Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

By now nearly everyone who pays attention to Connecticut news knows of the state legislator who last year stood up to speak at the Capitol when she was drunk and lapsed into incoherence and who, a few weeks ago, was driving drunk when she crashed her car nearby.

The legislator has become so well known in large part because television stations have delighted in broadcasting video of her failing a sobriety test and getting arrested. There was nothing remarkable about the video. It was just like all failed sobriety test videos except for the office of the person being arrested. She was hardly known before her public intoxication; she was what in Parliament would be called a back-bencher. But now she is famous for being humiliated, and her legislative committee assignments are suspended.

Of course she should have gotten treatment for her drinking problem before crashing her car and putting others at risk. But after the crash she quickly apologized publicly and began treatment. Beating an addiction is not easy; all may hope she succeeds.

But the repeated broadcast of her arrest was only prurient and may not make it easier for her. It was as if the TV stations thought she was Donald Trump.

Yes, after a long career as a grifter and four years of unprecedentedly disgraceful conduct in the nation’s highest office, Trump may be irremediable. But the state legislator is just an ordinary person without bad intent who has a character weakness shared by many others, including others in elected office. There are many other things Connecticut should be more ashamed of, but viewers of the state’s TV news probably don’t know.

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HIDDEN TAXES AGAIN: Governor Lamont and Democrats in the General Assembly again are attempting to raise fuel taxes surreptitiously.

They are pushing legislation that would authorize the commissioner of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection to commit the state to interstate agreements requiring fuel businesses to purchase and compete for a limited number of “carbon credits.”

The cost to the businesses would be passed along in higher prices to retail fuel customers, who would blame energy producers and distributors, not the real culprit, state government.

The “carbon credits” scheme might be less objectionable if the legislature had to vote on such interstate compacts directly as ordinary legislation, if the governor had to sign it before it took effect, and if in doing so they were candid with the public about the inevitable result and explained why higher fuel costs were worth the supposed progress against “climate change.”

But no. The Democrats want to pander to the climate extremists in their party without taking responsibility with everyone else.

If the governor and legislators want to raise fuel prices, they don’t need any interstate compact. They can just raise fuel taxes in the open, as they have done before, though such taxes in Connecticut are already high.

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FIND AN ALTERNATIVE: According to the Washington Post, the No Labels political organization, which includes former Connecticut U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, aims to try to put its own candidate for president on the ballot in all 50 states in 2024.

No such candidate has been designated but the idea is to draw the likely major-party candidates in 2024 — President Biden for the Democrats and former President Donald Trump for the Republicans — back toward the political center and away from their pandering to the left and right. Such movement might cause No Labels to endorse one or the other or to refrain from offering its own candidate.

Biden supporters are said to be most afraid of the No Labels plan. One says: “The only way you can justify this is if you believe it doesn’t really matter if it is Joe Biden or Donald Trump.”

No, there is plenty of other justification. A third-party candidate can be justified if people believe, as many well may, that Biden and Trump are equally catastrophic, if in different ways.

To ensure their victory in 2024 the major parties need only to nominate a presidential candidate who is competent, moderate, relatively honest, sane, and sentient.

They don’t yet seem to have noticed that Biden and Trump aren’t.

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Chris Powell (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com) is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. 

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By Chris Powell

Wokeness, the new model of political correctness reigning supreme in Connecticut, holds that all racial disproportions are caused by “structural racism” and must be eliminated by policy that awards favoritism by race.

State traffic stop data has shown that Black and Hispanic motorists are stopped somewhat more often than would be suggested by their proportion of Connecticut’s population. So legislation is advancing in the General Assembly to prevent police from stopping motorists for “low-level” violations, like broken or unused headlamps, taillights, and turn signals, obstructed windshields, excessively tinted windows, and expired registrations. Motorists still could be ticketed for those violations but only if an officer stopped them for something more serious.

The legislation’s approach may be politically satisfying but its assumption that racial prejudice is the main cause of the disproportion in stops is beyond simpleminded. It’s as if the legislation’s advocates have never examined criminal-justice data, which shows that [ITALICS] all [END ITALICS] crime is racially disproportionate, with members of minority groups committing more of it.

Fortunately few people still believe that this disproportion arises from an innately baser character of racial minorities. The evidence is that the disproportion is largely a matter of poverty, which has been racially disproportionate since the country’s founding.

Of course Connecticut could not begin to count all its traffic stops where the only offense was “driving while Black.” A young Black man driving or walking through a wealthy white suburb or rural town is likely to evoke suspicion no matter how innocent he is. The situation is improving but eliminating it will require much more housing and school integration.

But many motorists may put off fixing their headlamps, taillights, and turn signals, and making other car repairs because they don’t have the money. If it is enacted the legislation forbidding police from stopping motorists for “low-level” violations will in effect nullify the regulations and proclaim that safety on the road isn’t important anymore — especially with members of minority groups.

These days society’s disintegration may be most evident on the road, where there is ever more speeding, reckless and distracted driving, road rage, and bad manners. Police misconduct rightly gets plenty of attention but police remain more sinned against than sinning by a factor of a thousand to one, and they are more inclined to let violations pass rather than risk being so easily accused and disbelieved, even with dashboard and body cameras.

So while it is getting easier to imagine a state without accusations of police racism, it well may be a state with much less law enforcement.

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PROJECT VERITAS VINDICATED: After almost a year of paid leave, Assistant Principal Jeremy Boland will resign from the Greenwich school system on June 30, even as five agencies — the school system, town government, the state attorney general’s office, the state Education Department, and the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities — purport to be continuing to investigate him.

But Boland’s departure confirms that despite all the contempt heaped on it by the political left, the guerilla journalism of Project Veritas portrayed Boland with perfect accuracy in his own words, captured on surreptitiously recorded video. Boland admitted that he disqualified political conservatives, Catholics, and people over 30 from teaching positions so it would be easier to indoctrinate students with liberalism and thereby get them to vote Democratic when they grow up.

Establishment journalism in Connecticut, which, like Boland, leans heavily left, missed the indoctrination story and then resented its being told.

Something important is also shown by the long delay in Boland’s departure. Greenwich’s school superintendent says firing Boland outright would have been too expensive and time-consuming — a common complaint about pursuing accountability in public education in Connecticut, even accountability with nominal managers.

As a practical matter there is little management in public education, since nearly everyone but school superintendents is unionized and protected by so much due process that wrongdoing must be long indulged even when, as with Boland, it is caught on video and broadcast to a scandalized world.

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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

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By Chris Powell

Being the source of all sorts of politically correct nuttiness even as its violent crime is atrocious and its schools don’t work (because few of their students have competent parents), New Haven may be criticized for its new experiment with released prisoners. The city is awarding 20 of them a guaranteed income of $500 per month for a year to help them re-establish themselves on the right side of the law.

But the money is coming from a philanthropic grant, not from government, and only a big detail of the program is amiss, not the objective. Indeed, the objective is compelling. The program should be adjusted and implemented by state government throughout Connecticut.

With its largely impoverished, uneducated, unskilled, fatherless, and welfare-dependent population, New Haven is a hub of crime, as Connecticut’s other cities are. Every year the state prison system releases about 900 offenders back to the city as they complete their sentences. On average within three years about half of them are convicted of more crimes and sent back to prison. The true failure of rehabilitation in criminal justice is worse than that, since many released offenders commit more crimes but aren’t caught.

That this “recidivism” has been so bad for so long does not make it any less of a disaster and excuse government’s failure to do much about it. But this disaster is inevitable when uneducated, unskilled, and demoralized men are returned to society without financial resources, a job, housing, and medical insurance even as they carry the heavy handicap of a criminal record.

What’s faulty about the experiment in New Haven is that the guaranteed income for the former prisoners is not linked to a guaranteed job, medical insurance, and rudimentary housing. It’s welfare when it should be work.

The Correction Department should be funded to provide much more job training to prisoners within two or three years of their likely release. But government should be able to find work even for the uneducated and unskilled.

For starters, Connecticut’s roadsides, parks, railroad lines, and other public areas are full of litter strewn about by slobs. A few dozen released prisoners could clean up a whole city in just a month and might feel pretty good about it if they were being paid, appreciated, and free of the fear of having no housing and medical insurance.

Connecticut’s manufacturers are struggling to fill thousands of skilled positions and might provide internships and job training to former prisoners who showed an interest. Hospitals might too. Churches, especially those in the cities, surely would assist a campaign to employ former prisoners.

With its guaranteed income program New Haven has had its pick of the seemingly most rehabilitated and motivated former prisoners. Reintegrating other former prisoners will be much harder, and the public’s reaction to former prisoners working visibly in public places, sometimes near children and the elderly, might not always be welcoming. So government will have to explain patiently why society must help former prisoners make something good of themselves. Many people will understand.

Of course there would be failures in such a program — [ITALICS] but not as many as there already are with released prisoners. [END ITALICS] Indeed, compared to the present disaster, the success of such a program would be virtually certain.

Then maybe state government could turn its attention to getting rid of its policies and practices that have turned the cities into poverty factories.

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BRIDGEPORT FAILS AGAIN: Why has state government yet to see much progress from its longstanding policy of throwing ever-more money at Connecticut’s impoverished cities and especially their schools?

There may have been a hint the other day from Bridgeport, where videographer Steve Ronin posted on the internet a long video taken during his recent tour of the city’s former Harding High School. Though the school was closed five years ago, it remains packed with valuable furnishings and equipment as if it is still operating.

The video shocked city officials. They thought the school board had relocated the furnishings and equipment for continued use. But what should have been obvious wasn’t done.

What’s more shocking is that state officials still seem to consider Bridgeport capable of self-government.

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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

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By Chris Powell

Judging by legislation they are advocating, Democrats in the General Assembly think, for the moment anyway, that minors are not capable of fully understanding and making decisions that may be life-altering. The Democrats would raise from 16 to 18 the age at which Connecticut allows marriage. They also would increase the parole eligibility of offenders who committed their crimes before age 25.

Of course most marriages of minors are likely to involve unplanned pregnancies and a desire to provide the babies with their natural parents. But such “shotgun” marriages are not especially likely to endure. Besides, nothing prevents an underage couple from supporting each other before marriage, and adoption and abortion are always available. Marrying off a girl to someone who may have mainly just exploited her can wreck her chances in life.

The premise for increasing parole eligibility for younger offenders is more questionable. While the legislation’s advocates say young offenders often don’t know what they’re doing, evidence that breaks through the secrecy of Connecticut’s juvenile courts suggests that many young offenders know exactly what they are doing and laugh at the law, knowing also that there is little will to punish them.

But if the marriage and parole bills are enacted and thereby confirm that young people are not fit to make important decisions, Connecticut may face some cognitive dissonance. For under other state laws the same minors who will not be competent to get married before 18 and not fit to be held fully responsible for serious crime will remain free to have abortions and even get sex-change therapy in school without parental consent or awareness.

There is no logic to this inconsistency. It’s just that abortion, leniency with crime, and sex-change therapy for minors are considered virtuous in the sort of liberalism that animates Connecticut’s Democratic Party, which controls the legislature. The objective of the marriage and parole legislation is not really to protect young people but to be politically correct.

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ACCOUNTABILITY DIES: As much as accountability is work and a pain, it is a fundamental obligation of democratic government. But on both the state and municipal levels, government in Connecticut often disagrees.

A few weeks ago the state’s chief public defender, TaShun Bowden-Lewis, who is Black, leveled an accusation of racism against the commission responsible for her and the rest of the Division of Public Defender Services. Bowden-Lewis complained that the commission was “hyper-scrutinizing” her work and should not have differed with her about an appointment. She said the commission’s disagreement with her was “discrimination.”

Responding to the politically opportunistic charge, four of the five commissioners, two of them Superior Court judges, simply resigned rather than explain themselves.

No one responsible will answer questions about what’s going on. Governor Lamont, state legislative leaders, and Judicial Department leaders were stuck with finding new commissioners willing to be called racist for disagreeing with a Black official who is supposed to report to them.

Usually when a government executive can’t get along with his supervisors, the executive has to go. Here, instead, the entire mechanism of accountability blew up.

Meanwhile state government’s “quasi-public” agencies — agencies that were created by state government but prefer to operate as private businesses — are opposing the request of the State Contracting Standards Board to be given jurisdiction over them.

At the moment the board has jurisdiction over just one “quasi-public,” the Connecticut Port Authority, whose incompetence and corruption have run up the cost of the New London State Pier project and delayed its completion. The 16 other “quasi-publics” don’t want anyone looking over their shoulder. They claim that they need to be more “nimble” than ordinary state agencies.

Yes, oversight can slow things down. That’s the rationale for totalitarianism.

Government in Connecticut has little oversight and auditing generally but is no more effective for being so “nimble.” So the jurisdiction of the Contracting Standards Board probably should be expanded, or else every state agency should be given its own oversight board. The office of Connecticut’s two state auditors can’t even begin to keep up with it all.

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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

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By Chris Powell

For years now Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families has presumed that when parents are unfit to care for their kids, it is better to place them with relatives, since then the kids will not feel as lost and the foster parents will have a closer connection to them. Ordinarily this is probably right, but it sure wasn’t in the case of the child lately being identified as Baby Dylan.

In 2015 when Baby Dylan was just a year old the department placed him with a couple related to his parents. The child was already suffering from developmental impairments and they got far worse with his foster parents. During five months in their custody he was given little food and no medical care, and the department’s social workers were prevented from checking on him but failed to do anything about it.

Eventually the department saw his mistreatment and found new foster parents for him, but he now has permanent disabilities. His first foster mother pled guilty to risk of injury to a minor but her sentence was only probation.

Connecticut’s child advocate, who investigates such cases, has reported that adequate background checks were not done by the department’s social workers — that they failed to discover that the first foster mother already had been accused more than once of neglect of her own son, the foster father had a criminal record, the couple had little income, and their driver’s licenses had been indefinitely suspended.

So Baby Dylan, now 8 and said to be in a home with great new parents who have adopted him, has just been awarded $12 million, apparently the biggest personal damage award ever against Connecticut state government. He’ll need the money for a trust fund to see him through a life with disabilities.

The moral seems to be that relatives can’t be merely assumed to be better foster parents and that the Department of Children and Families, while much improved, will always be at high risk of negligence.

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NO PROTECTION OFFERED: Despite some recent horrible murders and assaults, Connecticut can forget about providing better protection to victims of domestic abuse this year.

The relevant legislation advancing in the General Assembly would do little more than forbid payment of alimony to domestic abusers and authorize electronic monitoring for them.

Domestic abusers seldom receive alimony and in any case courts already can deny it. And no ankle bracelet, even one monitored every minute of every day, is going to stop a crazed abuser from attacking his victim with a gun, knife, ax, or some other weapon.

Apart from around-the-clock guards, the only serious protection state government could provide to people threatened by an abusive former spouse or partner is speedy prosecution and long imprisonment of abusers.

State government is starting to consider faster and more serious prosecution of gun offenders, many of whom are repeat offenders but have never been put away for good. The same should be done with domestic abusers. Connecticut’s prisons now have plenty of room for such criminals, so many other criminals having been released early or never imprisoned at all.

An alimony ban and electronic monitoring will just be more of the empty posturing typical at the state Capitol.

* * *

ENOUGH NULLIFICATION: Will helping drug addicts shoot up under medical supervision break their addiction and regain their health?

That’s the idea of “harm reduction clinics,” which is being tried here and there around the world and is being put into legislation pending in the General Assembly. Such clinics may reduce overdoses, which are killing people in Connecticut every day, connect addicts with rehabilitation services, and take a bite out of the illicit drug trade.

Such clinics may be worth an experiment in the state, but not until they are allowed by federal law, which criminalizes them. State government’s effort to take over the marijuana trade is already violating federal law, a politically correct form of nullification, like state government’s obstruction of federal immigration law.

Enough nullification already.

Feeding drug addictions should always make public-spirited people cringe a little, and finding a location for a “harm reduction clinic” without outraging its potential neighbors will be difficult.

In the meantime state government may do best just by providing more free addiction treatment.

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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

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By Chris Powell

Just as you needn’t ask the barber if you need a haircut, you needn’t ask a political action committee run by government employee unions, leftist academics (maybe that’s a redundancy), and bleeding-heart clergy members whether government should raise taxes. But the political action committee called A Better Connecticut Institute figures that its name conceals its underlying interest enough to allow it to be taken seriously.

The other day the institute issued a study maintaining that contrary to the concerns of Governor Lamont, extremely rich people will not leave Connecticut if state government raises their taxes, so their taxes [ITALICS] should [END ITALICS] be raised.

There is some logic to the belief that the super-rich won’t move so easily if they are very happy where they are. For the more money people have, the less important any particular dollar is to them and the more they can afford higher taxes.

But the super-rich also might be just as comfortable in some other nice place, and they already pay so much in taxes in Connecticut that the departure of even one of them could cost state government many millions of dollars. The super-rich and the merely ordinarily rich already pay most of the state income tax.

Whether higher taxes would push the super-rich out of Connecticut is mainly speculation. But it is fair speculation, and it cannot be disputed that high taxes are discouraging. Nobody relocates in the hope of being taxed more.

For many years highly taxed states in the Northeast, including Connecticut, have been losing prosperous and self-sufficient people to the rest of the country. Connecticut’s population growth and economic growth are nearly the worst among the states. Whatever their cultural drawbacks, which are in the eye of the beholder, Florida and Texas have been growing rapidly, and they don’t impose income taxes.

Many Connecticut residents have moved there in recent years but even those who have moved to the Carolinas, which do have income taxes, report saving money, especially on property taxes, while enjoying comfortable lifestyles and milder winters.

Raising taxes on the super-rich might be good policy if there was some assurance that it would markedly improve living conditions in Connecticut. But the state has been raising taxes since it enacted its income tax in 1991, and where is the evidence?

The state’s cities are still dysfunctional, maybe more so.

Student proficiency has crashed despite the everlasting cycle of raising teacher salaries that began with the Education Enhancement Act in 1986.

Crime generally is said to be down lately but murders are up and even city mayors now admit that most shootings are being committed by repeat offenders — that is, people state government already has had many chances to deter but failed to.

Practically every week brings the disclosure of gross but uncorrected mismanagement in state government to which the governor and General Assembly are indifferent.

Maybe no one in authority cares about those things right now because state government is sitting on so much “emergency” federal financial aid, aid that has generated much of the inflation that is crushing not just the poor but the middle class too. The U.S. Census Bureau’s February “Household Pulse” survey found 44% of Connecticut residents struggling to pay their bills.

An argument for higher taxes on the super-rich might be made if the revenue was to be used to reduce taxes on everyone else. While the governor doesn’t support raising taxes on the super-rich, he [ITALICS] has [END ITALICS] proposed reducing income taxes on the middle class, which is more than advocates of raising taxes on the super-rich propose.

No, those advocates want the extra money only so state government can spend it, and the composition of A Better Connecticut Institute shows how most of it would be spent. For the institute’s board includes the executive director of the Connecticut Education Association, the state’s biggest teacher union, and the political director of the Connecticut AFL-CIO, which is composed largely of state and municipal government’s own employees. Most state and municipal tax revenue is spent compensating those two groups.

And what do many members of those groups do when they retire? Of course they move south, where the cost of living is lower and their Connecticut government pensions go farther.

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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

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By Chris Powell

According to an assistant secretary of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, Rachel Levine, who spoke the other day at the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center in Hartford, “gender-affirming care” — the euphemism for sex-change therapy — will be common and considered normal before too long.

Levine may be right but no one should hope so.

For it would signify profound national unhappiness if many people were so uncomfortable in their own skin that they would want to undergo physique-altering drug treatments and even mutilation. The law should prohibit this kind of thing for minors, for the same reason it prohibits minors from making contracts and should prohibit minors from marrying, as is increasingly being urged. Minors aren’t prepared to make such decisions.

Children may grow out of gender dysphoria, as they grow out of many other things, and evidence that sex-change therapy increases the long-term happiness of those who undertake it is lacking, even as the therapy may have irreversible effects.

While it does not seem to have been noted, the rise in gender dysphoria among children corresponds with the explosion of mental illness generally among the young. This may not be a coincidence.

After all, about a third of children in the United States live in a home without two parents and thus with less parenting and support than most children used to get. Many of those children are living in poverty. In cities the percentage of children living in poverty without fathers approaches 90%.

Meanwhile school performance is crashing throughout the country.

The explosion in youthful mental illness (and mental illness in the adult population as well) would seem to invite government to inquire urgently into its cause.

Indeed, the mental illness epidemic may be more damaging than the recent virus epidemic was. But no.

Instead Assistant Secretary Levine remarked in Hartford that sex-change therapy for minors has the “highest support” of the Biden administration.

If such an administration remains in power, the assistant secretary’s prophecy that sex-change therapy for children will become normal could be self-fulfilling, whether such therapy is really needed or not and though the country won’t be any saner for it.

* * *

MORE URGENT THAN BONUSES: While state government has begun paying $45 million in bonuses to 36,000 of its “essential” employees, a couple of sad news reports related to government finance were largely overlooked.

The housing authority in Bridgeport is evicting about a fifth of its households, 502 of 2,500, because they haven’t been paying rent and are already about $1.5 million in arrears. In New Haven a longstanding camp of homeless people in a city park, considered a sanitation and fire hazard, was dismantled and bulldozed by city employees.

The city governments didn’t mean to be cruel. They are striving to find other accommodations for the people being displaced, some of whom of course have drug and other mental problems. Even so, people living in a homeless camp are probably not in a condition to support themselves, just as people who can’t cover the rent in government housing for the poor probably aren’t either.

That doesn’t mean that with some temporary support, rehabilitation, and training these people couldn’t support themselves eventually, but their present is desperate. They need shelter immediately, and in Connecticut shelter is scarcer and more expensive than ever.

Governor Lamont is not indifferent to the problem. His administration has just given $2.45 million to Pacific House, a social-service organization that operates emergency shelters, for construction of 39 inexpensive apartments to become “supportive housing” in Stamford. But as the evictions in Bridgeport and New Haven show, that housing will not be nearly enough for immediate needs.

So Connecticut should consider opening a few emergency shelters like the field hospitals the National Guard set up quickly during the virus epidemic. Much vacant retail, school, and church property might be adapted for this purpose. Of course supervisory staff would have to be hired, and rules devised and enforced to keep the facilities clean and orderly, but such a project would not be complicated, except maybe for assuaging the neighbors.

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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

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By Chris Powell

Prompting suspicion that he seeks to follow in his father’s footsteps, state Rep. Matt Blumenthal, D-Stamford — son of U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, formerly Connecticut’s attorney general — proposes amending the state law that purports to require the attorney general to have 10 years of experience in the “active practice” of law.

Presumably Matt Blumenthal will have only nine years of “active practice” in 2026, when the next election for attorney general will be held and the current occupant of the office, William Tong, is expected to run for governor instead. So Blumenthal’s legislation would reduce the “active practice” requirement to six years.

He shouldn’t have to make such an unseemly show of his ambition. For the restrictive legislation he seeks to amend is plainly invalid.

Connecticut’s Constitution says: “Every elector who has attained the age of 21 years shall be eligible to any office in the state, but no person who has not attained the age of 21 shall be eligible therefor, except in cases provided for in this constitution.”

The Constitution imposes no other requirements for holding the attorney general’s office. There is nothing about being a lawyer or having particular experience as one.

But in 2010 the state Supreme Court upheld the restrictive statute, much to the disadvantage of Susan Bysiewicz. Back then Bysiewicz, now lieutenant governor, was running for attorney general.

Her candidacy was challenged and the court ruled surprisingly that while she had been a lawyer for more than 10 years, the “active practice” cited in the statute included experience as a trial lawyer, which she lacked.

So Bysiewicz was rudely knocked out of the 2010 election. (Like Tong, she also may pursue the governorship in 2026.)

The court’s arrogant misreading of the state Constitution in the Bysiewicz case may have been surpassed only by its decision five years later that the Constitution forbids capital punishment even as the Constitution always had explicitly provided for it. The court held that public opinion on the issue had changed so much in recent years that the provision for capital punishment should be void. In fact the most recent legislation enacted by the General Assembly and the governor had confirmed capital punishment.

Blumenthal would be more public-spirited and less self-serving if he revised his bill to reaffirm the democratic and egalitarian intent of the Constitution. Instead of tinkering with the “active practice” rule, the bill could simply appropriate the Constitution’s own language, with perhaps a little elaboration to chide the court for its arrogance:

“Except as provided otherwise in this Constitution, every elector who has attained the age of 21 years shall be eligible to any office in the state, ‘any’ including attorney general.”

Of course such language might not protect against the court’s determination someday that public opinion had turned so much against democracy and egalitarianism that the Constitution must be read to reinstate the repealed statutory restriction on the attorney general. But at some point democracy will always require the legislature to defeat judicial overreach.

* * *

GROVELING BY THE RIVER: A more immediate challenge to Connecticut’s sovereignty comes from the campaign by legislators in the southeastern part of the state to rename the Thames River as the Pequot River, after the ancient Indian tribe that so terrorized the region 400 years ago that the English settlers and other Indian tribes united to destroy the aggressor.

Of course today the remote descendants of the Pequots are rich and influential because of the casino duopoly state government has awarded them. But the duopoly is shared with the remote descendants of another tribe — the Mohegans — who aided the extermination of the Pequots. The modern Mohegans have other ideas for renaming the river, which flows between the casinos, the Pequots on the east, the Mohegans on the west.

So the legislation has been framed to invite the tribes to compromise on a recommendation for renaming the river.

This is all just more groveling to a special interest and should be scrapped. But if “Thames” must go, call it something that will remind the world of how Connecticut has been sold out by its elected officials: the Casino River.

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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

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By Chris Powell

Hardly a week passes without revealing more evidence that poverty is worsening in Connecticut.

As an emergency measure, all public school students in Connecticut are now eligible for free or discounted school lunches for the current school year. But this month it was reported that the number of students who would qualify under the old rules increased by 4% in the year ending last October. The number of students not able to speak English increased by 10%. These data points are the key measures of poverty used by state government for allocating state money to school systems.

Predictably enough, most of both increases involved children in Connecticut’s ever-struggling cities.

While the number of state students qualifying for free school lunches had fallen in the prior two years, this seems to have been only because of the federal government’s temporary tax credit for people with children. It’s not that students suddenly were able to pay for their own lunches but that government was paying for them in a different way. The self-sufficiency of poor families did not increase.

People who consider themselves advocates for children claim that the new data calls for state government to “invest” another $300 million in education in the cities. Actually the new data suggests that state government’s long practice of “investing” more in urban education has failed to achieve any substantial increase in learning or any substantial reduction in poverty.

But failure in education and poverty policy long has been the rationale for doing still more of what has failed.

All the extra money “invested” in urban education probably has failed because it has been spent mainly on increasing the compensation of teachers and administrators. The extra money has not made disadvantaged children any more prepared to learn when they get to school, nor has it made their households much less poor and their upbringings much better.

Indeed, though the virus epidemic is long over, chronic absenteeism in Connecticut’s schools has risen to an average of 25% and is closer to 50% in the cities. Standardized test results show that student proficiency in Connecticut has been collapsing for more than 10 years. The education and poverty problems have endured no matter how much money has been thrown at them.

But for political reasons this failure of policy has never been audited.

This doesn’t mean teachers are to blame. They play the hand they are dealt — indifferent, unparented, and sometimes incorrigible students. School administrators who stick to pernicious policies like social promotion and the suspension of discipline [ITALICS] are [END ITALICS] partly to blame. But the problem is still bigger than that — social disintegration and proletarianization, which begin long before children get to school, and quite without government’s objection.

The legislation proposed by a few far-left Democrats in the General Assembly to require people to vote seems to presume this proletarianization — to presume that the many people who don’t vote and the many who don’t even register to vote would vote Democratic if they were required to vote, since the Democrats are the party of enlarging government to dispense ever more free stuff and patronage and to increase dependence on government.

The mandatory-voting legislation raises questions that its advocates have yet to answer.

Could the mandatory voting requirement be met by filing a form affirming that a person is aware of an election but doesn’t want to vote for anyone?

What would be the penalty for refusing to vote or to file the opt-out form?

Would mandatory voting apply to everyone or only to those people registered to vote?

Would a mandatory voting requirement discourage people from registering to vote in the first place?

Perhaps most important, why would requiring everyone to vote necessarily improve politics, government, and public life?

After all, for years now half Connecticut’s high school graduates have failed to master high school math and English, most have lacked a basic knowledge of civics, and many carry this ignorance through life. They are being prepared mainly to become lifelong dependents of government.

Of course even the ignorant and uninformed have the right to vote. But why push it so hard?

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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

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By Chris Powell

Anyone of a certain age who reflects upon Connecticut’s housing policy might be reminded of a Rube Goldberg contraption.

Goldberg was the cartoonist of the last century who became famous for drawing imaginary devices that performed simple tasks in ridiculously complicated and inefficient ways.

Inadvertently honoring Goldberg, Connecticut lets municipal zoning prevent construction of the housing needed to meet demand, making housing scarce and expensive. Then, with money from the federal government, Connecticut operates a system of rental vouchers subsidizing poor people who can’t afford rents that have been driven up in large part by restrictive zoning.

But as a recent report by the Hearst Connecticut newspapers showed, the voucher program itself is ridiculously complicated. For the vouchers often can be used only in municipalities where there are no rental vacancies. Using the vouchers also can involve much tedious paperwork. So thousands of vouchers that have been issued in Connecticut go unused every year.

Thus the public interest in reducing the cost of housing and relieving the burden on the poor is thwarted. The poor have to live at a greater distance from their workplaces and the higher travel cost makes them poorer still.

Despite Connecticut’s bad example, it’s not always politically impossible to build housing on a broad scale. The South lately has been leading the country in housing construction and thus in population gains and economic growth as well. Zoning doesn’t seem to be as much of a problem down there.

While the South has more undeveloped land, Connecticut has plenty of room for more housing. Cities have many vacant old factories and run-down tenements that could be renovated or replaced, and suburbs are full of empty shopping malls and parking lots.

Though densely populated, the city-state of Singapore long has shown that it is politically possible to build much excellent multi-family housing — even public housing, the sort of housing that government in the United States has given a bad name.

Indeed, most housing in Singapore consists of apartment towers built by the government itself whose units are leased to city residents on a long-term basis, with the residents encouraged to purchase them by borrowing from their government social insurance account. They can sell their units.

Owner occupancy may be crucial. Singaporeans easily become property owners with housing security and a greater stake in society, and far from being a dysfunctional and dangerous welfare dump like many American cities, their city-state is spectacular, with little poverty, crime, income inequality, and homelessness. Singapore’s people are highly educated.

But Singapore rewards family cohesion instead of childbearing outside marriage and enforces standards in education, shunning social promotion. If Connecticut did that it would destroy the state’s poverty industry.

* * *

THANKS AGAIN FOR NOTHING: State government is broadcasting television commercials touting its new retirement savings mechanism for private-sector workers, MyCTSavings, a mechanism that businesses are being required to offer.

But like state government’s paid leave program for private-sector workers, MyCTSavings is nothing more than what people easily can arrange for themselves.

The paid leave program is only self-insurance. Everyone working in the private sector is taxed half of 1% of his salary for the paid leave fund and under limited circumstances, adjudicated by the Paid Leave Authority, can claim paid time off from work. State government contributes nothing.

Anyone could accomplish that and more with an ordinary savings account, which would give people access to all their money all the time for anything.

MyCTSavings only duplicates the individual retirement accounts offered by many financial houses and banks, with regular contributions made through automatic payroll deductions or deductions from the account holder’s checking account. Again state government contributes nothing.

State law could have required private-sector workers to maintain an IRA, as it could have required them to maintain savings accounts. But participation in MyCTSavings is optional. Like the paid leave program, the only thing My CTSavings does for sure is enlarge state government.

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Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com)

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