Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

What are the qualifications of Erick Russell, the Democratic state convention’s nominee for state treasurer in next week’s primary election?

Russell’s record in public life is slim. His campaign’s internet site says he is a lawyer with a “prestigious” firm in New Haven, where he has done legal work for the treasurer’s office. That’s something even if it provides little to evaluate him by.

But a few days ago Russell’s campaign publicist solicited news organizations to interview the candidate for another reason: “Not only would Erick make LGBTQ history in Connecticut; he would make national LGBTQ history as the first Black LGBTQ statewide elected official in U.S. history!”

That is, people should vote for Russell because of his sexual orientation and race.

Should those characteristics really be such a big deal? After all, until his resignation for health reasons last December a gay man had been Connecticut’s state comptroller for 10 years and was generally considered as conscientious, competent, and decent as any elected state official. Nobody seemed to care about his sexual orientation. But he was white. Should anyone care more about Russell’s sexual orientation because he is Black?

Since it is promoting Russell’s sexual orientation and race, his campaign seems to think that they are a political [ITALICS] advantage [END ITALICS] — that far from expressing prejudice, voters want to show their good nature by elevating members of sexual as well as members of racial minorities. But this promotion implicitly admits that, at least in Connecticut, being the first member of one minority or another in any office isn’t really much of an accomplishment at all.

Russell seems to have gotten the Democratic convention’s endorsement for treasurer as an elaboration on the party’s tradition of ethnic ticket balancing, whereby the treasurer nomination has been reserved for a Black candidate. Now the convention’s treasurer candidate is Black and gay. With luck he also may turn out to be left-handed.

But Russell’s silly appeal for votes may not be as much of a stretch as that of a rival in the Democratic primary for treasurer, Dita Bhargava, an investment fund manager. In her television commercials Bhargava pledges to refuse to invest state pension funds in companies that don’t sufficiently support abortion and aren’t accountable enough, criteria she conveniently fails to define.

In her commercial about corporate accountability Bhargava blames Stamford-based Purdue Pharma for the death of her son from a fentanyl overdose. But Purdue Pharma doesn’t make fentanyl. Instead it has been denounced for making the painkiller OxyContin, which is blamed for being addictive and causing users to turn to street drugs like fentanyl when their prescriptions run out. In the name of benefiting victims of opioid addiction, the company is being liquidated in bankruptcy.

Purdue Pharma’s responsibility here is actually secondary. For the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved OxyContin for public use in 1995 and thousands of doctors have prescribed it since and [ITALICS] still do. [END ITALICS] For the FDA has not revoked its approval. Indeed, the World Health Organization classifies the generic version of OxyContin as an essential medicine.

So while primary responsibility for the trouble with OxyContin lies with the FDA and the prescribing doctors, Bhargava seems to understand that it would be too hard to demand accountability from them even as it is always easy to demagogue against a drug company, since few people want to take any responsibility for their addictions.

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MONKEY BUSINESS: Hooray! A new example of racism supposedly has been discovered. It’s the name of a viral disease that causes fever, headache, and a blistering rash and is spreading around the world: monkeypox. Fortunately monkeypox usually resolves in a month and causes few fatalities.

But the disease appears to be highly associated with homosexuality and “monkey” has been not just a disparaging term generally but one used against Black people particularly. So public health officials want to sanitize the disease by renaming it.

That would be fine, but then “chicken” long has been a term of disparagement too, so what is to be done about chickenpox?

Maybe the whole medical lexicon needs an urgent review for political correctness. Or maybe public health authorities just need to lighten up.

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

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By Chris Powell

While Governor Lamont and Connecticut’s members of Congress seek re-election by touring the state distributing money for supposedly wonderful new projects and programs, what was already a catastrophe is getting worse and hardly being noticed.

It’s the failure of education in the cities and especially New Haven, whose Board of Education last week reviewed appalling new student proficiency test and attendance data.

Only 12% of New Haven students are performing at grade level in math and only 28% in English.

The city’s schools also have a 54% rate of chronic absenteeism, students who miss more than 10% of their classes. It is the highest rate of absenteeism ever recorded by the city’s schools.

As for what to do about it, the school board seemed unable to get past the local controversy over the best way of teaching reading. But others in the city keep clamoring for more spending on education and higher salaries for teachers, as if Connecticut hasn’t pursued such policies since the state Supreme Court’s decision in the school financing case of Horton v. Meskill in 1977, 45 years ago. Decades of spending more on schools and raising teacher salaries have made teachers happy but not improved student performance.

The cause of the problem is elsewhere: not teaching methods or money but more than a half century of social disintegration, child neglect resulting from the policy-induced destruction of the family among poor people.

Of course New Haven’s elected officials aren’t eager to acknowledge that the problem is their own constituents. Nor are the state’s top elected officials. They are all Democrats and long have farmed New Haven for their party’s biggest pluralities in state elections.

Even so, a student’s educational performance is mostly a matter of parenting. Teachers and school administrators often try heroically and sometimes inspire students enough to overcome their handicaps at home. But for most children the prerequisite of a decent education is conscientious parents. At bottom the educational catastrophe in New Haven and other cities and inner suburbs is the lack of conscientious parenting — and it can’t even be acknowledged and discussed officially in Connecticut, much less solved.

As a result many children are being doomed to lives of menial labor, poverty, crime, unhappiness, and dependence on handouts from government — which sometimes seems to be the idea. At least the perpetual poverty of the cities long has sustained those Democratic pluralities. So it is never questioned.

But perpetual poverty will not sustain democracy and liberty. Only a self-supporting and well-educated middle class will.

As the governor and members of Congress pass out the goodies in pursuit of re-election, it’s as if they are shopping for new curtains while the house burns down.

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NEW PARTY TIME: Polls suggest that most Americans are dissatisfied enough with both the Democrats and the Republicans that they would like the country to have a third major political party, especially if the Democrats are to renominate President Biden or substitute Vice President Kamala Harris for him and the Republicans are to renominate former President Donald Trump. So last week a few dozen prominent former Democrats and Republicans announced they are forming a party that is to be called Forward.

Forward is being led by businessman Andrew Yang, a very liberal Democrat who recently ran unsuccessfully for president and mayor of New York City, and former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, a moderate Republican. Both seem more competent and suitable for leadership than the president and the former president.

Third parties did surprisingly well in the presidential elections in 1980 and 1992. In 1980 U.S. Rep. John Anderson got 6.6% of the vote against President Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, while in 1992 zillionaire Ross Perot got 19% against President George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

But Anderson and Perot clearly stood for something — Anderson for moderate opposition to Carter’s liberal haplessness and Reagan’s conservatism, Perot for slashing the national debt.

What will Forward stand for? Even its organizers don’t know yet, but just not being Biden and crazy left and not being Trump and plain crazy may be enough for getting started.

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

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By Chris Powell

Guilt tripping through American history has become almost as popular for vacationers as Florida. It’s a vacation from current political reality.

In Connecticut the latest guilt trip involves the executions carried out here in the 1600s by the earliest European colonists against 11 of their number accused of witchcraft. The first known witchcraft execution in North America was that of a Windsor woman who was hanged in Hartford in 1647. This was just eight years after the Connecticut colony had distinguished itself more favorably by adopting the Fundamental Orders, a constitution establishing a government and taking more small steps toward democracy.

Until recently Connecticut preferred to remember the heroic virtues of its founders — their setting out on their own, crossing the ocean, and starting up all over again from nothing. But their failings, even their witchcraft hysteria, are not really cause for the everlasting shame pursued by today’s guilt tripping, which takes people and events out of the context of their time and ignores what used to be called the ascent of man, the long and bumpy journey from primitiveness to civilization.

For [ITALICS] of course [END ITALICS] hundreds of years ago people saw the world in a more primitive way, without the understanding provided by modern science and communications. The fear arising from their lack of understanding, combined with the severity of their Puritan religion, made witchcraft seem a plausible explanation for the frequent calamities they suffered, and an accusation of witchcraft quickly became a convenient mechanism for intimidating or expropriating others — much as accusations of racism are exploited today.

A group called the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project has been clamoring for a formal acquittal of the victims of the witchcraft hysteria. The state’s pardon law can’t help because it can be applied only to the living, so maybe it could be amended. Or maybe the General Assembly could pass a resolution of apology.

But why bother? Is there anyone in the state or even the country who has heard of the old witchcraft hysteria and who doesn’t know that it was all a horrible misapprehension and injustice and who doesn’t either shudder or laugh at it? Could anyone unaware of it come upon it without instantly recognizing it as such?

Meanwhile there are many criminal convictions throughout the country about which serious doubts have arisen, and a far more relevant project, the Innocence Project, has used DNA evidence and other investigation to exonerate hundreds of wrongly convicted people, including some in Connecticut — people who are still alive and thus in infinitely more need of exoneration than the supposed witches of old. The Innocence Project estimates that as many as 10% of prisoners held in the United States are innocent. (Also unjustly, many repeat criminal offenders stalk society because the criminal-justice system fails to put them away for good no matter how much harm they keep doing.)

Many wrongly accused people have been convicted on the basis of false confessions, extracted from them by intimidation and threats by police and prosecutors, just as false confessions were sweated or even beaten out of people accused of witchcraft.

That’s why any formal exoneration of the victims of the witchcraft hysteria won’t do much more than make people feel guilty about a wrong done long ago for which they bear no responsibility even as it distracts them from current wrongs for which [ITALICS] everyone [END ITALICS] remains responsible.

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OUTRAGEOUS INEPTNESS: Connecticut has all sorts of outrages that should be addressed before bothering with the flaws of ancient ancestors. Another such outrage arose two weeks ago in Stonington, where, according to The Day of New London, two municipal public works employees were caught on surveillance video planting drug syringes in a gazebo in a town park, and doing it on the job, no less.

Police said the employees aimed to create the false impression that the park is overrun by drug addicts and crime.

But Stonington First Selectwoman Danielle Chesebrough says the employees will not be disciplined because their dangerous and deceitful stunt violated no town government policy.

Indeed, all Connecticut often seems to lack a policy ensuring that government serves the public rather than its own employees.

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

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By Chris Powell

Connecticut state government has had worse managers than Ned Lamont, but nobody should be much impressed by the huge financial surplus over which he is presiding — more than $4 billion, equivalent to a fifth of state government’s annual budget.

For the surplus is not a product of any astounding new efficiencies in state government achieved by the Lamont administration.

No, state government still spends more every year without any marked improvement in service to the public or the state’s living standards.

Instead the surplus arises from billions of dollars in emergency cash from the federal government, distributed in the name of relief from the recent virus epidemic, and from big increases in state capital gains tax revenue.

Most state governments are enjoying big surpluses for the same reasons. But happy days are not really here again, for an old saying from Wall Street counsels caution: Don’t mistake a bull market for genius.

Caution is especially advisable now because, on top of the termination of that emergency federal aid, the stock market has been falling for a few months and is no longer producing capital gains for people who, to get richer, had to do little more than hang around.

The capital gains on which they lately have been paying much more in state taxes are, along with all that federal money propping up the state’s financial reserves, mainly the other side of the inflation that is devastating living standards throughout the country and the world.

The U.S. money supply, determined entirely by the federal government, is estimated to have increased by about 35% in the last three years even as the number of full-time workers fell, government paid people for not working, and production declined.

More money amid less production is the recipe for inflation, and perhaps not so coincidentally Connecticut state government’s financial surplus of about 20% of the annual budget is closer to the real annual rate of inflation than the official rate misleadingly calculated by the government, which lately has been about 9%.

State government’s financial position may look great but it has come at a great cost. Government has saved itself but not the people.

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THE ‘EQUITY’ RACKET: Connecticut’s buzz word of the moment seems to be “equity.” It sanitizes almost anything, including the state-licensed growing and retailing of marijuana. Under Connecticut’s new marijuana legalization program, licenses are to be required for large-scale growing of marijuana and to be limited to companies involving people from areas that saw a high level of prosecutions in the “war on drugs.”

People who obeyed the drug laws will get no such privileges for their good citizenship.

In essence marijuana licenses are becoming political patronage. Meeting clear criteria won’t be enough. The state Consumer Protection Department will award licenses not just according to the criteria but also as favoritism.

So it’s not surprising that, as the Connecticut Examiner reported last week, a grower’s license is likely to be awarded to a company owned in part by former state Sen. Art Linares, a Republican married to Stamford Mayor Caroline Simmons, a Democrat and former state representative.

That’s called working both sides of the street.

According to the Examiner, the “equity” part of Linares’ application is a partner who “has lived for five of the last 10 years in a disproportionately impacted area of Connecticut.”

That is, a front man. How just and remedial!

All this evokes how Connecticut handled the start of cable television 50 years ago. State law divided the state into franchise areas with a single license to be issued for each. To qualify, a company had to be owned by local residents. But they weren’t required to have the capital and expertise needed to operate the business.

So local politically connected people started such companies, got the franchise license, and sold the franchise to a real cable TV company, making a bundle. This racket came to be called “rent a citizen.”

Today’s marijuana licensing racket will enrich people who need only to be friends with someone who can pretend to have been oppressed.

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

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By Chris Powell

Each major political party has its fruitcakes at the national level, though the Republican ones, like U.S. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn, get far more attention than the Democratic ones since news organizations overwhelmingly favor the Democrats.

Last week two Democratic equivalents of Greene and Cawthorn, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, were arrested for blocking traffic during an abortion-rights protest near the Supreme Court in Washington. As they were led away by police to be booked, they put their hands behind their backs, pretending, for photographers, to be handcuffed. No one had been handcuffed but the dishonesty of the stunt was not widely reported.

Of course the problem of Donald Trump lurks around Republicans and may not end until the next presidential election. But what of the intervening two years and the congressional and state elections in November? Should the Republican fruitcakes, Trump, and recent controversial Supreme Court decisions disqualify all Republican candidates, now and even forevermore?

That is the suggestion from some quarters, as with the letter published the other day in the New Haven Register from former New Haven Republican Chairman Victor Fasano, who declared that he had quit the party in disgust and become a Democrat.

Disdain for the national Republican Party’s increasingly conservative inclination was blamed for the defeat of Connecticut’s last Republican member of Congress, U.S. Rep. Chris Shays, in 2008. Shays was a moderate, even rather liberal, and after 20 years in the House was well regarded in his district, southern Fairfield County, even when he lost. The decisive rap against him was that he was a vote for control of the House by his awful national party.

Such concerns are always fair and likely to be raised in the current campaign in Connecticut, where two Republican candidates for Congress are thought to have an outside chance. One is the candidate for U.S. senator endorsed by the Republican state convention, former state Rep. Themis Klarides. If she defeats Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, then — horrors! — Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell might return as Senate majority leader.

No matter that Klarides has voted for abortion rights and gun control. It will be said, as already is being said about Republicans elsewhere, that if Klarides helps the Republicans take Congress, they will outlaw abortion, same-sex marriage, and even contraception.

Such complaints are calculated hysteria. Anti-abortion Republicans in Congress long have been appropriating for contraception. As for abortion and same-sex marriage, legislation to forbid them nationally almost surely would fail in the Senate as long as the Senate maintained the filibuster rule, which requires 60 votes to advance legislation. (Democrats pressing to repeal the rule before the election might miss it afterward.) Even without the filibuster rule such legislation probably would not command even a simple majority. And if it somehow did pass, President Biden or his successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, would veto it and it would fail to get the necessary two-thirds override vote.

But consider the greater craziness likely to be triggered if Blumenthal is re-elected and Democrats increase their narrow majorities in Congress.

A more Democratic Senate probably will scrap the filibuster rule and a more Democratic Congress will pass legislation nationalizing a right to late-term abortion, which the president will sign. The Democrats already have passed such legislation in the House and have put it to a vote in the Senate. It is extreme and Blumenthal is its most enthusiastic supporter.

A more Democratic Congress probably will outlaw all guns except shotguns. Such legislation is already pending in a House committee.

A more Democratic Congress probably will make permanent the open borders being maintained by the Biden administration. The next step will be voting rights for non-citizens.

A more Democratic Congress probably will require transgender participation in women’s sports. A more Democratic Senate probably will put on the Supreme Court more justices who pretend not to know what a woman is only to discover, once seated, that men can be women too.

To prevent the looming craziness, Congress needs more moderates, whatever their party.

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

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By Chris Powell

Nobody can blame Themis Klarides for liking the idea of term limits. She is the Republican state convention’s choice to challenge U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat who has been in elective office for 37 years and at age 76 is seeking a third six-year term in the Senate, at the end of which he would be 82.

So last week Klarides, the former leader of the Republican minority in the state House of Representatives, pledged that if elected to the Senate she will support a constitutional amendment limiting U.S. House members to three two-year terms and U.S. Senate members to two six-year terms. The amendment would not prohibit merely that number of [ITALICS] consecutive [END ITALICS] terms; its term limits would be [ITALICS] lifetime. [END ITALICS]

There is some irony here.

Polls show strong support for term limits in principle, but practice is otherwise, since while Americans hate Congress in principle, in practice they usually love their own members of Congress, with incumbents being re-elected to the House about 95% of the time and to the Senate about 85%.

Klarides herself served 11 terms, 22 years, in the state House before retiring last year — not quite Blumenthal-like longevity but long enough that a sincere belief in rotation in office might have caused her to look for other work at least a decade ago.

The problem that term limits mean to address is the same problem term limits would worsen — a lack of democracy.

Yes, elections often are not as competitive as they should be. But incumbency, the favors it can bestow, and the advantages it confers in campaign fundraising aren’t the only reasons.

Incumbency probably is not as decisive as districting for political advantage — gerrymandering. States that want political impartiality rather than favoritism in districting can assign the task to a nonpartisan agency, or at least a bipartisan one as Connecticut does.

The campaign fundraising advantages of incumbents could be reduced by requiring holders of federal television and radio broadcasting licenses to provide much free advertising time to federal candidates. That’s where most federal campaign money is spent. (Such a system of government financing of campaign ads could restrict them to a candidate’s delivering his message himself, without the flashy graphics and sinister sound effects.)

There is wisdom in the Constitution’s 22nd Amendment, limiting the president to two terms, because the presidency holds enormous executive powers and longer tenure in office might facilitate tyranny. But congressional office is without executive power and every member of Congress shares legislative power with 534 others. There is little danger of tyranny in letting any member of Congress serve indefinitely, but prohibiting people from re-electing a legislator contradicts democracy.

Rotation in office can be achieved far short of doing that. Even now if voters want to replace an elected official they can figure out how to do it, just as Klarides’ own constituents easily could have replaced her long ago but didn’t. Does she now think they were wrong?

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CONNECTICUT LAGS AGAIN: Maybe Connecticut’s unfavorable business climate isn’t big news anymore, but this month CNBC did another survey anyway and ranked the state 39th out of 50 for attractiveness to business. Despite Governor Lamont’s recent national appeal to businesses to relocate to Connecticut so their employees can enjoy the state’s liberal abortion law, nearly all the states with the most restrictive abortion laws ranked higher than Connecticut in the survey.

The most notoriously anti-abortion state, Texas, was fifth. It’s easy to see why the governor’s wife, an investment banker, recently was pursuing business opportunities in Tennessee, since that state ranked sixth, just behind Texas. Also running far ahead of Connecticut were supposedly benighted Utah (8), North Dakota (13), Idaho (20), South Dakota (22), Wisconsin (23), Kentucky (26), and Wyoming (32).

These states may be culturally backward, since, unlike Connecticut, they lack “drag queen story hours” in their libraries and “pizza sex” lessons and “social-emotional learning” in their schools. But their growing prosperity might teach Connecticut more about business than Connecticut might teach them about abortion. At least they seem to know what pays the freight and that it’s not abortion or other politically correct stuff.

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

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By Chris Powell

All abortion all the time continues to be the theme of Connecticut’s Democratic Party. Last week a candidate in the party’s primary election for state treasurer, Dita Bhargava, pledged in a campaign commercial to use the state’s pension funds to badger companies into guaranteeing their employees access to abortion. If she is elected the state pension funds won’t invest in companies that don’t comply.

Bhargava is not the first candidate for state treasurer to advocate using government pension investments as weapons of political ideology. It is happening throughout the country and Connecticut’s current treasurer, Shawn Wooden, who is retiring this year, has done it as well, divesting from companies that manufacture ammunition. The treasurer’s job might get boring otherwise, with nothing to do but be prudent and honest.

But the history of Connecticut’s treasurer’s office suggests that being prudent and honest may be challenge enough, since the treasurer 20 years ago extorted kickbacks for the placement of state pension investments, got caught and convicted, and went to federal prison.

The implication of that disgraceful episode was that the treasurer might best keep state pension investing simple, putting the money into low-commission index funds, government bonds, and gold. Such simplicity might seem even more compelling now that inflation and rising interest rates are pricking what has been called the “everything bubble.”

After all, any company or investment house so eager for state investment that it would yield to political pressure about its abortion insurance policy might not be such a safe investment, and any company that [ITALICS] was [END ITALICS] a safe investment, and any investment house with a highly successful record, would hardly need the patronage of a state treasurer who sought to bully it over its abortion insurance policy.

But at least for the duration of the Democratic primary, in which she is a challenger lacking the endorsement of the party’s state convention, Bhargava figures that she can get crucial support by pledging to politicize the pension funds.

Bhargava is probably correct to think that, at least during the primary campaign, no one in journalism or among her rivals for the nomination will ask her just how much abortion advocacy a company or investment house will have to provide to qualify for investment during her administration.

For example, will the supplicant company or investment house have to provide insurance for all abortion all the time — that is, including abortion after fetal viability right up to the moment of birth? Will coverage for pre-viability abortion but not post-viability abortion be enough? Will a company or investment house that is located in an abortion-banning state and seeks Connecticut pension fund patronage have to finance not only its employees’ abortions but also their travel to an abortion-permissive state?

And why stop with the medical insurance policies of companies in which Connecticut’s pension funds may invest? If restricting abortion is really so outrageous, why invest in [ITALICS] any [END ITALICS] company located in [ITALICS] any [END ITALICS] state or [ITALICS] any country [END ITALICS] that gets in the way of abortion?

Indeed, maybe one of her rivals in the primary will charge that Bhargava doesn’t go far enough — that she is too moderate and all abortion all the time requires so much more.

Similar fanaticism is playing out in Connecticut’s Republican Party, where the state convention’s choice for U.S. senator, former state Rep. Themis Klarides, is being scorned by her primary rivals for supporting abortion rights and not supporting former President Donald Trump.

The fanaticism on the Republican side is laughable, insofar as challenger Leora Levy, a member of the party’s national committee, used to favor abortion rights and deplore Trump but reversed herself as her opportunities changed. Levy and the other challenger for the Senate nomination, perennial candidate Peter Lumaj, claim to be the only true conservatives in the race.

Their posture may have to adjust if either wins the primary and has to appeal to an electorate that, while starting to perceive the deficiencies of the liberal Democratic state and national administrations, has not elected a Republican to Congress or statewide office in many years.

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

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By Chris Powell

Ancient Rome’s foremost historian, Tacitus, who often sat at the center of the empire’s government, observed, “The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.” Today he might add that the nation with ever-more laws is probably becoming not just more corrupt but more dishonest and stupid as well.

The recent mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, may be a case in point. That state has tough and comprehensive gun-control laws and a “red flag” law — just like Connecticut. Yet these laws didn’t stop the disturbed young man charged with the crime, whose craziness was well known to his parents and the police but prompted no intervention.

In recent days in Connecticut a 15-year-old boy was shot to death and a woman wounded in Fairfield at a birthday party for a 13-year-old that was attended by dozens of people. Then two people were shot in New Haven, for which a 17-year-old was charged, and two more were shot in downtown Norwich, for which an 18-year-old was charged.

Meanwhile a Norwalk City Hall forum on gun violence, attended by Mayor Harry Rilling and U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, produced only a glimmer of understanding. The forum heard that many young men are idle, uneducated, and unskilled and that despite Connecticut’s strict laws, legal and illegal guns alike are prevalent here.

Ebony Epps of Street Safe Bridgeport added, “These kids are so desensitized.” But like everyone else Epps advocated only more “programs,” which multiply almost as fast as the laws with a similar lack of effect.

There were no calls at the forum to inquire [ITALICS] why [END ITALICS] the young men are so “desensitized,” no calls to inquire into the causes of the social disintegration that is slowly destroying the country.

There was no acknowledgment that the strictest gun laws have accomplished little more in Connecticut’s cities than they have in Chicago or New York.

For the country now has a huge underclass — disengaged, demoralized, alienated, and unproductive but heavily armed, and the underclass won’t be giving up its guns any faster than the rest of the country will be.

Where has this underclass come from? Is it the fault of Donald Trump and George W. Bush? Why wasn’t it civilized under Barack Obama and Bill Clinton? Why are fewer people today prepared to become good [ITALICS] citizens? [END ITALICS]

Anything short of questions like those is a waste of time, except for people aspiring to careers in “programs.”

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Some wise guys in Connecticut, angry at the Supreme Court’s recent reiteration in the Second Amendment case from New York that individuals have the right to keep and bear arms, are arguing again that the right should be restricted to members of the militia mentioned in the amendment.

Yes, “a well-regulated militia” is the rationale offered by the Second Amendment for the right to keep and bear arms. But this rationale for the right does not establish a [ITALICS] requirement. [END ITALICS] Back when the Bill of Rights was adopted, people didn’t have to be formal members of a militia to be eligible to join it or be summoned into it. The Bill of Rights gave the people the right to keep and bear arms [ITALICS] just in case. [END ITALICS]

That is how the Second Amendment was construed back then. People today may consider the amendment’s rationale outdated, but it’s still in the Constitution and it’s not for the courts or state legislatures to change or invalidate it. That can be done only by repealing the amendment through the prescribed constitutional procedures.

The wise guys complain that today’s semi-automatic rifles are “weapons of war,” far more deadly than the muskets in use when the Bill of Rights was adopted. The wise guys argue that the country’s founders didn’t imagine that the right to keep and bear arms included “weapons of war.” But of course the founders imagined it, since back then muskets were “weapons of war” too.

Connecticut’s own Constitution suggests that the Supreme Court has construed the Second Amendment exactly as it was understood when it was ratified in 1791. For since 1818, 27 years after ratification of the Second Amendment, Connecticut’s Constitution has declared: “Every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state.”

It always was and remains an [ITALICS] individual [END ITALICS] right.

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

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By Chris Powell

Supposedly Connecticut’s new paid family and medical leave program is a rousing success after its first six months of giving people cash benefits financed by a half-percent increase in the state income tax. The program reports that as of May 31 it had paid more than $80 million to 19,700 of the 44,000 people who applied.

No doubt those 19,700 were glad to get the money. But the program’s report means that most applicants, 55% — people who suffered what they considered a family or medical emergency — were actually [ITALICS] rejected [END ITALICS] for benefits. These included many people who were self-quarantining, missing work, and losing wages because they were suffering from COVID-19, a situation not covered by the program unless claimants are getting serious medical treatment.

The program’s narrow limits on what are accepted as family and medical emergencies make it objectionable. After all, many people are more disadvantaged by the breakdown of a car or home heating system than by losing wages because of personal or family illness. But the program won’t let people prioritize their own emergencies.

Most objectionable about the program is that it is really only self-insurance, something people could achieve for themselves just by opening a savings account and putting half of 1% of their income into it. This would let people draw on their own money to compensate for [ITALICS] any [END ITALICS] emergency or income loss without having to get state government’s permission and without state government or its insurance administrator taking a cut.

Emergencies are emergencies. People should provide for them and government should encourage them to do so — maybe even require them to do so. But government should respect them enough to let them decide how to spend their own money.

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CAR TAX CAP FAULTY: Also not living up to its advertising is state government’s new cap on municipal property tax rates for cars.

The cap was supposed to save money for car owners, especially those in cities with high property taxes. Rolling in “emergency” money from the federal government, state government is to reimburse municipalities for the lost car tax revenue.

But the federal government has created so much “emergency” money that inflation has exploded not only in this country but also around the world, and this inflation has significantly increased the municipally assessed value of cars, especially used cars, raising their property tax liability — enough, for some people, to wipe out any tax savings.

This isn’t state government’s fault. But then state government would not have found the money for car tax relief if the federal government hadn’t created and distributed the money that caused the inflation that drove up property values and the price of nearly everything else while incomes were failing to keep up.

Given all that inflation, even people whose car taxes have gone down are feeling poorer.

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SCAPEGOATING LANDLORDS: Another purported gift from state government is on its way, this one for residents of municipalities with populations greater than 25,000. A new law requires them to establish fair housing commissions, which will have the power to reverse rent increases — that is, rent-control commissions.

After gasoline and other fuels, inflation may have boosted housing prices and rents more than anything else. Housing prices recently have been their highest ever relative to incomes, driving many people closer to or deeper into poverty.

But inflation isn’t the only reason for the rising cost of housing. In Connecticut housing prices also have been rising because the supply is tightly restricted by municipal zoning regulations. The state law that lets housing developers push back against rejection of their projects has annoyed some suburbanites but has done little to increase housing supply.

The new law requiring municipalities to create rent-control commissions is typical of state government’s evasions and dishonesty. The law blames landlords for high housing prices when government itself has far more responsibility for the problem by preventing supply from responding to demand. Not all landlords are saints but it is government itself that long has been giving them so much more power over tenants.

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

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By Chris Powell

Especially for politics, “never let them see you sweat” is usually a good rule, but last week Governor Lamont’s campaign for re-election broke it spectacularly.

The Lamont campaign responded hysterically to the most pointed video commercial yet broadcast by the Republican nominee for governor, Bob Stefanowski. The commercial noted the irony of the governor’s appeal to businesses in abortion-banning states to relocate to Connecticut, an appeal made even though the governor’s wife, an investment banker, lately has been developing businesses in Tennessee, a state that had a “trigger law” ready to outlaw abortion upon the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.

The governor’s touting abortion rights as economic development wasn’t serious. It was aimed less at out-of-state businesses than at Connecticut’s own voters in the belief that most of them support all abortion all the time as the governor and all other leading Democrats in the state do. The Stefanowski commercial was so effective not because it took any position on abortion — the Republican candidate supports Connecticut’s longstanding liberal law, allowing abortion before fetal viability and limiting it afterward — but because it exposed the governor’s insincerity. Doing business in anti-abortion states turns out not to be so bad when the governor’s wife does it.

Stefanowski’s rebuke of the governor was fair enough and the Lamont campaign should have just let it pass. Instead the campaign issued a statement calling the commercial “false” without explaining how. Instead the statement quickly tried to change the subject, accusing the Republican of being “extremist,” “anti-choice,” and a “failed businessman” who “bragged about firing people.” This hysteria called more attention to Stefanowski’s commercial without rebutting it and showed just how stung the governor was.

The Lamont campaign may respond with commercials attacking Stefanowski’s background, but they may seem a bit dated, as Connecticut heard it all four years ago during the first contest of the two candidates.

Maybe the governor’s hysteria will inspire Stefanowski to attempt fewer commercials depicting himself as a nice guy (the governor is one too) and more addressing issues about the conduct of the Lamont administration — like the grotesque cost overruns and corruption in the New London State Pier project, the contract-steering scandal in the state budget office, the never-ending financial bungling and exploitation at the University of Connecticut, and the governor’s recent insistence on raising diesel fuel taxes by 23%.

If he wanted to be really daring, Stefanowski might advertise the governor’s support of post-viability abortion and opposition to parental notification of abortions for minors. The Democratic positions are extremist, strongly contrary to the public’s views, and something Democrats may not want to have to explain any more than Mrs. Lamont’s doing economic development in supposedly benighted Tennessee.

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ANOTHER UCONN MESS: Two weeks ago a Superior Court judge confirmed another scandal at UConn, awarding a former professor more than $700,000 from the university and restoring him to his job upon concluding that he was fired as retaliation for questioning mismanagement and nepotism in the university’s business school.

Additionally the court will award fees to the plaintiff’s lawyer, and since the case has been going through state and federal courts for 11 years, these fees could exceed the actual damages.

In January UConn was ordered to pay $11 million for another improper firing, that of basketball coach Kevin Ollie, to whom the university stupidly had awarded union contract protections on top of his own contract.

Almost as notoriously, UConn’s Board of Trustees hired Thomas C. Katsouleas as president in 2019 only to discover that it couldn’t stand him, causing him to resign two years later and parachute into a tenured professorship at the university with a guaranteed salary of $330,000, an expensive perk of his presidential contract.

In 2019 Katsouleas’ predecessor as president, Susan Herbst, moved into the same professorial sinecure at UConn with an exceedingly light course load and similarly stratospheric salary, starting with a paid year off at her old presidential salary of more than $700,000.

These details might make a pretty good campaign commercial calling for the replacement of all UConn’s trustees.

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

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