Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

Anyone listening to the demand for “justice” made by the “civil rights lawyer” who came to New Haven last week to exploit the paralyzing injury suffered by a Black man in police custody might have thought it was another George Floyd case of murderous racism. But police video, quickly made public, depicted instead the routine idiocy of life in Connecticut’s troubled but politically correct cities.

The incident seems to have gone this way.

A man with a criminal record that made it illegal for him to have a gun brandished one at a block party, causing a call to police. Officers arrested him but he resisted being taken away for booking. He was suspected of being drunk and was handcuffed and put into a police van whose passenger compartment had a bench but no seat belts.

On the way to police headquarters the man kicked the passenger compartment to protest his arrest. When the van driver braked abruptly to avoid a collision, the man fell sideways and slid forward along the bench. His head smashed into the wall at the front of the compartment, injuring his neck, leaving him unable to move.

He called for help. The van driver stopped and looked at him, called for an ambulance, and drove on to headquarters.

At headquarters officers seem to have thought the man was drunk rather than badly injured and they dragged him out of the van by his feet and put him in a wheelchair and then a cell, possibly worsening his injury. Then an ambulance took him to a hospital.

Police conduct was callous and contrary to regulation about prioritizing medical help, but nothing suggested racism. At least one of the officers handling him was Black.

But the bellowing lawyer posed a question that might be worth answering anyway: “Why don’t they believe us when we tell them we’re injured?”

Maybe this time it was because the injured man had been fooling around in public with a gun he possessed illegally while being drunk and disorderly and resisting arrest.

In law what matters here is only that the arrested man’s injury was incurred while he was in police custody. That his injury was accidental or aggravated by misunderstanding the man himself helped cause doesn’t diminish police liability.

Unless the man recovers quickly, which seems unlikely, since he already has undergone several surgeries, the city will be on the hook for millions of dollars in damages, his lawyer will enjoy another spectacular payday for showing up at an exceedingly simple case, and one bunch of taxpayers or another will bear the expense.

Since, like Connecticut’s other cities, for practical purposes New Haven is a ward of the state financially, ultimately the bill may be borne by state taxpayers.

And since Connecticut lately has received from the federal government billions of dollars that were created out of thin air, money creation that is behind the inflationary fever ravaging the world, as a practical matter everyone on the planet will pay.

Yet despite this vast money creation, despite the P.C. bleating long emanating from New Haven and state government, and despite the hundreds of millions of dollars city government and state government have paid their employees in raises and pensions in the years since the city police acquired the van in which the unfortunate man was so badly injured, no one ever got around to putting seat belts in it.

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost, and then the horse, the rider, and the war.

Government in Connecticut abounds in missing nails, systems that don’t work as they pretend to, no matter how much money they get. Yet they are never audited for results.

Even as that lawyer was bellowing for justice in New Haven, a state court was approving a $9 million settlement for a man long held at the state hospital for the criminally insane in Middletown whose repeated abuse and psychological torture by dozens of hospital workers had been captured on surveillance video.

Many hospital workers were fired, others prosecuted and convicted. A few got their jobs back. But the scandal was not well reported and Connecticut hardly knows about it.

So next on state government’s agenda is what is being called “hero pay” — that is, more bonuses for government employees.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

As he lies dying in Tennyson’s epic poem, “The Idylls of the King,” Arthur offers encouragement to his knights: “More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.”

We all may hope so. But does prayer influence the outcome of football games or the success of football teams? That’s the implication of the tale of the Bremerton, Washington, high school football coach who the other day won a case at the Supreme Court. The court decided that his school district had violated his constitutional rights by removing him for praying ostentatiously on the field after games.

Reasonably enough, the school administration felt that the coach wasn’t praying privately and individually, as his lawyers maintained, as much as he was using his public school position to encourage his players to pray. Indeed, once the coach began the practice, his players soon joined him in prayer on the field. They well could have suspected that doing so might help them gain playing time. They might have been praying for exactly that.

While the court seems to have overlooked them, old news reports about the coach’s practice quoted him as admitting that with his praying he sought to set an example for the players to help improve their lives. If that was his purpose, his praying wasn’t really private and individual at all but government-sponsored prayer in a public school setting, which has been deemed unconstitutional since a Supreme Court decision in 1962.

Of course prayer won’t kill anyone. In government venues people may feel pressure to pray but no one can be compelled to pray, and the court’s decision in this case isn’t likely to revive the insincere and superficial if not meaningless school prayers of old, in which students could feel coerced.

But since it calls attention to the connection of prayer and sports competitions, the decision invites speculation about the nature of such public prayer and the civic religion behind it.

After all, right now the world is suffering, as it usually is, several wars — not just in Ukraine but also the Middle East and Yemen — as well as sharply rising inflation that threatens some poor countries with famine. Meanwhile there is always widespread suffering from disease and natural disasters. In these circumstances who should feel compelled to seek divine help in the context of football?

Occasionally sports may reflect a great cause worth praying for, like the liberation of the oppressed, as when Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers bravely challenged racial segregation in baseball.

Desire for the success of a perpetual underdog might justify prayer as well. People are moved by the locker-room prayer scene in the basketball movie “Hoosiers,” where a player for the team of a tiny rural school competing for the state championship says, “Let’s win this one for all the small schools that never had the chance to be here.”

But such prayer needn’t be offered in a stadium, the sort of spectacle condemned in the Sermon on the Mount:

[ITALICS]

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.

Verily I say unto you, they have their reward.

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

[END ITALICS]

Any place that prays over football may not understand just how blessed it already is.

* * *

BAD POLICY KILLED THEM: While the Supreme Court was ratifying high school football prayer, dozens of illegal immigrants were baking to death in a truck in San Antonio, Texas.

In recent years there have been many such smuggling atrocities near this country’s southern border, and they happen not just because of the desperate economic conditions in Latin America and elsewhere.

Most of all they happen because people contemplating illegal immigration are justifiably confident that if they can sneak into the United States or even just reach the U.S. border, the U.S. government will never get around to enforcing the law against them.

This de-facto policy of semi-open borders is not as humane as its proponents think.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

How, some people ask resentfully, does the Supreme Court get to tell states they can restrict or even outlaw abortion but not guns?

The question is misleading.

The court didn’t make up the law on abortion and guns. Rightly or wrongly, the court construes the law already in place, the Constitution, and the Constitution itself answers the question.

That is, gun rights have their own amendment in the Constitution even as the Constitution never mentions abortion. This doesn’t mean that a case for abortion rights can’t be construed from the Constitution’s provisions about liberty, just that a constitutional right to abortion is a stretch.

From that point on the abortion issue is entirely a matter of policy preferences and political posturing.

For example, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong denounced the recent abortion decision, charging that it “carves our nation in two” — as if the original carving was not done by the court’s first abortion decision 50 years ago in Roe v. Wade, which its supporters hoped would stifle argument. It didn’t. That first carving is still OK with Tong.

Tong, a Democrat, thunders that he will defend Connecticut’s abortion law against any attempt by Republicans in Congress to nullify it through a federal law prohibiting abortion throughout the country. But the attorney general overlooks that the abortion legislation recently pressed by Democrats in Congress, the Women’s Health Protection Act, [ITALICS] also [END ITALICS] would nullify Connecticut’s abortion law, canceling its prohibition of abortion after fetal viability, [ITALICS] requiring [END ITALICS] the state to allow it.

Indeed, insofar as they have endorsed their party’s legislation in Congress, Connecticut’s leading Democrats — Governor Lamont, the state’s seven members of Congress, and Tong himself — are extremists, supporting post-viability abortion, even abortion at the moment of birth.

Insofar as leading Republicans in Connecticut generally favor allowing abortion before viability and prohibiting it afterward — the position articulated by the Roe decision, Connecticut law, and, according to polls, supported by most people nationally and in Connecticut — Republicans in Connecticut are the moderates.

Tong says he will defend Connecticut law against Republican legislation that has not yet even been formulated in Congress. Will he defend Connecticut law against his own party’s legislation already pending in Congress? Or does Tong want only to generate partisan hysteria?

The political left, which dominates Connecticut, asserts that the new abortion decision oppresses women. But any oppression here is done not by the court but by states with highly restrictive or prohibitive laws, and these states would not have such laws if many if not most of their own women did not support them. So far those women seem to oppose abortion more than they feel oppressed.

In any case claims of gender oppression are weak now that the political left imagines not only that men should be allowed to compete in women’s sports contests but also that men can get pregnant and have abortions as well.

The Supreme Court’s decision invalidating the New York state law that long has virtually prohibited citizens from carrying guns also has sparked some hysteria among Democrats in Connecticut. Some people say the decision will turn New York into the Wild West, as if, despite its virtually prohibitive law, New York hasn’t had plenty of gun crime anyway.

The law has prevented people from obtaining permits to carry guns unless they could show they faced a specific and serious threat. A general desire for self-defense wasn’t enough. Thus the law nullified Second Amendment rights, and the New York Legal Aid Society said it was used for discrimination against Blacks.

Now New York may have to follow Connecticut’s practice of presuming that an applicant should get a permit unless he is deemed a special risk.

It is hardly noticed but Connecticut’s own Constitution is more explicit about gun rights than the federal Constitution, declaring: “Every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state.”

Can Attorney General Tong be trusted to defend that right against his own party’s hysteria?

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

Amid the controversy about gun crime and the right to bear arms, it’s strange that legislative responses like the ones enacted last week at the federal level are so indirect and tangential.

Not that the new federal law is objectionable. It just doesn’t do much more than pay states for their expenses implementing “red flag” laws, encourage them to include juvenile crime records in reports to the federal gun background check database, and increase aid to states for mental health programs and school security.

The new law does not require background checks for the private transfer or sale of guns, nor does it outlaw any type of gun.

While the new law is fairly celebrated for at last winning the support of enough Republicans in the Senate to evade a filibuster, it seems to have no application to the circumstances of the recent mass murders in Buffalo and Uvalde, the atrocities that prompted the legislation. It may save a few lives but probably not the “thousands” imagined by its supporters, including one of its architects, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy.

The new law is just the most that is politically possible at the moment. Its supporters should be credited for that, but the law addresses political necessity more than public safety — the necessity for the federal government to be seen to “do something” even if nothing terribly relevant and effective. But at least members of Congress and President Biden now can say they have done as much as they could, and they can come back for more, like [ITALICS] comprehensive [END ITALICS] background checks, as political circumstances change — maybe with the next few mass murders.

While mass murders with “assault rifles” get most of the attention, they are not the big part of the country’s gun crime problem. Handguns are. In Chicago alone in a typical two weeks more people are killed by handguns than were killed in the massacres in Buffalo or Uvalde.

Last week in Hartford two people were shot to death and a third seriously wounded by a handgun in what police say was an argument over a dog. The mass murder in Manchester in 2010 was committed with a handgun.

Nationally and in Connecticut much of this handgun crime produces the biggest cliché in both criminal justice and news reporting about it: “long criminal record.”

That is, most serious crimes are committed not by first offenders but by people who already have been in trouble with the law many times but have not been deterred or rehabilitated by their plea bargains, sentences, probations, paroles, and encounters with social work.

This month in California a man with a long criminal record was charged in the murder of two police officers, his most recent previous offense having been illegal possession of a gun, for which his plea bargain allowed him to avoid jail — and apparently kill the two officers.

Of course since there is far more crime than there are resources to prosecute it, most criminal justice discounts crime to secure a plea and avoid the time and expense of trial.

Meanwhile in the United States there are far more guns in private possession than there are people, and even ardent advocates of imposing more restrictions on guns acknowledge that obtaining a gun illegally will remain relatively easy short of national confiscation, which would require repealing the Second Amendment, which isn’t going to happen any time soon.

So instead of futilely targeting the estimated 400 million guns in private possession in the United States, why not target repeat offenders generally and gun offenders particularly?

Why not enact federal and state incorrigibility laws, requiring life sentences after three, five, or even 10 offenses — and, crucially, a mandatory life sentence for a single offense committed with a gun, loaded or unloaded, real or replica?

Such laws would not have had application to the Buffalo and Uvalde massacres any more than the new federal law would have had. They also would cost a lot more money for more serious prosecution and maintenance of a larger prison population.

But such laws might be more relevant than anything yet proposed. Before long their implementation might spread the word that the country at last was as serious about gun crime as it is about the Second Amendment.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

When will Connecticut take the hint it long has been getting from its increasing population of bears, a hint that was reiterated two weeks ago when one repeatedly tried to break into houses in the Canton area, getting into at least one of them before being euthanized by environmental police?

That bear was unusually aggressive and would not be scared away, as most bears can be. But even ordinary bears have been causing more problems in Connecticut lately. They have damaged farm crops and killed or injured farm animals, and whenever bears show up, neighborhoods and schools have to close down until they wander away.

Apologists for the bears blame people for not sufficiently securing their trash cans and bird feeders, thus leading the bears to associate people and houses with food.

But many people [ITALICS] won’t [END ITALICS] do better with their trash, and in any case their doing better won’t stop the bear population from growing and causing more danger and inconvenience, as the Canton incident suggested, since the troublesome bear left behind three cubs. One died when tranquilized and the other two were helpfully relocated by the environmental police. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger, they’ll be back.

The General Assembly’s behavior here isn’t much better. The legislature keeps acting as if the bears will go away before they overwhelm the state. In March the legislature’s Environment Committee defeated 18-13 a bill that would have merely allowed farmers to kill bears to protect their farms, just as farmers already can obtain permits to kill destructive deer on their property.

The state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection estimates that 1,200 bears are roaming Connecticut. Most haunt the more rural northwestern part of the state, where bear sightings are almost routine. But now even towns east of the Connecticut River are afflicted.

The department reports that last year there were 124 sightings in Eastford, 54 in East Haddam, 44 in Chester, and even 22 in Old Saybrook on Long Island Sound.

Some sort of bear hunting season is required, if only in Litchfield and northern Fairfield counties. The alternative is to resign Connecticut to having dozens of bears in every town in another 10 or 20 years, with residents spending a lot of time at home trying to shoo the animals into the yards of their neighbors and towns trying to shoo them back and forth across town lines.

Tighter trash can lids won’t solve this problem any more than municipal zoning will.

* * *

GUN CHECK OBSTACLES: Since mass shootings are committed disproportionately by disturbed young men, one of the good ideas in the pending federal gun-control legislation is to conduct deeper investigation into the backgrounds of people between 18 and 21 who seek to purchase guns. These people might not have criminal records but they might be great risks anyway.

Such deeper investigation would require access to both medical records about mental health and juvenile court records.

Medical records are traditionally confidential, so the new federal law would have to nullify medical confidentiality for prospective gun purchasers. But then how would the federal background check agency, the FBI, even learn that such records existed unless prospective purchasers volunteered the information? Few are likely to do that.

In Connecticut a young prospective gun purchaser might have a long criminal [ITALICS] history [END ITALICS] but no criminal [ITALICS] record, [END ITALICS] or at least no record in a public database. That’s because the state refers most crimes by juveniles to juvenile court and, in violation of its own constitution, operates that court in secret on the premise that the public should never learn anything about any particular juvenile offender.

The 17-year-old boy charged with driving a stolen car into and killing Henryk Gudelski in New Britain last year has never been identified publicly, but police say he had been arrested 13 times in the previous 3½ years and was free anyway thanks to juvenile court. Under current law juvenile court will never produce any public accountability for Gudelski’s death.

If the new federal gun law can override the secrecy of Connecticut’s juvenile courts and those of other states and pry loose some records and even make them public, it will be doing double service.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

By Chris Powell

For Father’s Day last weekend the state Department of Children and Families publicized Connecticut’s Fatherhood Initiative, a program DCF runs with the state Department of Social Services that strives to get men as involved with their children as those children are involved with welfare agencies.

The social science confirming that a father’s involvement with his children is crucial long has been overwhelming and DCF laid it out well. Children involved with their fathers do better in every respect in life: educationally, emotionally, and in physical and mental health and social development. They are far more likely to avoid poverty, to grow up happy, confident, and kind, and to find decent employment. They are far less likely to get in trouble.

“Children want to make fathers proud,” the DCF stressed. Exactly!

The Fatherhood Initiative is great as far as it goes, but like so much else in government, it is remedial to the problem rather than what is most needed: prevention. That’s because a third of U.S. children are living without a father in their home. Programs like the initiative will be lucky to reach a tiny percentage of them.

Especially required are changes to the welfare system to remove its perverse incentives, to stop it from discouraging family formation, from encouraging childbearing outside marriage, and from substituting economically for fathers. Indeed, if, as social science suggests, fatherlessness is the country’s worst social problem, the root cause of most other social problems, then childbearing outside marriage is more anti-social than some things that are criminalized.

This needs to be taught in schools and all places where young people gather. But politically government is too scared to do it, lest it distress the many fatherless children who would hear the lesson and offend their single parents.

The lesson most needs to be taught in cities, where as many as 90% of children have no fathers in their home or lives. But that is where politics makes it least likely to be taught.

Prior to the “war on poverty” a half century ago the prospect of having a child outside marriage terrified young men and women alike, for both moral and economic reasons, reasons that were essentially the wisdom of the ages.

But then public policy removed the economic reasons, hastening the erosion of the moral reasons. Government urgently should find ways of restoring the wisdom of the ages to welfare policy.

For as the country might have noticed by now — from Los Angeles to Chicago to New York and to Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven — fatherless places are miserable and violent.

* * *

Winsted native Ralph Nader, the great advocate of civic activism, wrote this week that Connecticut U.S. Rep. John B. Larson is clamoring — privately, apparently to minimize embarrassment within his party — to get House Democrats to push their party’s tenuous majority in the Senate to start doing something.

That is, Nader suggests, Larson wants Senate Democrats to play Dirty Harry and tell Senate Republicans: “Go ahead and filibuster — make our day!”

Nader notes that with the Senate tied 50-50 and with 60 votes needed to terminate debate and bring legislation to a vote, the Republican Senate leadership has needed only to threaten a filibuster to induce the Democratic Senate leadership to put aside any legislation from the Democratic-controlled House.

But Larson is said to argue that the Democratic senators should bring House bills to debate anyway and cause the Republican senators to be [ITALICS] seen [END ITALICS] opposing them and to spend much time and energy doing so. For even if the Republican filibusters succeeded, issues would be illuminated and public pressure might change some minds.

A former history teacher, Larson may know that in 1948 Democrat Harry Truman overcame huge odds and got elected president in his own right in part by calling a special session of Congress, which had a Republican majority, to consider his administration’s agenda and then denouncing the “do-nothing” Republicans when they wouldn’t act favorably.

Today’s Democratic agenda is hardly perfect but the country deserves a debate on it and some work from the Senate for a change.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

His innocent enthusiasms sometimes get the better of Governor Lamont, so a few weeks ago he celebrated a new country song purportedly about Connecticut by the musical impresario Rusty Gear. But the song’s only lines about the state were not really so complimentary, and criticism by the governor’s Republican challenger, Bob Stefanowski, made them a bit infamous:

Back home we thank the governor
For the blessings that we got.
We can gamble on the internet
And it’s cool to smoke some pot.

Of course these days you can gamble on the internet and smoke marijuana in most states without getting in trouble with the law, and if such activities really are to be considered great achievements, the country’s decline becomes easier to explain.

Clever and catchy as it may be, the new song also can be criticized for historical and artistic inaccuracy. “Songs about my state are hard to find,” Gear sings, suggesting that this is because not much rhymes with “Connecticut.” (Gear makes do with “etiquette.”) But there are at least nine other songs about or involving Connecticut, and of course you don’t need to rhyme it to sing about it. You can rhyme other lyrics.

What may be the best of the Connecticut songs was recorded in 1945 by Bing Crosby and Judy Garland. It includes many references particular to the state, as well as gratuitous cracks at two other states. Crosby and Garland conclude:

Circled the globe dozens of times.
Seen all its wonders, known all its climes.
I’ve searched it with a fine-toothed comb
And found that I only have one home, sweet home.
Connecticut always will be my home.

Back then nobody needed internet gambling and marijuana to extol the state. Instead Crosby and Garland celebrated it for being “peaceful and fair” and having “village greens,” “childhood scenes,” “moonlit streams,” and “nights full of stars.”

Perhaps a bit daring for the times, they added, “You’ll find the chicks slicker” and “Every Yale guy is a male guy through and through.”

Of course this was 77 years ago, before new sexual manifestations were discovered, and besides, hard as it is to rhyme “Connecticut,” try rhyming something with “LGBTQ+.”

The important things here are appreciation of what one has and the patriotism it should evoke despite its failings — even as Connecticut has many failings, especially now that anyone pursuing the “peaceful and fair” in Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport is just as likely to find gunshots, squalor, child neglect, despair, drug addiction, and depravity. Rhymes for those are more easily found.

But trouble like that did not discourage the philosopher, theologian, and writer G.K. Chesterton.

“The world,” Chesterton wrote a century ago, “is not a lodging-house at Brighton, which we are to leave because it is miserable. It is the fortress of our family, with the flag flying on the turret, and the more miserable it is, the less we should leave it.

“The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love. The point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more.”

Hartford, Connecticut’s capital city, was once thought to be the richest city in the country but now is among the poorest.

Bridgeport, once the state’s manufacturing center, is not only desperately poor but pockmarked with the empty and crumbling factory buildings of its former fame.

Almost as poor is New Haven, which, once a pinnacle of scholarship, now produces instead most of the country’s political correctness.

Nevertheless it is June and for a few months ahead government-addled Connecticut will be, in its natural condition, just as Crosby and Garland sang, probably the most beautiful place in the world, quite without gambling on the internet and dope smoking.

Hartford’s Latin motto is “Post nubila phoebus” — “After the clouds, the sun.” As Chesterton envisioned, enough love, loyalty, effort, and courage may vindicate that motto yet.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

Maybe Connecticut’s recent police accountability legislation went too far with its provision limiting the “qualified immunity” of officers against civil lawsuits, but this month’s investigative report by the state’s Hearst newspapers about misconduct in the state police showed accountability is long overdue.

The Hearst report, facilitated by the new law, reviewed 900 complaints of misconduct filed against troopers between 2015 and 2020. It found that dozens of cases involved criminality, with troopers disciplined for, among other things, falsifying reports, mishandling evidence, using excessive force, failing to investigate crimes, improper searches, driving while intoxicated, violating protective orders, and threatening and fighting with colleagues.

But according to the Hearst report, on the whole discipline was light.

Records of the cases, the Hearst report said, were maintained by the state police Internal Affairs Unit, signifying that long ago the General Assembly itself could have investigated police misconduct. The legislature once had a Program Review and Investigations Committee but it seldom did anything important and was eliminated in 2017, purportedly for budget reasons, as if government no longer needed scrutiny.

Instead the legislature and the governor enacted a law empowering state employee union contracts to nullify the state right-to-know law and approved a state police contract allowing complaints to be concealed.

The murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis in 2020 prompted Connecticut’s Black state legislators to shame their colleagues into nullifying that contract provision via the new accountability law.

News coverage of state government, increasingly erratic as the finances of news organizations worsen, occasionally reports cases suggesting that discipline throughout state government, not just in the state police, is often too light as well, when it is attempted at all, and is frequently undone by appeals to the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration.

School systems everywhere long have been notorious for their inability to fire incompetent but tenured teachers. Just as Connecticut until recently was keeping secret the misconduct complaints against troopers, state law still exempts teacher evaluations from the disclosure requirement applying to the evaluations of all other state and municipal government employees.

That is, the effectiveness of discipline in government employment remains ripe for legislative investigation. Of course it will never happen. Why?

It’s because the clamor in Connecticut for greater accountability in police work was led by a mobilized ethnic minority with a strong moral claim and plenty of proof of injurious misconduct, a minority whose state legislators are safe for re-election in their heavily minority districts. The target of the clamor, police officers, while politically organized, are not so numerous.

But misconduct and malfeasance elsewhere in government are seldom physically injurious and the beneficiaries of impairing discipline are not just politically organized but numerous indeed. They constitute the most influential special interest everywhere even as there is no organized constituency for more efficient and effective government.

In the old days journalism might have led such a crusade, but investigative reporting is expensive while journalism is struggling to survive amid society’s declining literacy and civic engagement. So Connecticut will be lucky just to get more accountability from police.

* * *

DUMP THEM BOTH: Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives are running what seems like a third attempt to impeach former President Donald Trump over his instigation of the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6 last year. It’s hard to imagine how Trump’s reputation can be worsened, but worsening it might be a service not just to the country but also to the Republican Party.

For maybe then Republicans might see that Trump, unstable and sometimes vile, is the weakest candidate they could nominate for president in 2024 and might look elsewhere.

Fortunately many Democrats already are hoping to prevent President Biden’s renomination. But the Democrats still may have to answer for live-birth abortion, prosecutors who won’t prosecute, “social-emotional learning” that is displacing education, and transgenderism and drag queen story hours.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

Whoever would have thought that after 22 years in the state Senate and another 22 in the U.S. House of Representatives from Connecticut’s 1st District, the most Democratic district in the state, John B. Larson, raised in an East Hartford housing project, devotee of President John F. Kennedy, and holder of a 90% rating from Americans for Democratic Action, might not be liberal enough?

Muad Hrezi, that’s who.

Hrezi, 27, son of Libyan refugees and a former substitute teacher and staffer for U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, is challenging Larson for renomination, suggesting that Larson is serving “greedy special interests” and has been “bought by corporations.”

Hrezi received few votes at the recent Democratic nominating convention in the 1st District but has been trying to petition his way into a primary against Larson in August. He seems to have fallen short of the 3,900 petition signatures he needed from 1st District Democrats, but he hopes to win a court order for a primary anyway. It would be the district’s first primary since the one won by Larson himself in 1998.

Surprisingly, Hrezi’s campaign is reported to have raised about a half-million dollars, and it has been a long time since Larson had competition serious enough to cause him to raise a lot of campaign money.

Could Hrezi duplicate the shocking upset achieved four years ago by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another young unknown with no record in public life, who ran a far-left campaign in a heavily Democratic New York City district and denied renomination to 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley, a member of the House Democratic leadership?

That’s Hrezi’s idea. His platform supports raising taxes on the rich, raising the minimum wage, canceling all student loan debt, making higher education free (to students anyway), the “Green New Deal,” government takeover of medical insurance, slashing military spending, and putting still more money into schools.

Hrezi’s ideological blinders are apparent insofar as his platform takes no notice of inflation, which is by far the greatest burden on the working class he aspires to help.

At least Hrezi condemns the federal government’s subservience to the investment banking industry. Like more serious liberals he proposes reinstating the restrictions on investment banking that disappeared when the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed in 1999.

But is Larson really a tool of greedy special interests and corporations when he is solicitous of the Hartford area’s insurance companies and military contractors and their thousands of employees? Or is he just serving his district?

And how eager should the district be to dispense with Larson’s great seniority in the House and the goodies it often brings home from Washington?

While Larson remains vigorous at 73, a recent opinion poll suggested that many in Connecticut — not quite a majority — are tiring of U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who also remains vigorous at 76 after 37 years in elective office, though Blumenthal’s tenure may seem longer because of his devotion to television news cameras. Could Hrezi make 1st District Democrats as tired of Larson as Ocasio-Cortez made Democrats in the Bronx and Queens tired of Crowley, or motivate the far left as much as AOC did?

Maybe. But Larson is gregarious and well liked, and even if he is losing touch with his district, he remains well known while hardly anyone has heard of Hrezi.

The big question in any challenge to Larson, now or in the future, may be whether Democrats in the 1st District have moved much farther left than Larson and most observers think. Hrezi stresses his endorsements from 18 far-left activists, none of whom commands a substantial constituency, even if the far left makes, if not the most sense, the most noise.

But Democrats in the 1st District are not accustomed to primaries and it has been two decades since Larson was hard-pressed to get people to the polls on his own behalf. The fewer the voters, the more likely that the most ideological among them will constitute a majority in a primary.

At least one trend may be working in Hrezi’s favor: the worsening proletarianizing of Connecticut and the country under regimes of both parties. With the real inflation rate above 20% and government still growing anyway, desperation is approaching fast.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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By Chris Powell

While he already had signed Connecticut’s Juneteenth holiday legislation the previous month, Governor Lamont went to New London last Friday to sign the legislation again more ceremonially alongside the replica of the ship Amistad, which was visiting the city.

This allowed the ceremony to evoke not only the end of slavery in Texas in 1865, as Juneteenth does, but also the slave revolt that took place on board the ship in 1839, beginning a legal controversy that struck a blow for liberty, a controversy in which Connecticut people played a heroic part.

But at bottom the Amistad’s availability for the re-signing of the Juneteenth legislation was just a fortunate distraction for many of the celebrants, including state and municipal officials. That’s because most Connecticut residents who are descendants of slaves kidnapped from Africa live not in or near New London but in or near Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport, which might have been distressingly ironic locations for the ceremony.

For within a few hours on either side of the ceremony there were the usual fatal shootings in Hartford and Bridgeport and in New Haven a 16-year-old boy was wounded in a drive-by shooting but survived.

Also meanwhile in New Haven the school system was holding a conference on reading instruction, partly in response to the collapse of student reading scores in the city, where for years most students have not been able to read at grade level.

Chronic student absenteeism and lack of parenting are big parts of that problem and afflict schools not just in New Haven but in Hartford and Bridgeport as well.

New Haven school officials had invited the press to attend the conference but after it began they expelled the New Haven Independent’s correspondent so that potential disagreement between teachers and administrators about instructional techniques wouldn’t be disclosed.

Yet they still call it public education.

Back at the ceremony in New London, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz declared, “Today we’re here to recognize the trauma of our African-American community and to start in a small way to correct the wrongs of our past.”

[ITALICS] Start [END ITALICS] to correct the wrongs of our past?

From the 13th Amendment and the Freedmen’s Bureau at the end of the Civil War to the civil rights and voting rights laws and “war on poverty” of more recent decades, the country was trying, at spectacular expense, to correct the wrongs of the past long before anyone thought of making Juneteenth an official holiday on top of Martin Luther King Day.

Of course much progress has been made during this century and a half, but given Connecticut’s enduring racial disparities — in educational achievement, housing, integration, crime, poverty, and public health — overall conditions in the places where most of the state’s descendants of slaves live seem to have worsened in important respects in recent years despite the huge amounts that have been spent in the name of improvement.

This makes the official Juneteenth holiday look mainly like a strategic distraction from failure and government’s chronic refusal to audit and address it.

After all, what will the Juneteenth holiday do about all those disparities?

What will Juneteenth accomplish besides what probably will become another paid day off for government’s own employees and another day for city residents to endure reduced or more expensive public services?

What will come from the additional righteous posturing by elected officials who, under cover of Juneteenth, can keep overlooking those disparities and failures and evading the underlying causes in government policies that, while comfortably employing so many politically connected people, don’t achieve their nominal objectives?

In New London Governor Lamont said some people “want to airbrush our history.” This was a misleading reference to those who object not to an honest teaching of history and the long struggle to democratize society but to educators and curriculums depicting the United States as a hopelessly racist country instead of one striving, however imperfectly, to live up to its founding principles.

The governor’s traveling to New London for a second signing of the Juneteenth holiday legislation served mainly to airbrush Connecticut’s [ITALICS] present. [END ITALICS] More holidays may make politicians feel good but they won’t change anything.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.

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