General Assembly. The magic is taking longer than expected.

The idea is for state government to pay $6.5 million to a charitable organization that purchases uncollectible medical debt from hospitals, whereupon the charity will offer the hospitals 1 cent per dollar of debt and the hospitals will agree to sell at that rate. Then the charity will inform debtors that they are off the hook.

But society won’t be off the hook. For medical debt won’t really be extinguished at all by this mechanism but merely transferred — transferred to everyone else who uses hospitals. Indeed, uncollectible medical debt is already effectively transferred to the rest of hospital patients, private insurers, and government insurers through the higher rates hospitals need to keep operating. Services have been provided without payment and their costs have to be recovered somehow.

While hospital rates must be negotiated with insurers and the government, as vital public institutions the hospitals can’t be allowed to fail. State government is already deeply involved in negotiations to arrange Yale New Haven Health’s purchase of three hospitals looted by the predatory investment company that acquired them several years ago — Waterbury Hospital, Manchester Memorial Hospital, and Rockville General Hospital. A direct or indirect subsidy to Yale from state government may be necessary.

As a practical matter most hospitals in Connecticut are already government agencies, with the government controlling most of what they do, either through statute, regulation, or insurance and reimbursement rates. Just this week the state Office of Health Strategy ordered Sharon Hospital not to close its money-losing maternity ward. A state government that claims the power to order a hospital to operate a maternity ward can claim the power to order forgiveness of medical debt and set debt forgiveness terms.

Key questions about the governor’s debt forgiveness idea remain to be answered. 

Will hospitals sell much of their debt so cheaply? They haven’t said.

Will government-facilitated forgiveness of medical debt incentivize more people to stiff the hospitals serving them? That seems likely, since the proposed income limits for people qualifying for debt forgiveness are far above poverty thresholds.     

Perhaps most important, since state government already has such power over hospitals, what’s the need for a charitable organization to serve as intermediary in debt forgiveness?

The answer seems to be to provide political cover and obscure what will be going on — the transfer of debt from individuals to the public and the concealment of more of the cost of government in the cost of living.

If state government arranged medical debt forgiveness and qualifications directly, by statute or regulation, the program would compete directly and clearly with all other demands on state government’s finances. Every state budget might be forced to determine how much medical debt is to be forgiven each year. 

Instead an intermediary would disperse the expense of debt forgiveness in thousands of transactions, distributed unequally among hospitals, which in turn would distribute the expense unequally in hundreds more transactions with insurers, government agencies, and hospital labor contracts. Political responsibility and blame would land mainly on hospitals.

Why does medical debt relief need such subterfuge? For the problem is a terrible consequence of the country’s medical insurance system, whose creakiness is exposed every day by “Go Fund Me” or similar campaigns on behalf of people with catastrophic injuries or diseases whose treatment costs far exceed any insurance coverage. 

Though individuals or families may be blameless, just victims of bad luck, medical debt can follow them for lifetimes, ruining their credit.

Government is supposed to do for the people the crucial things they can’t do for themselves. Covering medical care in catastrophic circumstances should be one of them. Let it be done directly, frankly, and without apology.

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

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A Connecticut fairy tale; and hiding juvenile crime

By Chris Powell

While few people were looking, and while most who were were too deceitful to explain or afraid to speak out, the General Assembly passed and Governor Lamont signed a law requiring public schools to distribute free feminine hygiene products in at least one male restroom.

In anticipation of the law’s date of implementation this coming September 1, Brookfield’s school administration installed such a vending device in a male bathroom at the town’s high school. Boys being boys — at least most of the time — the other day some at the high school destroyed the device, thereby bringing the law more attention than it received while being enacted and causing Brookfield High Principal Marc Balanda to proclaim himself disgusted by the vandalism. Balanda called it “the work of immature boys, not men.”

But whose work was the law itself? Responsibility rests with legislators and educators who want Connecticut to believe that there are no biological, anatomical, and psychological differences between male and female and that if people want to pretend about their natural gender, everyone else must pretend along with them.

The feminine hygiene products dispenser law isn’t the only manifestation of this pretense. The state Education Department advises schools to let students who consider themselves transgender use whichever restrooms they prefer. Some school systems direct their employees to keep a student’s gender dysphoria secret from the student’s parents if the student so desires. School athletic conferences require students claiming to be transgender to be allowed to participate in the sports of whichever gender they choose, though the policy remains under challenge in federal court by young women cheated out of championships by young men. 

Everyone in Connecticut must pretend, on pain of denunciation or worse, as in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

The law’s advocates defend it dishonestly as a matter of helping poor students — as if free feminine hygiene products can’t easily be made available in female restrooms and school offices rather than in male restrooms. 

Brookfield’s state senator, Stephen Harding, wants the legislature to consider repealing the law. But he approaches the issue as if it is just another excessive state mandate on municipalities, not an excess of political correctness. Can the pretense here ever be confronted at the state Capitol?

Gender dysphoria is a burden to those who suffer from it. Schools should ensure that no one suffering from it is denied ordinary rights or harassed. But neither should gender dysphoria be used to deny the long-established rights of others, like gender privacy in restrooms, parental responsibility, and equal opportunity for girls and women in sports. The pretense here makes government ridiculous.

*

Local television news reporters are good at showing up at a crime scene late, when witnesses have departed, and instead interviewing people who know nothing about the crime except what the reporters have told them. Typically the bystanders obligingly deplore the crime they didn’t see and then are put on the evening newscasts.

But such silly journalism last week was actually useful. A group of young people went on a car-theft spree, including a carjacking at a gas station in West Haven, and led police on a chase through several towns before being stopped back in West Haven. Some of the perpetrators ran off but police captured two 14-year-olds, one of them armed with a loaded handgun.

Pressed by a TV reporter to comment later, a woman who was pumping gas at the station where the carjacking occurred and had seen nothing speculated that the incident demonstrated the need for more “programs” for young people.

Many people may feel the same way. But while Connecticut long has had many “programs” for troublesome youths, their car thefts lately are more numerous than ever. 

What exactly are the “programs” for 14-year-olds with guns stealing cars? How successful are they? Do any involve confinement or is that now forbidden? And how will people ever find out while state government keeps juvenile court secret? 

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

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Troopers aren’t so racist; and integrity arrives late

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s state police department turns out not to have been a big racist conspiracy after all, according to an investigation of the “fake ticket” scandal that was ordered by Governor Lamont and conducted by former U.S. Attorney Deirdre Daly and her law firm.

According to the investigation, whose report was published last week, most of the traffic-ticket data inaccuracies disclosed by an audit last June resulted from carelessness, equipment malfunctions, or inadequate training, and there is no evidence that any troopers intended to do what the audit suspected: underreport the number of minority motorists they were stopping.

So the audit’s implication that hundreds of troopers may have been targeting minority motorists has been repudiated.

But in 2018, five years years before the “fake ticket” audit, three troopers, now retired, were found to have been creating fake tickets — not to underreport minority stops but to make themselves seem more productive — and the recent investigation found that the conduct of as many as 15 current troopers remains questionable and requires more review.

Additionally, 14 troopers escaped full review because they retired prior to the investigation and couldn’t be compelled to cooperate.

Perhaps most important, the investigation also found that the two top managers of the state police at the time of the ticket audit, whom the governor nudged into retiring last year, were indifferent to possible misconduct in their ranks. Indeed, discipline in the state police long has been weak, as it long has been in most other state agencies.

The state police have been required to record racial data in traffic stops because of widespread suspicion that many motorists are pulled over because of racism — stopped for “driving while Black.” Of course few motorists ever feel that they have been stopped fairly, even when they know they were speeding, since many other drivers around them were speeding too without getting stopped. But suspicion of racism in traffic stops is probably more justified with municipal police in suburbs and rural towns with few minority residents.

While racism endures, accusations of racism in police work are too easy to make, because, like poverty, crime and traffic violations are racially disproportionate. The growing use of police dashboard and body cameras probably will reduce racism in police work even as crime and traffic violations will remain racially disproportionate. Indeed, the greater danger with traffic stops now is not racism but the increasing reluctance of police officers to risk making them at all.

*

The new Conviction Integrity Unit in Connecticut’s chief state’s attorney’s office achieved its first victory last week: the reversal of the conviction of George Gould for the gunshot murder of a grocer in his store in New Haven in 1993.

Gould’s case has been bouncing around in the courts ever since because his conviction was based entirely on the eyewitness testimony of a drug-addicted prostitute who claimed to have seen Gould and another man go into the store moments before the murder. 

The supposed eyewitness didn’t know the men but identified them from photos shown to her during police interrogation. The only other evidence against the men was that they were in the neighborhood at the time of the murder — no fingerprints, no murder weapon, no DNA, nothing.

But a jury convicted the men anyway. Whereupon the supposed eyewitness recanted her accusation, reinstated it, and recanted it again, while accusing both the police and the defense of bribing her.

A judge overturned Gould’s conviction. The state Supreme Court reinstated it and ordered more proceedings. The second convicted man died. The Conviction Integrity Unit’s review of the case finally persuaded even the prosecution to support reversing the conviction. After nearly three decades in prison, Gould is free and may have millions of dollars coming to him as compensation from state government.

At a distance of 30 years, exacting accountability from the prosecution, defense, and jury responsible for this atrocity is impossible. They all failed, inviting wonder if juries today have proper appreciation for reasonable doubt.

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

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Mutilation is mutilation, politically correct or not

By Chris Powell

What’s the difference between “female genital mutilation” and “gender-affirming care”?

“Female genital mutilation” is an ancient barbaric practice prevailing in primitive cultures in Africa and the Middle East. Some adherents mistakenly think Islam requires it. It is committed against minor females and is euphemized as “purification.” 

“Gender-affirming care” is the euphemism for sex-change therapy and is a modern barbaric practice associated with politically correct cultures in North America and Western Europe. It is committed against minors of both sexes and involves anatomy-altering drugs and surgery. 

Female genital mutilation is prohibited by federal law and 41 states but not Connecticut, so last week state legislators, 30 civic groups, and victims of the practice announced that they again will try to have it outlawed in the forthcoming session of the General Assembly. Legislators are rushing to endorse the proposal, though following the dubious practice of states that outlaw abortion, the advocates of outlawing female genital mutilation in Connecticut also want the law to criminalize taking a minor out of state for mutilation.

But meanwhile there is no effort in the legislature to prohibit “gender-affirming care” for minors, though Connecticut law presumes that minors lack the judgment to make such serious decisions, prohibiting them from purchasing alcohol, tobacco, and guns and from entering contracts and getting tattoos.

Medical research increasingly connects bad physical and psychological outcomes with “gender-affirming care,” and many who received it as minors come to regret it. 

So in their consideration of female genital mutilation, legislators should ask why surgical and chemical mutilation and alteration shouldn’t be forbidden for all minors, delaying such practices to adulthood. What’s bad for the young goose is bad for the young gander as well, regardless of political correctness and however many other genders there are imagined to be.

DON’T WHINE, SPECIFY: Connecticut’s social-services industry is complaining about the “fiscal guardrails” state government has imposed on itself for the last few years at the behest of Governor Lamont and leaders of both parties in the General Assembly. The “guardrails” function as the limit on state spending that was promised as an apology for the state income tax in 1991 but was never delivered.

The industry has a point. Paid by state government, the industry provides many services state government is obliged to provide and does so far less expensively than they would be provided by state government’s own employees, whose compensation is far higher than that of social-service organization employees.

But the industry’s complaint is empty, for the industry never specifies any state spending that is less important than its own.

For many years state government has been primarily a pension-and-benefit society for its own employees. By law and union contract the compensation of state employees takes precedence over everything else in state government. Twenty percent of state government’s revenue now is used for government employee pensions, in part because for decades state government bought votes by overpromising while underfunding benefits. The social-services industry didn’t object.

Even now much money could be transferred to social services if state government economized with its employees, as by freezing salaries instead of paying generous raises. 

But the social-services industry doesn’t press for that either.

Indeed, practically every week brings an announcement from the governor about financial grants from the state to municipalities and other entities for discretionary purposes. Last week’s disbursements included $9 million for roads, sidewalks, and recreation trails in 10 small towns. No one would die if the money wasn’t spent that way. Without the state money the towns might proceed with some of the projects at their own expense.

But the social-services industry could make a plausible claim that some of its underfunded work is a matter of life and death.

State government is never efficient. It is full of inessential, excessive, and patronage spending. The social-services industry should try to earn more money by showing how it could be obtained without more taxes — that is, by correcting state government’s mistaken priorities.

—— 

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

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Cops in paralysis case start to get their jobs back

By Chris Powell

Among the principles of liberalism in Connecticut is that minorities are always right. Another one is that government employee unions are always right too. So maybe that’s why there has been no complaint from liberals about the Jan. 19 decision of the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration to overturn the New Haven Police Department’s firing of Officer Oscar Diaz and order his reinstatement after a 15-day suspension.

Diaz was driving the police van in which an arrested man, Randy Cox, suffered a broken neck during transport to police headquarters in June 2022. A car at an intersection ahead of the van ran a stop sign and Diaz stopped the van abruptly to prevent a crash. The van lacked seatbelts and Cox, handcuffed but unsecured, quickly slid forward head-first into the van’s cargo compartment wall, suffering his grave injury.

Cox had been arrested because he was drunk, illegally carrying a gun, and brandishing it at a street festival, scaring people. In the van he resisted arrest, yelling, kicking, and rolling on the floor. When the van arrived at headquarters Cox protested that he could not get out as ordered because he was so badly hurt. Other officers dismissed him as a drunk faking injury and pulled and dragged him to get him to a cell.

Cox is Black, so his injury in police custody sparked shrieks of racism around the country, though some of the five officers who handled him are also members of minority groups. Four of the five, including Diaz, were fired, the fifth retired, all five are facing criminal prosecution for cruelty and reckless endangerment, and New Haven paid Cox $45 million to settle his damage lawsuit. Paralyzed, Cox likely will need round-the-clock care for life.

Awful as the case is, the arbitration board concluded there was no proof that Diaz caused Cox’s injury or did anything to harm him. Indeed, it won’t be surprising if the arbitration board makes similarly sympathetic findings in regard to the other fired officers, also replacing their dismissals with unpaid suspensions, since Cox suffered his injury before they took him from the van and they hadn’t meant to harm him.

Indeed, if Cox had been white, the whole incident might be dismissed as understandable, not a scandal at all.

Yes, the police van should have had seatbelts, and officers should not assume that drunks resisting arrest are lying when they claim to be badly hurt. As a matter of law New Haven’s liability is undeniable. But it is hard to see malice here, much less racism.

Racial hysteria and liberalism’s principles compelled New Haven, always politically correct, to fire the cops. While the city will appeal Diaz’s reinstatement, criticism of the arbitration order now appears to be precluded by liberalism’s countervailing presumption in favor of government employee unions, and now that Cox has his damage award, racism hysteria can move on.

Maybe someday there will even be tacit recognition that the proximate cause of Randy Cox’s catastrophe was Cox himself — recognition that testing government’s competence is seldom a good idea and that getting drunk, possessing a gun illegally, and waving it at people, thereby becoming a gun nut, invites such a test. 

NO GREAT GAIN: Connecticut has seen a small net gain in population, 11,264 people, since 2020, the Yankee Institute reports, citing data from the U.S. Census Bureau. But it’s not exactly good news.

For the departure from Connecticut of 21,485 residents during 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 was offset mainly because 37,453 people arrived in the state through “international migration,” and while the Census Bureau doesn’t make the distinction, many if not most of those people probably entered the country illegally.

Connecticut may be fortunate that the flood of illegal immigrants into New York City has not yet spilled over into the state. But the city is screaming that it can’t handle any more. So maybe this year heavily Democratic Connecticut will get more of a taste of the Biden administration’s open-borders policy than will go down well politically.

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

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Can government in Connecticut ever become relevant again?

By Chris Powell

Even more than its ever-increasing expense, the biggest failure of government in Connecticut may be its lack of relevance. News and commentary last week raised several examples.

It was reported that the upcoming session of the General Assembly is expected to see a renewed attempt to prohibit “legacy” admissions in public and private institutions of higher education. Such admissions involve relatives or friends of big donors and are said to reduce room for students from poor families and minority groups.

But “legacy” admissions are not numerous at public colleges and universities, which long have been heavily recruiting students from poor families and minority groups. “Legacy” admissions are more common in private institutions, but since they can’t rely on government funding, why shouldn’t they be allowed to favor people who finance them?

In any case enrollment in higher education is lagging and student loan debt explains why. Higher education is ridiculously overpriced, leaving many of its customers unable to get jobs that can support both a decent lifestyle and loan repayment. Excessive cost is the big problem of higher education, not legacy admissions.  

Connecticut’s biggest problem in education generally is not higher education but lower education, where per-pupil costs long have been rising even as enrollment and student performance have fallen. Last week it was reported that only 45% of Connecticut lower-education students passed the most recent physical fitness test, the lowest score in 10 years.

Sincere pursuit of justice in education wouldn’t have time for “legacy” admissions in college when basic education was doing so poorly. The interest in “legacy” admissions implies that legislators have given up on basic education and need to strike a pose about trivia to look righteous.

In an essay in National Review, the Yankee Institute’s Frank Ricci, former president of the firefighters union in New Haven, noted the “cunning tactics” of Connecticut’s school superintendents for getting their ever-growing budgets past school boards and taxpayers.

One such tactic resembles what in the federal government is called the “Washington Monument syndrome” of budgeting, where popular programs — like keeping the Washington Monument open — are threatened with cuts to protect dubious appropriations no one wants to scrutinize.

Superintendents, Ricci writes, propose cutting “seemingly indispensable programs,” like football or foreign languages, prompting outrage in the community. Such proposals distract from areas more deserving of cuts, like staff increases “unaccompanied by any tangible improvement in academic outcomes.”

The biggest part of municipal school budget increases is always attributed to “fixed costs” — that is, increases in staff compensation compelled by teacher union contracts. But unfixing the “fixed costs” can’t be discussed, since that might call attention to the disconnect between school spending and performance. In turn that might force school board members to acknowledge that the decline in student performance is mostly a matter of the decline in parenting — the failure of many of their own constituents.

Hartford Business Journal editor Greg Bordonaro reviewed the state Transportation Department’s Greater Hartford Mobility Study, noting that while its proposals for relocating highways in the city and building two new bridges over the Connecticut River to East Hartford are interesting, the study’s recommendations would cost $10 billion or more and there is no plan for getting the money.

Quite apart from the money, where is the necessity? Are Hartford’s poverty and dysfunction really matters of insufficient overpasses and underpasses along Interstate 84? Could Hartford really not be improved substantially without moving highways around?

I-84 isn’t the cause of division in the city between north and south. People easily go over and under the highway every day. While the city used to be racially divided, Black on the north side, white on the south side, the whole city is now mostly minority and poor and most of its children fatherless.

If there are ever billions more to spend on Hartford, it might be best used to hire parents for the kids. Many already have tutors, social workers, and probation officers. More parents might put the others out of business and save money.

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

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‘Go beyond Roe’ means aborting viable fetuses

By Chris Powell

Fanaticism and extremism were unleashed when the U.S. Supreme Court returned the abortion issue to the states in 2022, reversing the court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which had discovered in the national Constitution a limited right to abortion, a right to abortion prior to the viability of the fetus. The Roe decision said government had a proper interest in regulating abortion after fetal viability — an interest like protecting the unborn.

When Roe was reversed, some Midwestern, Rocky Mountain, and Southern states reinstated restrictive abortion laws that had been blocked by Roe, enacted new limits on abortion, or prohibited abortion altogether.

But in Connecticut, which in 1990 put the Roe standard into its own abortion law, fanaticism and extremism are entirely on the pro-abortion side, as was demonstrated this week when the General Assembly’s Reproductive Rights Caucus gathered at the state Capitol to announce its plan to “go beyond Roe” with new legislation.

That is, some members of the caucus want to repeal state law’s ban on abortion of viable fetuses except to protect the life or health, physical or mental, of a pregnant woman, a ban that had been authorized by Roe. Some caucus members even want to amend the state Constitution to prohibit state regulation of abortion in any way. 

Last November voters in Ohio amended their Constitution to include an individual right “to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions.” It’s not yet clear how the amendment will be construed in regard to Ohio’s laws restricting abortion.

But Connecticut’s prohibition of the abortion of viable fetuses is already largely a fiction, since any doctor and patient can contrive a mental health reason for an abortion at any stage of pregnancy, even if a woman is already in labor. This prohibition is only nominal, just a mechanism for pretending that in Connecticut crying babies fully capable of life outside the womb can’t be sliced up as they are removed and dropped in a trash can to bleed to death.

To the co-chair of the Reproductive Rights Caucus, state Rep. Jillian Gilchrest, D-West Hartford, even the pretense of a restriction on abortion is objectionable. She would have Connecticut formally authorize live-birth abortion and thereby proclaim abortion to be the highest social good.

Most people in Connecticut probably do not consider abortion the highest social good. Most probably think that the Roe policy established in state law strikes the proper balance between the right of a woman to control her own body and the duty of society to respect innocent young life. Indeed, dubious as the Roe decision may have been as constitutional law, it became politically realistic, a workable compromise, and remains so.

In the face of the far-leftists who dominate the caucuses of the majority party, the Democrats, in the legislature, most people in Connecticut may be afraid of being called some awful name if they express concern about late-term abortion. So without some courage on the moderate side of the abortion issue, the fanatics may win.

Can the diminishing number of moderate Democrats in the legislature join with the Republican minority to preserve the Roe policy and its pretense of respect for life, the pretense the abortion extremists find so offensive?

To counter abortion extremism in the forthcoming session of the legislature, people who do not consider abortion to be the highest social good should press for a law requiring parental notification for minors seeking abortions, a proposition that usually has strong support in opinion polls.

There is little sentiment in Connecticut for outlawing abortion, but even two of the state’s liberal neighbors, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, have parental notification laws, which discourage the sexual exploitation of minors by predatory men. 

There is plenty of such exploitation in Connecticut as well, even as the abortion extremists seek to conceal it, lest exposure of abortions arranged for minors by men preying on them raise doubts about the policy the extremists pursue: all abortions all the time, no questions asked.

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

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Buy EVs now, pay later, just don’t ask how much

By Chris Powell

Governor Lamont and leaders of the Democratic majority in the General Assembly are planning to call a special session of the legislature next week to enact the strict California standards for auto emissions that were declined by the General Assembly’s Regulations Review Committee in November. Back then two Democratic legislators on the committee from working-class districts seemed to understand that the California standards, outlawing sale of new gasoline-powered cars as of 2035, would leave the working class much poorer than the elites who can afford to toy with electric vehicles.

The governor is said to be giving assurances to legislators, especially those from racial and ethnic minority groups, that the ban on new gas-powered cars could be postponed by new legislation if the performance of electric cars doesn’t improve as much as is hoped and if the necessary huge expansion of the state’s electricity grid and production doesn’t proceed fast enough. The governor and other advocates of the California standards insist that mass conversion to electric cars is inevitable.

But if electric cars are inevitable because they will be so good that everyone will demand them, why must consumer choice be prohibited? Why must Connecticut commit to an expansion of its electricity grid that will cost billions of dollars when there is no plan for it and no idea of how it is to be financed?

The inadequacy of electric vehicles was powerfully demonstrated by the recent frigid weather across the country, with thousands of EVs stranded because batteries don’t hold their charges in extreme cold and charging stations are not as ubiquitous as gas stations. And would the people of Connecticut approve outlawing new gas-powered cars in another 11 years if they had to decide right now on how to pay the conversion costs? Of course not.

The California standards legislation is mainly a lot of politically correct posturing to lock Connecticut into a future that almost certainly will not turn out exactly as hoped. It is a “buy now, pay later” scheme whose cost is open-ended.

Repealing or postponing the California standards if things don’t progress as hoped won’t be so easy. By that time various interest groups will have sprung up to profit from the new policy whether it’s working or not and they may be influential enough to block any changes.

Hearst Connecticut newspapers reporter and columnist Dan Haar has noted the special tawdriness of the special session idea. The Democrats, Haar writes, want to enact the California standards before the legislature’s regular session begins in February, while the public is not paying close attention and public hearings won’t be required.   

Before anything is put into law, the governor and other advocates of the California standards should offer a detailed plan and specify its costs and its method of financing, thereby allowing the public to make an informed decision while there is still a choice about paying. 

Besides, Connecticut has far more compelling claims on public policy and public finance than whatever its gas-powered cars may be contributing to “climate change.” Nothing Connecticut or even the whole country can do with auto emissions will come close to offsetting the carbon dioxide and pollutants that inevitably will be put into the atmosphere in coming decades by China, India, and the rest of the developing world.

State government has been prattling about equalizing, integrating, and improving public education at least since the state Supreme Court decision in Horton v. Meskill in 1977, and 47 years and tens of billions of dollars in extra expense later nothing of substance has changed. Indeed, in recent years Connecticut’s per-pupil costs have risen even as school enrollment and student performance have declined.

On top of that, homelessness and crime now are rising in the state amid other signs of social disintegration.

So why should anyone think that state government will succeed with a similarly grandiose project, conversion to electric cars, and that even if it was successful it would make any practical difference anyway?    

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

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Attorney general’s opinion needn’t stop ranked-choice voting

By Chris Powell

With his excellent and even fascinating review last week, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong did not oppose ranked-choice voting in principle or declare it surely unconstitutional. He concluded that the concept’s constitutionality is “a close call” and so it shouldn’t be enacted without an amendment to the state Constitution.

Caution is usually good advice for a lawyer to give, and with the basic format of elections at stake, it would be risky to proceed without assurance that the state Supreme Court wouldn’t interfere.

But Connecticut should continue to consider ranked-choice voting anyway. For while the constitutional issues identified by the attorney general are legitimate, they are at best technical and at worst hair splitting. Indeed, the attorney general notes that court decisions around the country can be found on both sides of his concerns.

Ranked-choice voting invites voters to list candidates for an office in order of preference — first choice, second choice, and so forth. If no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes, the trailing candidate or candidates are removed from the tabulation, their first-choice votes are transferred to the candidates their supporters designated as second choices, and a new tabulation is done. Vote transfers and new tabulations continue until a candidate receives a majority.

This is simple enough when there are only three or four candidates. With more candidates it can get complicated and confusing.

The attorney general’s biggest concern about ranked-choice voting’s constitutionality is that the system could be construed as allowing some people to vote twice or more. But it is better construed not as letting some people vote multiple times but as letting all people change their vote.

Also of concern to the attorney general is the state Constitution’s requirement for municipal officials to announce vote totals upon tabulation. But if multiple tabulations are required to achieve a majority, vote counting will take longer and municipal officials may be overwhelmed. For offices representing more than one municipality, all vote counting might have to be transferred to the secretary of the state’s office, since the trailing candidates to be removed from a second tabulation could not be identified on the basis of the vote in just one municipality.

While the attorney general writes that Connecticut has no experience and no court precedents with ranked-choice voting, he reports that throughout the 1800s the state did want its top officials to get a majority of the vote rather than just a plurality. The state’s 1818 constitution required the winner of the election for governor to get a majority of the vote and empowered the General Assembly to choose the winner if there was no majority. In the 1830s the Constitution was amended to add similar provisions for the other statewide constitutional officers.

But the requirement to achieve a majority was not accompanied by a mechanism like ranked-choice voting or runoff elections to assure such majorities. The result was a long disaster. Tong notes that between 1818 and 1900 the election for governor defaulted to the legislature 14 times, the election for secretary of the state 18 times, comptroller 15 times, and treasurer 14 times.

The disputed gubernatorial election of 1890 practically incapacitated state government, and by 1901 both the legislature and the voters were exhausted by the majority requirement and repealed it with another constitutional amendment, leaving the state constitutional officers to be elected by plurality.

But several times in recent decades Connecticut has elected governors and U.S. senators with less than a majority vote when a true gauging of public sentiment would have elected someone else and produced much different policy. Lacking ranked-choice voting, this year’s presidential election well may give the country a leader most people don’t want.

If ranked-choice voting is considered too complicated to implement, Connecticut at least could give itself ordinary runoff elections for the top state offices when no candidate has received a majority of votes, with the runoff limited to the top two finishers in the first election. This would be more expensive than current practice but also more democratic and easy to understand. 

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

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