Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

While President Biden, Governor Lamont, and their administrations cajole and coerce people to get vaccinated against the virus epidemic despite fears that the vaccines are really still experimental, the president’s administration has just admitted to the country about 12,000 Haitians without documentation of vaccination and without virus testing.

U.S. citizens are finding that they need “vaccine passports” within their own country, but no such requirement is being made of foreigners crossing the southern border, either illegally or claiming refugee status.

Why has this been happening?

First, of course, it’s because the Haitians who flash-mobbed the highway bridge in Del Rio, Texas, and other irregular border crossers have been confident that the Biden administration will not enforce immigration law. They have been proven correct.

Second, it has been happening because the Democratic Party, which now controls the federal government, can’t face down its far-left faction, which favors open borders as moral principle, even now that having open borders means disregarding a more recent moral principle of the left — vaccination coercion. That far-left faction long has ruled the party in Connecticut and so Connecticut has become a “sanctuary state,” obstructing enforcement of immigration law and facilitating illegal immigration by awarding driver’s licenses, other identification, and some public benefits to lawbreakers.

In politics nationally and in Connecticut, the desire for open borders now trumps public health.

What should be done about the Haitians and Haiti? Any solution starts with recognizing the country’s history.

It is widely understood that Haiti long has been a disaster, recently because of earthquakes and hurricanes but, more profoundly, because of decades — centuries, really — of political instability and imperialism, first the imperialism of France, then Germany, and then the United States. From 1915 to 1934 the United States occupied and ran Haiti as brutally as any other imperial power might have done. Since the Marines departed, Haiti seldom has been capable of more than military coups, assassinations, and dictatorship.

In recent years the placement in Haiti of a United Nations peacekeeping force also has failed to achieve political stability. The country is desperately poor, uneducated, malnourished, denuded, covered in earthquake rubble, gang- and crime-ridden, and, where there is ordinary politics, corrupt.

So it’s no wonder that so many Haitians try to get out. But 11 million people remain there. Even sanctuary-crazed New Haven wouldn’t welcome them all, and no other country wants to take in many more destitute people.

The most obvious solution might be a comprehensive intervention under the United Nations with a much larger force of soldiers and technicians and a 30-year charter to remake the country from scratch and brook no interference, though local advisory councils might be organized. This might be brutal sometimes but less brutal than the present. With a country as small as Haiti, couldn’t a determined effort by the developed world maintain public safety; build medical, educational, electrical, water, sanitation, and judicial systems; facilitate agriculture; prevent starvation; and nurture self-sufficiency?

But since the record of intervention in Haiti is so miserable and the commitment of the developed world so unreliable, maybe something new should be tried with Haiti — that is, leaving the country alone with its misery, forcing Haitians to deal with it themselves and with whatever help international aid groups want to provide on the slim chance of making a difference.

While the latter option may sound horrible, the developed world is tolerating many human disasters as bad as Haiti’s or nearly so: China’s persecution and genocide of the Uyghur people in the northwest part of the country; the Myanmar military junta’s persecution and genocide of the Rohingya Muslims and its murderous suppression of advocates of democracy; the civil wars in Yemen and Ethiopia; and, of course, the oppression being imposed on Afghanistan by the new Taliban regime.

The catastrophic and humiliating failure of 20 years of “nation building” by the United States in Afghanistan argues strongly for leaving all these disasters alone, at least until they break the firewalls of national borders.

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

By Chris Powell

Higher education prattles about academic freedom but a recent poll of college students across the country supports the suspicion that higher education is becoming political indoctrination working against the country’s most basic liberty, freedom of speech.

The poll, conducted by the market-research organization College Pulse, claims to have surveyed more than 37,000 students at 159 four-year colleges and to have found that two-thirds of their students approve shouting down a speaker on campus and 23% approve using violence to stop a disagreeable speaker.

The accuracy of the poll may be questioned but if even a few college students really believe that suppressing speech is acceptable, higher education and the country have a big problem.

The problem may be that higher education is failing to convey the country’s founding principles to their students. But many recent incidents suggest that higher education doesn’t believe in those principles at all and is encouraging students to become totalitarians.

In any case higher education today is the preserve of the political left, and speech suppression at colleges always targets the right. Colleges celebrate diversity in all superficial respects but push everyone to think alike.

The College Pulse survey included four schools in Connecticut — Yale University in New Haven, Wesleyan University in Middletown, Trinity College in Hartford, and the University of Connecticut at Storrs. All produced heavy majorities in favor of shouting down disagreeable speakers — 82% at Wesleyan, 80% at Trinity, 77% at Yale, and 62% at UConn.

The percentages endorsing violence for speech suppression were 39% at Wesleyan, 26% at Yale, 20% at UConn, and 8% at Trinity.

In recent years incidents of speech suppression have taken place at those four colleges and others in Connecticut, including Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, where this year some professors wanted the university to censure history professor Jay Bergman for urging school superintendents not to use in their curriculums the discredited “1619 Project” of The New York Times.

The professors couldn’t just disagree with Bergman — they had to condemn him for contrary opinion and threaten his employment without ever specifying error in any assertion he had made about the “1619 Project.” While the professors did not achieve censure, they did induce the university’s president to announce she disagreed with Bergman, lest she be suspected as politically incorrect too.

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WEED AND SPORTS BETTING: Connecticut’s laws against marijuana and sports bookmaking never made much sense, since they were widely violated, hard to enforce, and unevenly enforced. But the enthusiasm for the imminent opening of legal marijuana retailing and sports betting businesses in Connecticut is similarly mistaken.

Marijuana and sports betting will hardly be “economic development.” As local entertainments whose customers will be mostly state residents, the new businesses will attract little patronage from out of state and the money they collect will be mainly diverted from other entertainment venues within the state. Any increase in marijuana use and sports betting in the state will come at the cost of more addiction.

Since state government will heavily tax both endeavors, it can rationalize the problems they will cause, as well as the brazen violation of federal drug law, which continues to treat marijuana possession as a serious crime. Like other states, Connecticut is confident that President Biden will disregard, as his recent predecessors did, his constitutional obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

Legal marijuana and sports betting products may be more trustworthy than underground products have been. But the taxes on marijuana may leave room for underground business to continue.

While the public generally seems glad to get out of the failed “war on drugs,” municipal governments sense that most people don’t want marijuana to be sold or used openly near them. So towns increasingly are using zoning authority to prohibit marijuana dispensaries and use on public property.

The only consistent policy here is not libertarianism or justice but government’s desire to grow, bestow more political patronage, and take more money out of the economy.

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

By Chris Powell

Strange that most of the clamor about electric rates in Connecticut is directed at the state’s electric utilities and so little at state government. For the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority and the state’s leading electric company, Eversource, agree that 15-20% of the typical Connecticut electricity customer’s monthly bill doesn’t pay for electric generation and transmission at all but for charges imposed by state law and policy. (Connecticut’s other major electric company, United Illuminating, did not reply to a request for its own estimate.)

While the charges imposed by state law and policy are collected by the electric utilities, they are ultimately paid out at the direction of state government, becoming a sort of state sales tax on a necessity of life.

Some of these charges are relevant to electricity or the security of its supply, like the charge that funds the subsidy paid to keep the Millstone nuclear power plant operating profitably. That arrangement was controversial, but Millstone, operated by Dominion Energy, provides half of Connecticut’s electricity and as much as 20% of New England’s.

But some charges on electric bills don’t arise from anything that is particularly the responsibility of electricity users — charges for environmental programs, subsidies for renewable energy projects, reimbursements to electric companies for customers who don’t pay their bills, and subsidies for purchase of electricity by the poor. These are public welfare expenses and would be more honest in the state budget.

Of course state government has a great incentive to hide its own costs in electric bills, since even if they are noticed they will be blamed on the electric companies. Meanwhile, fearful of more demagoguery by elected officials, electric companies decline to call attention to the huge part of bills that is effectively a sales tax.

These camouflaged costs of government are another reason why, despite the clamor about electric bills and the public’s resentment of electric companies, not even the farthest left elected official in Connecticut will propose a state government takeover of the electricity business. For when state government is also the electric company, there will be no way to transfer political responsibility for electricity costs and service outages.

Even so, the camouflaged costs should get much more attention, since Connecticut’s electric rates are close to the highest in the country and a big obstacle to attracting and keeping business, just as the state’s high taxes are.

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‘PASSPORT’ RACISM AHEAD?: Political correctness in Connecticut maintains as a matter of principle that any public policy that can be associated with racially disproportionate results is “systemic racism.” (Just don’t mention the racially disproportionate results of the state’s failing welfare and education policies, since most people comfortably employed implementing those policies are politically correct themselves.)

So Governor Lamont should watch out as he considers having state government create a sort of “vaccine passport” system by which businesses, employers, and state and local government agencies more easily might exclude people from participating in normal life if they have not been vaccinated against COVID-19.

For according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s analysis of vaccination rates in Connecticut, while 68% of whites have been vaccinated, only 51% of Blacks and 58% of Hispanics have been, even as state government and social-service agencies are concentrating their vaccination campaigns on minority communities.

So under a “vaccine passport” system what will happen when it is noticed that members of racial minorities are excluded from normal life at much higher rates than whites?

Of course racism will not have been intended, but lack of bad intent has not excused all the other stuff denounced as “systemic racism.”

Will a “vaccine passport” system in Connecticut cause the politically correct to reconsider what they call “systemic racism” — to concede that some racial disproportions are innocent, a consequence less of policy than of the preferences, decisions, qualifications, or finances of individuals?

Or despite all the P.C. posturing he does to appease his party’s left while trying to preserve room for being moderate in policy, will the governor have to bear the “racist” label anyway?

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

By Chris Powell

Frogs have gotten a bad reputation from the story about their supposed failure to jump out of a pot of water if its temperature is slowly raised to boiling, eventually killing them. For the story was meant as a metaphor to mock the tendency of people to accept gradually worsening conditions until it is too late.

This month Connecticut has been making those metaphorical frogs look superior.

First New Haven’s schools began requiring students at sporting events to be accompanied by their parents because brawls broke out at a high school football game.

Then Waterbury’s Board of Education was told about the failure of the scheme it implemented in the last school year to improve measures of student performance by reducing academic standards. So the board dismissed the failure and extended the scheme for the current school year.

The scheme makes 50 points, instead of zero, the minimum grade for students in any class. But student performance went on to decline sharply along with the academic standards, with 4,700 students receiving a failing grade, more than double the 2,300 the year before. Students who received “A” grades fell by 2,700 too.

Of course much of the decline in performance resulted from the virus epidemic and the replacement of in-person classes with “remote learning” via the internet, a joke for most students who didn’t have parents constantly watching over them. Classes in Waterbury now are back to being held in person.

But the school board’s concept was faulty in the first place, even if it was consistent with the trend of public education to reduce standards and eliminate meaningful and accurate measures rather than acknowledge and confront declining performance.

Defending the lowered standards, the Waterbury school system’s chief academic officer, Darren Schwartz, told the board: “There isn’t a single study in educational research that supports the use of low grades or marks to motivate students. Low grades are more likely to discourage students.”

So where is the study showing that awarding high grades to students who don’t deserve them prepares them well for the real world? Such a practice only lets schools evade responsibility, transferring the consequences to police, courts, welfare departments, and other agencies already overwhelmed trying to remediate educational failure.

Once Waterbury’s school board voted to continue falsifying student performance, New Britain High School Principal Damon Pearce announced that his school would be closed for a few days and operate by “remote learning” again because some students had been unable to “adjust” to the return of in-person classes. He meant that many students had begun vandalizing the school and getting into fights.

The principal asked parents to persuade their children to behave in school — as if many of the misbehaving kids have parents in any real sense.

The high school’s haplessness enraged New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart, who induced the school administration to reinstate in-person classes immediately and offered police officers to help keep order. The problem, Stewart observed, is that “there are no consequences for bad behavior” by students, adding that the disruptive “should be given real consequences, including being removed from the school.”

The mayor, who is seeking re-election in November, surely recognized the gross inconvenience that more “remote learning” would inflict on parents — and voters — along with more loss of learning.

Then Governor Lamont issued his formal call for a special session of the General Assembly to extend his emergency powers for the umpteenth time and practically forever — but not for legislation to address the state’s surge in juvenile crime, for which there also seem to be no consequences.

Maybe the lack of a special session on juvenile crime is no big deal, since even the Republican legislators who have been pressing for one don’t dare to address the cause of the failure of juvenile justice, the secrecy and unaccountability of juvenile court. But when the failures of education and juvenile justice are disregarded like this, Connecticut’s future is being determined all the same — a future of ignorance, decline, and disintegration.

By now even frogs would be jumping out of such a pot.

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

By Chris Powell

While billions in federal “rescue” money are raining down on state government and municipal governments and Connecticut’s members of Congress bestow new grants almost every day, a report from Connecticut Public Radio last week suggested that a glaring problem is still being overlooked.

The report found that there is a desperate shortage of special-education teachers in Bridgeport’s schools and those of other “high-poverty” municipalities.

The CPR report highlighted the experience of a 14-year-old Bridgeport boy who recently was spending most of his “remote learning” time in front of a blank computer screen at home because his special-education teacher was unavailable. Of course such loss of education was pervasive throughout the state in the last school year as the “remote learning” attempted during the virus epidemic succeeded only for students with the most attentive parents.

Fathers of the disadvantaged students cited in the CPR report and similar reports are never mentioned, though their absence is a disadvantage as profound as any student’s learning disability.

Bridgeport Superintendent Michael Testani blames his school system’s shortage of special-education teachers on the inability to compete with the salaries paid by suburban school systems. Unfortunately the city’s members of Congress — U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy and 4th District U.S. Rep. Jim Hines — and state and city government are bestowing the “rescue” money elsewhere.

But maybe attention to the special-education teacher shortage is a waste of time anyway. Connecticut’s urban education calamity was painfully detailed five years ago by the decision issued by Superior Court Judge Thomas Moukawsher in a school financing lawsuit. City schools, the judge found, knowingly award diplomas to ignoramuses, students who have learned little in 12 years of public education.

Like Bridgeport’s superintendent, the judge attributed this failure to a lack of money. While the judge’s finding that Connecticut’s school financing system is unconstitutional was reversed by the state Supreme Court, no one could dispute the evidence he recounted about the calamity. The decision certified that social promotion is the one absolute if unacknowledged policy of public education in Connecticut.

Five years ago Connecticut just shrugged it all off, perhaps as people began to sense, if not acknowledge, that decades of raising education spending have made no difference to education itself — that the extra money has only purchased the loyalty of the teacher unions to the state’s majority political party — and that the education problem isn’t money at all but something else.

The CPR story gave a hint of this, observing parenthetically that “the number of children with disabilities has increased significantly over the last 10 school years.”

Maybe someday someone in authority will inquire about the cause of that increase. After all, in recent weeks people have noticed a serious increase in juvenile crime, some of it outrageous, and even a few Democratic state legislators in the suburbs, usually apologists for the poverty factories operated by their party, have been forced to strike nervous poses of concern.

So where are all the messed-up kids coming from? And instead of spending more on remediating their broken lives, how about trying to identify and stop what is breaking them?

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LIES STILL ABOUND: President Biden sensed he needed to look tough amid the debacle of his administration’s evacuation from Afghanistan. So he had the military fire a missile at a car in Kabul and announce that a terrible terrorist had been killed.

But a few Western journalists remained in the city, still courageously doing their jobs. They found that the victims of the drone strike were actually an aid worker and nine members of his family, most children. Now the Defense Department has been forced to admit the error, if not the lie about it.

“Friendly fire” casualties are inevitable in war. Maybe politically motivated recklessness and deceit are too.

But when Donald Trump was president the political left understood that the government is routinely corrupt and dishonest. Now that Biden is president, the left seems to need reminders like the horrible one from Kabul.

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

By Chris Powell

An argument being made for extending Governor Lamont’s emergency powers to deal with the virus epidemic is that this would be more efficient than involving the General Assembly and enacting ordinary legislation instead of proclaiming emergency orders. But efficiency is only the old rationale for totalitarianism, and history doesn’t support it so much.

German efficiency is a cliché that draws much of its strength from World War II in Europe. But Germany’s early triumphs arose mainly from the weakness, unpreparedness, and mistakes of its adversaries. In fact the Nazi state was a caricature of bureaucracy, with many departments and functionaries frequently in conflict about overlapping responsibilities and with genocide policy drawing crucial resources away from the war.

The totalitarian Soviet Union did most of the fighting that defeated Germany, but its victory did not arise from efficiency. It arose largely from the Soviet Union’s huge advantage in manpower and from war materiel and food provided by the United States.

Indeed, the war’s totalitarian aggressors could not have been defeated without the war production of the United States and the superior use of its military, even as the country remained a vigorous democracy. Few who have served in the U.S. military marvel about its efficiency, but during World War II the United States made far better use of its manpower (and womanpower) than the totalitarian aggressors did. The totalitarians were not much concerned about wasting lives.

During the war the United States and the United Kingdom had the great advantage of independent political officials who could monitor the government’s performance, expose weaknesses, gain publicity, and exact accountability. Indeed, Harry Truman was chosen as vice president in 1944 largely because of his able and well-publicized chairmanship of a Senate subcommittee investigating waste, corruption, and mistakes in war contracting. Truman’s subcommittee is estimated to have saved the government $15 billion.

Of course fending off the virus epidemic in Connecticut is not as challenging as waging a world war, but the principle of oversight is the same. Totalitarian governments suppress oversight. Democratic governments put up with it if only because they have to.

Benign as Governor Lamont has been with his emergency powers, legislators and the public have not yet been full participants in their deliberation, even as the epidemic is not half as serious as governmental and journalistic hysteria makes it seem, what with 99.8 of infected people recovering.

Bad as the epidemic may seem, there’s no reason to let democracy be another one of its victims.

Every day for months now the governor’s office has done excellent work publishing data by which the epidemic in Connecticut can be monitored — a compilation of the number of new and cumulative virus infections, the number of virus tests administered, the “positivity” rate drawn from that testing, the current number of people hospitalized with the virus (figures recently augmented with the percentage of unvaccinated patients), and the total of new and cumulative deaths that were “associated” with the virus (now reported weekly rather than daily).

Without these reports Connecticut would not have much idea of where it stood. But the data isn’t really so definitive.

The “positivity” rate, emphasized by news organizations, is of little value. It is just a measure of those who recently chose to be tested, not a measure of the extent of infection in the state. Besides, virus tests are often inaccurate.

Deaths and hospitalizations have seemed far more valuable measures. But the death data doesn’t show whether people died of the virus or merely with it.

Similarly, a study reported last week by The Atlantic magazine impugns hospitalization data for failing to show just how sick patients are with the virus and how many are in the hospital mainly because of “co-morbidities.”

According to The Atlantic, “The study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease.”

This is more reason for oversight and for not being frightened so easily.

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

By Chris Powell

Having just been appointed president of Huxley College in the Marx Brothers’ 1932 movie “Horse Feathers,” Groucho’s Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff quickly diagnoses the institution’s failure. “The trouble is,” he tells the faculty, “we’re neglecting football for education.”

Lately the same might be said about the University of Connecticut, whose football program has just sunk from disaster to catastrophe. Since nearly everyone knows the history, there would be no need to review it here except to try to exact some accountability at UConn, and accountability at UConn remains illegal, what with the university paying three presidential salaries even as it has only one president, and no one in state government cares.

What’s the football solution?

That is, he set off to hire some players better than those produced by the college’s ordinary recruiting.

Such a course of action is more or less legal now. National college athletics rules have been changed to permit athletes to earn money by selling rights to commercial use of their “name, image, and likeness” — to let athletes be paid for endorsements and for licensing merchandise celebrating themselves.

So all UConn needs is a company that will pay maybe a million dollars a year for rights to the name, image, and likeness of maybe 20 football players at $50,000 each, put those names and images on some T-shirts and sweatshirts, and sell them to football fans.

Then everyone might want to play at UConn.

Under the new rules, the university cannot arrange this. But the university has many rich friends who have made big donations for particular projects and might jump at the chance to get into the endorsement and licensing business. Such a company might make money for itself as well as the players.

When, seven years ago, the university wanted to ingratiate itself with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who seemed likely to become the country’s next president, the UConn Foundation picked up the phone and from just one donor collected the $250,000 Clinton outrageously demanded as an honorarium for visiting the Storrs campus and having an insipid conversation on stage with the university’s nearly as egotistical president.

Pledging a million-dollar contribution in 1987, the philanthropist Harry A. Gampel got his name on what was to become UConn’s basketball arena.

Wealthy friends of the university are still around. But quite apart from them UConn also has thousands of supporters of ordinary means who might pay $100 or so each year to a company that sent them a T-shirt or sweatshirt with a football player’s name and face on it.

Such a company would have to be completely independent of the university, as it would resemble a booster club. Such clubs have gotten in trouble for providing impermissible benefits to college athletes.

But now that direct cash payments to college athletes for mere endorsements are not only authorized but glorified as social justice, policing them will be difficult. Presumably an athlete might be paid tens of thousands of dollars just for an autographed photo, and who will be qualified to judge its true value to the purchaser other than the purchaser himself? Baseball cards of stars from long ago sell for spectacular prices.

Exploiting the new rules like this may smell like corruption. But the purpose of the old rules was to prevent corruption, even if their letting colleges and media companies get rich off the labor of unpaid “student athletes” came to be seen as grossly unfair.

In any case the new rules will smash what is left of the old ideal of “student athletes,” noble young people who played for their love of their game and their school. But that ideal long has been disintegrating anyway as college athletics has become the minor leagues for professional sports and many players have left college early for lucrative pro contracts, playing not for love at all but for a shot at big bucks.

The conclusive reform will be to let colleges hire their players outright, without requiring them to be students at all. The romance of the “student athlete” will be gone but so will the hypocrisy — and that white elephant of a stadium in East Hartford might be filled again.

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

By Chris Powell

While he tries to be a moderate Democratic governor and indeed is more moderate than his predecessor, Ned Lamont still feels obliged to make regular obeisance to his party’s left wing, which constitutes a majority of the party’s activists. So last week the governor posted on his social media channels a minute-long video encouraging businesses in states that are restricting abortion to relocate to Connecticut.

Connecticut, the governor said, is “family friendly” and its liberal abortion law “respects” women.

The new abortion law in Texas is not just almost prohibitive but bizarre, delegating enforcement to civil lawsuits for damages. But it would not have been enacted if Texas was not full of women whose idea of respect includes protecting what they call the pre-born. The women of Texas are fully capable of getting the law repealed.

In the meantime Connecticut’s pitching businesses in Texas and other states restricting abortion is ridiculous, as is a similar appeal made to Texas businesses last week by Chicago’s economic development agency, which placed an advertisement in the Dallas Morning News.

The Chicago agency’s chief executive, Michael Fassnacht, told Bloomberg News: “We believe that the values of the city you are doing business in matter more than ever before.” But of course the “values” of Chicago encompass scores of shootings and dozens of murders almost every weekend, while the “values” of Illinois include the country’s worst insolvency.

Connecticut does not have the violent crime of Chicago, nor is Connecticut quite as insolvent as Illinois. Connecticut has advantages of climate, geography, and culture. But in friendliness to business, Texas clobbers Connecticut and Illinois, having no corporate and personal income taxes while Connecticut and Illinois have both.

The Tax Foundation says the personal tax burden in Connecticut and Illinois is above 10% but is only 7.6% in Texas. That is, Connecticut’s personal tax burden is almost a third higher than that of Texas.

Not surprisingly, Texas long has been gaining population relative to the rest of the country while Connecticut has been losing.

With such a differential in taxes, even Texas businesses opposed to the new abortion law might save so much money by staying put and not relocating to Connecticut that they could afford to pay for their employees to come to Connecticut for abortions every year.

No amount of the governor’s pandering to his party’s left wing will make Connecticut’s high taxes “family friendly.”

Nevertheless, higher taxes well may be on the way for Connecticut, since the governor and Democratic leaders in the General Assembly seem inclined to revive in a special legislative session what they call the Transportation Climate Initiative. The plan would raise wholesale taxes on gasoline so the added burden wouldn’t be as visible as the retail tax and would claim that the new revenue would be spent on transportation projects that reduce pollution.

But the state is already rolling in emergency federal money and billions more in federal “infrastructure” appropriations may arrive soon, so Connecticut hardly needs more gas tax money.

Raising gas taxes will be most burdensome to the poor and middle class even as inflation is already roaring and eroding their living standards. Further, it would be unusual if any money raised by state government in the name of transportation wasn’t diverted.

With its taxes already so high, state government needs mainly to set better priorities.

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PRISONS NOT NEEDED?: Last week Governor Lamont announced with some pleasure that his administration will close another prison, the one in Montville, because the state’s prison population is declining so much.

When the announcement was made four people had just been shot in separate incidents in Hartford over the Labor Day weekend, making nine shootings there for the previous week. There had just been four shootings in New Haven as well. The day before the prison announcement a Hartford man, a chronic offender, earned his 14th conviction and was sent back to prison.

The rise in violent crime and the failure to deter repeat offenders could make prison closings seem premature.

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

By Chris Powell

Governor Lamont seems inclined to ask the General Assembly to extend his emergency powers again to deal with the virus epidemic when they expire at the end of the month. The governor’s request likely would be for another 90 days. The legislature should decline.

For starters, while the epidemic continues and is expected to continue indefinitely, there no longer is an emergency.

An emergency is something that is sudden, unexpected, and urgent. But the governor’s emergency powers have been in effect for 18 months, the epidemic has become a way of life for everyone, and nothing about it is sudden, unexpected, and urgent.

For months Connecticut has been dealing well with the epidemic, and the governor can take much credit for that. But he will not deserve credit for changing the definition of “emergency.” When something becomes permanent, it’s not an emergency anymore.

At the beginning of the epidemic state legislators were only too happy to abdicate to the governor and run home and hide under their beds even as their constituents trudged on, trying to keep working as best they could, when they were allowed to work at all.

Now even legislators have discovered they can adapt with internet meetings and “social distancing” in the workplace. The General Assembly held a relatively normal legislative session this year.

So there’s no reason for the legislature to keep deferring all epidemic-related policy decisions to the governor. The legislature is fully capable of reviewing his emergency declarations, enacting some into statute and nullifying others, and fully capable of approving or rejecting his additional proposals and involving the public through hearings in person or on the internet.

Just as important as the procedure for resuming normal government is the substance. The governor’s emergency rules long have touched nearly every aspect of life — business, commerce, schools, restaurants, and more. It is hardly possible to leave one’s home for even a half-hour without having to comply with some executive order that was not in place a year and a half ago, an order issued directly by the governor or by municipal officials to whom he has delegated authority.

Democracy requires the people’s assent to such rules through their elected representatives. Otherwise Connecticut has reverted to monarchy. While it has been a benevolent monarchy so far, even that risks eroding the state’s habit of democracy, which was already fragile enough before the epidemic.

If a real emergency descends on the state after Sept. 30 — an asteroid strike, a solar flare, a plague of frogs or locusts, or anything else Connecticut hasn’t been handling for 18 months already — the governor can always ask legislative leaders to abdicate to him again. Until then, ordinary democracy should resume, and legislators who are unwilling to do the jobs they were elected to do should resign and let the people choose replacements.

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HOUSING PRICE DISASTER: Anyone in Connecticut who owns his home may be rejoicing over the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s report two weeks ago that house prices in the state have risen 20% in the last 12 months. But actually this is a disaster, since housing is, like food, a necessity of life, and homeownership is the primary mechanism of giving people a stake in society generally and their community particularly and of building generational wealth.

Of course the problem is not peculiar to Connecticut. Nationally house prices rose 17% in the last year, the main reasons being the de-urbanization stoked by the virus epidemic, inflation, and interest rates that have been pushed below the inflation rate by the Federal Reserve, which is pumping up asset prices to protect the wealthy while the poor choke.

But housing prices are Connecticut’s problem all the same, and rising prices for houses are pulling up rental housing prices as well, squeezing the poor. Higher prices for necessities reduce discretionary income and thereby risk weakening the economy.

The solution is for government to enable the market to increase supply — to loosen land-use restrictions and allow conversion of vacant commercial properties to housing. But will people sitting on another 20% in unrealized capital gains cooperate politically?

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

By Chris Powell

Responding to the new law in Texas sharply restricting abortion, Connecticut Democratic State Chair Nancy DiNardo last week tried to rile up the party’s base. “Connecticut,” she said, “will never allow the activist Supreme Court to strip away reproductive rights from the women of our state.”

The Texas law is bizarre, if strategically formulated. Its enforcement is assigned to civil lawsuits brought by private citizens against abortion providers and facilitators. Victorious plaintiffs can claim a $10,000 bounty from each defendant. On procedural grounds the Supreme Court has declined early intervention against the law, prompting suspicion that the court’s new conservative majority may plan to discard the court’s governing precedent on abortion, the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade.

There’s nothing new to be said about abortion itself. But its politics will always produce new material — as DiNardo did last week. For a Supreme Court that discarded Roe and returned abortion law to the states would be no more “activist” than the Supreme Court that issued Roe and took the issue away from the states, where it had rested since the country’s founding.

Even liberal legal experts — including the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — have acknowledged that quite apart from whatever abortion policy should be, Roe was legally unsound or at best a big stretch. That is, Roe was the product of an “activist” Supreme Court.

DiNardo’s premise and objective are hysteria. For the Supreme Court will not “strip away reproductive rights from the women of our state,” because the court has no power to do so. The court’s power here is only to decide whether abortion is a federal constitutional right, a right in every state.

Additionally, Connecticut long has had a permissive abortion law and public opinion here seems unlikely ever to change the law much, though most state residents probably would favor requiring the approval of parents or guardians for abortions for minors.

Last week DiNardo and all other leading Democrats in Connecticut ignored a chance to defend a constitutional right far more established than abortion. While neither the federal nor state constitution mention abortion, both guarantee the right to gun ownership. Even more explicit than the federal constitution’s Second Amendment, Connecticut’s Constitution says: “Every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state.”

A gun-rights group, the Connecticut Citizens Defense League, brought a federal lawsuit against the police chiefs of Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven, and Waterbury for refusing to process applications for municipal gun permits, without which people cannot get state permits. The lawsuit details how applicants in the cities have been stalled for many months, even indefinitely.

The cities didn’t deny their obstruction of this constitutional right. New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker essentially admitted it, noting the frequent gun crime in his city as if that nullifies a constitutional right. New Haven’s acting police chief, Renee Dominguez, dishonestly blamed the stalling on the virus epidemic.

Mayor Elicker was demagogic. “My priorities are keeping our residents safe, not profiteering for gun retailers and manufacturers,” the mayor said.

But the cities are not being sued by gun retailers and manufacturers but by their own residents. Some may have noticed the social disintegration all around them and government’s causing it. These residents may think they should protect themselves because the government won’t.

Connecticut’s political establishment considers abortion a good right and gun ownership a bad one. To the political establishment, that makes the constitutions themselves dispensable.

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EXPOSE HIDDEN COSTS: Connecticut Attorney General William Tong is urging the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority to reduce Eversource Energy’s electricity rates. Maybe that should be done but only after determining and publicizing how much electric bills are hiding the costs of state government social policy.

If only state government had an agency to audit its own costs comprehensively. The state auditors don’t do that. Yes, electric rates in Connecticut are nearly the highest in the country, but so are Connecticut’s taxes, and state residents pay far more for government than electricity.

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

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