Chris Powell column

By Chris Powell

What is the public interest in unionizing government employees as they now are unionized in Connecticut?

The public interest in allowing private-sector workers to unionize is obvious. Without organized labor’s countervailing force, big private business interests can gain control over communities, states, and sometimes the whole country.

But the government is not a private interest. It represents everybody, so organizing against it — rather than organizing against a particular administration — is against the public interest.

Liberals used to agree. Even during the Great Depression years President Franklin D. Roosevelt opposed government employee unionism. So did New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. They understood that coercion of the government by its own employees would subvert democracy itself.

But now liberals make common cause with government employee unions against the government. Even as Connecticut Democrats keep carping about the January “insurrection” in Washington by the crowd summoned by President Trump to protest the election results, Democratic state legislators are advancing a bill in the General Assembly to subvert state and municipal government. Their legislation would compel government agencies to stop being merely neutral about employee unionization and instead to coerce employees to join.

The legislation would direct state and municipal government agencies to sic unions on their new hires, notifying the unions of new hires, giving the unions the home contact information of new hires, inviting union representatives to orientation meetings, and providing work time for unions to propagandize new hires. All this would undermine a new employee’s loyalty to his employer from the start.

There is no public interest in this. There is only a political interest — the interest of Connecticut’s Democratic Party in mobilizing government workers in support of the party’s candidates.

There is already little management in government in Connecticut. Performance standards are low and the little discipline that is imposed is often weakened or nullified by the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration. This is not government of, by, and for the people, but government of, by, and for the unions — and unlike the insurrection in Washington, this one, infinitely more subversive, is likely to be enacted while hardly being noticed.

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Complaints of socialism are being hurled at the Biden administration by Republicans who think the label itself is enough, just as Republicans did back in the 1930s, ’40s, and early ’50s. But the label is not enough, and President Harry Truman, a Democrat, answered the Republicans well in October 1952 not long before he left office.

“‘Socialism,'” Truman said, “is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years. Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called Social Security.

“Socialism is what they called farm price supports. Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance. Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.

“Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.”

But socialism isn’t always progress, for Truman’s list was incomplete.

Socialism is also perpetual stupid imperial wars. Socialism is government bailouts for crooked investment banks. Socialism is excessive salaries and unaccountability for government employees. Socialism is government’s award of privilege to racial and ethnic groups.

Socialism is government’s pretense that men can be women and its requiring women’s sports to admit men. Socialism is the government’s paying people not to grow crops and now even paying them not to work.

That is, socialism is anything the government does in the name of progress, and since some of it is good and some isn’t, the word is meaningless as an epithet.

The serious issue here is something else. According to the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, government now is the direct source of more than a third of the country’s personal income.

So does the country still want a free-market economy with a dominant private sector, or does it want government to control more than it already does?

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

By Chris Powell

Connecticut long has been known as the Constitution State because of the Fundamental Orders ratified by its original European settlers in 1639, a document considered the first constitution written by a community to establish a representative government. That constitution is believed to have been inspired by a sermon given a year earlier by the leader of the settlers, the Puritan preacher Thomas Hooker, a democratic radical by the standards of his time, who declared: “The foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people.”

Hooker concluded: “As God has given us liberty, let us take it.”

But no one watching the current session of the General Assembly would get any sense of this history as the Democratic majority shreds one part of the state Constitution after another.

First there were the legislature’s repeated abdications to the governor, its grants of emergency power for him to rule by decree for more than a year now, though the legislature has been in session.

Then there was enactment of a law requiring secret trials for young people charged with murder and other serious crimes, despite the state Constitution’s provision declaring that “all courts shall be open.” Fortunately the federal courts recently nullified that statute.

And now the Democratic majority in the legislature would impose on the state a new commission to which particular taxes and as much as a billion dollars in annual revenue would be assigned and spent on “equitable investment” outside normal legislative appropriation and review and evading the state Constitution’s spending cap. The commission would be another gross abdication by the legislature, another diminution of democracy, and a lot more surreptitious political patronage.

The Republican minority leader in the state House of Representatives has asked state Attorney General William Tong for an opinion on the legislation’s constitutionality. House Speaker Matt Ritter, a Democrat, admits he is uncertain about the idea’s propriety, though rule by gubernatorial decree and secret courts haven’t bothered him.

If this legislation is enacted, maybe someone will have to take it to federal court as well, since, after all, the federal Constitution requires the United States to “guarantee to every state in this Union a republican form of government.” Spending a billion dollars a year outside state government’s normal budgeting process is some other form of government.

The people now running the legislature seem to have no idea of the history, forms, limits, and obligations entrusted to them.

Drunk with power, they are cracking the Constitution of the Constitution State with unaccountability and secrecy, forgetting that “the foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people.”

“As God has given us liberty,” Hooker told his brave little band 383 years ago this month, “let us take it.” Let us take it back soon.

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INSURGENT NO MORE: Proclaiming oneself an insurgent is often a good way to win election. Joining the establishment is often a good way to win re-election. That’s the story of U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, D-5th Dist.

In 2018 during her first campaign for Congress, Hayes was well cast for insurgency. She had no political experience but was a former national teacher of the year. She was also Black in the only congressional district in the state that had sent a Black person to Congress before even though it was the most conservative district in the state. (Despite all the prattle about racism, most white people in Connecticut are delighted to vote for Black candidates who don’t curse and scream at them.)

Three years ago Hayes forswore campaign contributions from political action committees, fonts of corporate largesse. But now, entrenched, she is accepting some big ones.

Her spokeswoman says Hayes’ position has “evolved.”

After all, to remain an insurgent Hayes would have to break notably with some of her party’s positions, but now that her party holds the majority in the House, insurgency would alienate her from that majority and diminish her influence.

So Hayes might as well start taking the corporate money, even if that makes her like nearly everyone else in Congress. Once again insurgency has served its purpose: entry to the establishment.

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

By Chris Powell

Long having been shameless because the governor and General Assembly never call it to account, the University of Connecticut probably won’t show any embarrassment over last week’s abrupt resignation of its president, Thomas C. Katsouleas, who was not even two years into the job. But Connecticut might be mortified.

Of course no official explanation has been given, but news reports say Katsouleas quickly alienated the university’s Board of Trustees by announcing major initiatives without the board’s approval.

Having eagerly danced to every politically correct tune that was played for him on campus, Katsouleas shouldn’t be missed — and indeed as a practical matter he won’t be. For he really won’t be leaving at all. Despite his alienating the trustees, his contract allows him to remain in a sinecure at UConn as a tenured professor with an office, secretarial help, and an annual salary of $330,000 — a grossly extravagant and premature pension.

Katsouleas’ predecessor, Susan Herbst, is enjoying a similar arrangement as a tenured professor with a nominal courseload at UConn’s Stamford branch with a salary of $319,000. At least Herbst put in a few years.

While Governor Lamont is busy trying to wrap up a devastating epidemic, avert a nursing home strike, and get a responsible budget past his party’s crazy-left majority in the General Assembly, he might want to take a few minutes with the UConn trustees to make sure that their next presidential search committee doesn’t include anyone from the last one.

But since he approved the selection of Katsouleas, the governor also might want to reflect on his own responsibility here and, more so, on the presumption at UConn in recent years that its president must be a swelled head from out of state who knows nothing about Connecticut, is unknown here, and has no connection to the university.

At least the Board of Regents for the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system has just appointed as the system’s president someone who has all of four years in the state — Terrence Cheng, who has been director of UConn’s Stamford campus and an English professor there. Accepting his new job the other day, Cheng lauded what the regional state universities and community colleges system does for its working-class students. Just look at what the system is doing for Cheng — a salary of $360,000.

Three college administration salaries above $300,000 in a state whose economy has been declining for a decade — maybe that’s why they call it higher education.

But police work in Connecticut can be pretty lucrative too, especially in New Haven. While New Haven is always pleading poverty as it wallows in incompetence, the New Haven Register reports that three city police officers tripled their regular salaries last year through overtime, extra duty, and other mechanisms.

Three of the city’s four highest-paid employees were police officers, the Register says. A detective whose nominal salary was $84,000 earned $264,000, and two officers whose nominal salaries were $76,000 earned $258,000 and $234,000.

Even if the police department could not have assigned work more efficiently — as by hiring more officers to pay less overtime — the department should have been concerned about weariness on the job by officers doing so much extra work.

After all, who can forget the crazed state trooper whose frightening tirade was caught on video last year as he abused a motorist in New Haven? The trooper proclaimed his contempt for the public, his exhaustion, and his eagerness for retirement. It turned out that for five years his overtime earnings had equaled his base pay as he went nuts building up his pension credits.

Thanks to the billions of federal dollars flowing to state and municipal government in the name of repairing the economic damage of the epidemic, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker won’t have to worry much for a couple of years about the city’s financial excesses. Meanwhile Governor Lamont and state legislators also can let the good times roll throughout state government.

But they all might do well to wonder whether, as inflation roars, the salaries of their constituents will be as protected as the salaries of government employees.

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

Mister Bluster Saves the World

Weicker’s Memoir is Breathtaking for Self-Contradiction and Omission

By Chris Powell
Journal Inquirer
Saturday-Sunday, July 15-16, 1995

Legend has it that the ancient Athenian statesman Aristides was stopped in the street by an uneducated man who didn’t recognize him and who asked for help in writing Aristides’ own name on a ballot in an election to decide who among the nation’s leaders would be banished. The man is said to have explained that he didn’t know Aristides at all but was simply sick and tired of hearing him called “the Just.”

It may be impossible to get far into Lowell P. Weicker Jr.’s autobiography, “Maverick: A Life in Politics” (Little, Brown, & Co., $22.95), without understanding exactly how that disgruntled voter felt.

According to the legend, Aristides silently completed the man’s ballot for him and was duly voted into exile, which is sort of where Weicker, Connecticut’s former U.S. senator and governor, now finds himself politically. Unfortunately, while Weicker was at the center of great events both in Washington and in Connecticut and has had the ghostwriting services of Barry Sussman of The Washington Post, this memoir is almost entirely without reflection even as it is often laughably and unintentionally ironic. Indeed, if there is even one insight in “Maverick,” it is lost under an avalanche of chest-thumping, self-congratulation, self-righteousness, and breathtaking self-contradiction and omission.

The self-contradiction begins right away, in Weicker’s introduction, where he denies the grievance of many Republicans, to whose party he belonged throughout most of his political career, that he lurched to the left after he was elected to the Senate in 1970 with less than half the vote in a three-way race. He insists that it is the Republicans themselves who have “moved so far to the right” since then.

But only a few paragraphs later Weicker acknowledges having been a Goldwater supporter who, during his single term in the U.S. House of Representatives, endorsed a school prayer amendment to the Constitution and the impeachment of Justice William O. Douglas. In [ITALICS] this [END ITALICS] paragraph Weicker writes that he “matured and changed,” having just denied changing at all. And that is the extent of his explanation of his remarkable political metamorphosis. He doesn’t deign to address the old suspicion that he mainly adapted himself to suit Connecticut’s traditional Democratic leanings.

To explain his narrow loss to Democrat Joseph Lieberman in his bid for re-election to the Senate in 1988, Weicker writes, “I had remained the same persistent figure, fighting with the Jesse Helmses of this world….” A few pages later he discloses not only that he, the great maverick, actually believed fervently in the Senate’s seniority system but also that, in this belief, he [ITALICS] supported [END ITALICS] the very same repugnant but duly senior Helms against the tolerable but junior Richard Lugar for chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“By 1988 Connecticut citizens were tiring of a senator who kept focusing on annoying issues like discrimination, separation of church and state, health care, and AIDS,” Weicker writes, never mentioning the possibility that Connecticut also might have tired of a senator who was missing dozens of Senate votes to go out collecting a fortune in “speaking fees” from special interests on whose legislation he simultaneously was voting — the issue that actually cost him the election. Nor does he explain how, if benighted Connecticut really was so indifferent to those annoying issues of his, it nevertheless elected him governor as an independent two years later.

FIRST CIVILITY, THEN NAME CALLING

Weicker laments the loss of civility in public life and complains that his political opponents over the years have been hateful and vicious. Having disposed of civility, a few pages later [ITALICS] he [END ITALICS] calls [ITALICS] them [END ITALICS] names like “slimeball,” “chameleon,” “ass,” and “moralizing nuts.”

He can relate a trivial anecdote about playing in a tennis match for charity with Vice President Spiro Agnew but recalls nothing about the speech Agnew gave soon after, in the last weeks of the 1970 Senate campaign, calling Weicker’s Democratic opponent a communist — a damaging attack whose immense political profit was gratefully accepted by the fearless crusader for fair play.

Weicker calls former state Sen. Richard Bozzuto’s endorsement of Lieberman in 1988 “a stunning act of disloyalty to the Republican Party.” But Weicker neglects to mention his own frequent and stunning endorsement-like remarks from the Republican side in support of Connecticut Democrats in the thick of campaigns over the years. How someone who was elevated by Connecticut’s Republican Party and was never denied anything he sought from it and still sabotaged its candidates and then left it to deprive it of the governorship in 1990 can fault [ITALICS] others [END ITALICS] for disloyalty is … well, vintage Weicker. As he did in politics, in this book he simply waives all standards for himself, sometimes only moments after he articulates them for everyone else.

He praises his broadmindedness for having induced the party in Connecticut to open its primary elections to unaffiliated voters. But he fails to address the complaint that his underlying purpose was only to prevent Republicans even from [ITALICS] having [END ITALICS] a party of their own in which they someday might have a primary Weicker himself might not win.

“DIALOGUE” OR BAITING THE CROWD?

Even advocates of progressive taxation may gag at Weicker’s account of his imposition of the income tax on Connecticut soon after his inauguration as governor in 1991.

Weicker writes that he said during his campaign for governor that he “wouldn’t rule out an income tax.” But in fact he did rule it out — in general with his famous television commercial likening the tax to “pouring gasoline on a fire,” a commercial responding directly to his Republican opponent’s charge that Weicker [ITALICS] did [END ITALICS] support an income tax; and specifically, in writing, with a pledge to oppose an income tax at least through his first year in office.

He writes that he waded into the crowd at the mass rally at the state Capitol protesting the tax because “I wanted to keep up the dialogue.” A few lines later he remarks that the insults hurled at him there were “the kind of inanities you expect in that situation.” So might he really not have sought “dialogue” at all but rather an opportunity to taunt the protesters into discrediting their cause and to get himself on TV looking like a brave martyr to a mob?

This self-contradiction suggests as much, and sure enough, in the Weicker pattern, it is followed by an equivalent hypocrisy, when he condemns White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman for having done the same sort of thing, for having welcomed the chance that protesters would turn violent and obscene at a campaign rally for Richard Nixon.

Weicker writes that he refused to give state legislators jobs in the executive branch in exchange for their votes for the income tax. But in fact a good number who voted for the tax did end up with such jobs.

He writes that his income tax saved Connecticut. He doesn’t mention the tax’s cynical “Greenwich” nature, its replacement of capital gains and dividend taxes on his wealthy friends and neighbors with taxes on the ordinary earnings of the middle class. Nor does he mention that, whatever the cause, Connecticut remains severely depressed economically and has lost population every year since the income tax was passed, the only state in such a long downward trend.

WHO MANIPULATED WHOM?

Weicker denounces the manipulation and self-perpetuation of the two-party system and cites an example of it: the attempt of Democratic and Republican legislators who opposed the income tax to build support for their alternative tax proposals by promising not to nominate candidates against each other in the next election. But then he boasts that he got votes for the income tax by promising his third party’s cross-endorsement to the same legislators, who, with that endorsement, survived to perpetuate the very system he just denounced.

He describes as his great personal victory the 1992 state legislative election, which returned to power the Democratic majority of the income-tax session, without mentioning the possible influence of the Democratic presidential landslide at the top of the ticket. He does not explain why he did not dare to seek re-election himself two years later.

To hear Weicker tell it, he didn’t just end up on the right side of the Watergate drama but rather was its central figure. (Putting Nixon rather than Weicker himself on that postage stamp apparently should be considered doubly unjust.) Weicker didn’t just work to clean up the oceans and integrate the disabled and retarded into society and so forth. No, Mister Bluster singlehandedly saved the world — and in a mere 224 pages.

HE’S AGAINST THE WAR … NOW

As he has been doing in speaking engagements for a few years now, Weicker blithely rewrites history here, portraying himself as the anti-Vietnam War candidate when, in both 1968 and 1970, his two congressional elections during the war, he was entirely Nixon’s candidate and supported Nixon administration war policy. He may be escaping exposure in this because most of those who supported the war don’t want to have to account for it now and because most of those who opposed the war give him a free pass for having come over to their side on big issues since then.

Amid all these self-contradictions and omissions he writes that his “first truly hypocritical act in politics” was only to eulogize Malcolm Baldrige at the dedication of a research ship named for the late commerce secretary. According to Weicker, Baldrige’s unforgivable sin was that he had tried to carry out the cuts proposed by his president, Ronald Reagan, in the budget for oceanic research. (Of course if Baldrige had [ITALICS] resisted [END ITALICS] carrying out the will of his boss, Weicker now might be sneering at him as well as at Bozzuto for “a stunning act of disloyalty to the Republican Party.”)

While his once having spoken a little too well of the dead is the most Weicker can fault himself for in “a life in politics,” it was not policy or ideological disagreement but his making a whole career of flaming hypocrisy that created such apoplectic animosity toward him among certain political people in Connecticut. Indeed, here and there in this book he actually makes good if all-too-brief arguments for particular policies, like means-testing entitlements and relaxing the U.S. embargo against Castro’s Cuba. But these are overwhelmed by the blustering pose that he has been so much better than all other politicians in methods, tactics, principle, and personal virtue.

NOT REALLY CANDID AT ALL

In fact Weicker regularly lowered himself with the worst of them. Maybe that is why there is no mention in this book either of his too-cozy relationship with the contrivance that calls itself the Mashantucket Pequot tribe, to which, by gubernatorial fiat, he granted a monopoly on casino gambling in Connecticut and from which he received, seemingly in return, a $2 million contribution to a charity he chaired and controlled, the Special Olympics –which promptly provided many of his political cronies with cushy jobs and a comfortable place to land as his administration was coming to an end.

If Weicker’s predecessor from the Democratic old guard, William A. O’Neill, had taken personal advantage of his office like that, Connecticut’s largest newspaper, The Hartford Courant, would have led the state’s press in demanding impeachment on grounds of corruption. But since their darling of political correctness did it, The Courant and most other Connecticut newspapers never even reported the connections.

Weicker has cultivated a reputation for candor, and the publicity for this book tries to perpetuate it. He [ITALICS] has [END ITALICS] taken many forthright positions over the years and no one would accuse him of timidity, but, as this book inadvertently suggests, he may have been the [ITALICS] least [END ITALICS] candid politician of his era in Connecticut, the distinction between candor and mere bluster having been lost.

Weicker notes that he has been married three times and acknowledges shortchanging his family during his 30 years in politics. As he took this book on the road to receptions at bookstores last month, he said his family was the most important thing in his life now. A few days later came the announcement of his exploratory committee for an independent presidential campaign.

“Maverick” may be less an autobiography than a hasty and self-serving text for that campaign, establishing that its author isn’t always wrong, just insufferable.

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Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.

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By Chris Powell

Nursing home workers in Connecticut long have been essentially state government employees because most patients are technically indigent and their care is financed by state government’s Medicaid program — for nearly $1.2 billion per year, half reimbursed by the federal government.

The euphemism for this is “estate planning.” When people who have assets reach a certain age they are advised to squirrel their assets away where government can’t get at them — reliable family members, trusts, and such — so if someone needs round-the-clock care, he can go on welfare.

It’s a demeaning system and no longer saves much money for the government, and it should be replaced by an expansion of Social Security if the country ever decides it can do without fantastically expensive imperial wars.

But while nursing homes are de-facto state institutions, most of their employees have been paid more like fast-food employees. Like agricultural work, nursing home work is not always easy but it does not require special skills. So labor for nursing homes has been plentiful, mainly women from racial minorities who have limited education, just as agricultural labor has been plentiful, mainly immigrant men, often immigration lawbreakers, of limited education. Thus these workers have little power to gain higher wages and constitute much of the working poor.

Representing agricultural workers, the United Farm Workers union has had limited success, mainly because its constituents are largely transient immigration lawbreakers. But the nursing home workers are not transient and illegal, so their wage prospects are better. In Connecticut, District 1199 of the Service Employees International Union long has been gaining representation at nursing homes and now represents workers at enough homes to cause a big problem, as with the strike it lately has threatened at 39 homes.

The union wants big raises and improvements in benefits and working conditions. Governor Lamont has offered to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at the problem, and with billions in emergency federal largesse behind him, he should be able to satisfy the union for a year or two, though the cost will include raising payments to all nursing homes, not just the unionized ones. This will buy time but it won’t answer the longstanding question about the structure of the industry.

There is a public interest in elevating the working poor, but what is fair compensation for nursing home employees? The market, such as it is with the government buying most of the product, suggests that fair compensation is not high. Buying most of the product, the government has the right and power to set compensation.

So those nursing home employees who are unionized are organized less against their nominal employer, the nursing home operators, than against the government itself.

Maybe determining fair compensation starts with recognizing that as a practical matter there really is no market here — that government controls nearly everything. This implies socializing or nationalizing the system.

Of course especially in Connecticut most nursing home employees would love to become state government employees. Some elected officials might not enjoy losing their intermediaries — the nursing home operators — in assigning responsibility for the industry, just as elected officials wouldn’t enjoy socializing the electric companies and losing wonderful scapegoats. But many Democratic leaders would love adding thousands of nursing home employees to the party’s army of tens of thousands of unionized state and municipal government employees.

Or maybe recognition that there isn’t a market for nursing home care implies the need for government to create a market. Maybe state government could set a uniform per-diem payment for care and issue vouchers to patients or their conservators, with the patients and conservators doing their own shopping and keeping the change if they purchase care for less than the amount of the voucher.

Such a system might provide some incentive to economize in a billion-dollar industry.

In any case, throwing money at the nursing homes may prevent a strike now, but when the emergency federal money runs out, Connecticut will be back in its usual insolvency with an aging population.

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

By Chris Powell

After government employee union members, Connecticut’s Democratic state legislators seem most compelled to pander to abortion fanatics. It’s not enough for them that abortion is legal in the state at any stage of pregnancy, including long after a fetus becomes viable, and that minors can get abortions without the approval of their parents or guardians, even when the abortions are facilitated by their rapists.

No, the abortion fanatics require that anyone who, in an office setting, would merely counsel a woman against abortion and describe the support she might get in bearing and raising her child should be subject to special scrutiny by state government to ensure that the counseling is not deceptive.

That is the premise of the legislation passed last week by the state Senate, which authorizes Attorney General William Tong to prosecute the right-to-life movement.
The legislation solves no problem, for it has not yet been shown that any of the anti-abortion counseling offices impersonate doctors and nurses to dissuade women from abortion. But even if there was such impersonation, how long could it really fool anyone? A woman seeking an abortion may notice pretty quickly if she hasn’t gotten one.

Meanwhile no one from state government proposes to check what abortion providers and abortion-rights advocates tell women contemplating abortion. Are they always telling the truth about the medical and emotional risks of abortion and the possibility of adoption? No one has proposed legislation to penalize them if they don’t.

Thus the pending legislation could be construed to legitimize a damage lawsuit against a right-to-life counseling office on a claim that it had used deception to talk a woman out of an abortion. But the legislation could not be construed to legitimize a damage lawsuit against an abortion provider and abortion-rights advocate who deceptively talked a woman into an abortion.

That is, the legislation presumes that opponents of abortion always present a special danger to lie but abortion advocates always tell the truth.

Someday the U.S. Supreme Court may modify its abortion rulings. After all, even liberal legal authorities, including the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, doubted the rationale for Roe v. Wade. But nothing at the federal level is likely to take away abortion rights in Connecticut, where most people consider abortion a matter for a woman to decide.

The most the Supreme Court might do is return the abortion issue to the states for regulation. And the most Connecticut might do in retreating from unrestricted abortion would be to require parental or guardian consent for abortions for minors. Robbing parents of that much authority raises concerns even for supporters of abortion rights, which is why the abortion fanatics strive to suppress that part of the issue.

As with the legislation that threatens anti-abortion counseling, the pro-abortion side simply can’t bear any honest discussion.

* * *

NULLIFICATION GROWS: Last week voters in Lubbock, Texas, overwhelmingly approved an ordinance establishing a “sanctuary city for the unborn,” prohibiting abortion except to save a woman’s life and even authorizing relatives of a woman who has had an abortion to sue the abortionist and anyone who assisted.
Also last week Tennessee’s legislature approved a law declaring the state a “Second Amendment sanctuary,” prospectively canceling any federal law the state might deem to interfere with the right to bear arms.

Of course all this is old-fashioned nullification, like what often was attempted in the segregationist South as the civil rights era dawned and blossomed. The Lubbock ordinance may be challenged in court.

But Connecticut has no right to scorn these developments, since the state long has made itself a sanctuary state for illegal immigration, striving to nullify federal immigration law by providing official identification documents to illegal residents and obstructing the work of federal immigration agents. Soon Connecticut may extend state medical insurance to immigration lawbreakers as well.

Meanwhile many states are legalizing and commercializing marijuana in violation of federal law. Connecticut is close to joining them.

For lack of an Eisenhower, a Lincoln, or a Jackson, a great nation is starting to break up.

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

By Chris Powell

Democrats in the General Assembly are busy with big plans for transforming Connecticut. Though state government is rolling in federal cash, the Democrats want to tax business and the wealthy a lot more. They want to overthrow suburban zoning. They want state government to start selling medical insurance to small businesses. They would legalize and commercialize marijuana and erase thousands of criminal records. They seek a vast expansion of state-sanctioned gambling.

But that’s all in the future. What Democratic legislators don’t want to do is take responsibility for running Connecticut in [ITALICS] the present. [END ITALICS]

Instead once again the Democratic legislators want to leave the daily nitty-gritty to Governor Lamont, who is acting with becoming modesty as King Ned the First and has governed by executive order for more than a year on the false presumption that the virus epidemic prevents the legislature from doing its ordinary work. In fact the legislature has been convened for many weeks now and most aspects of life in Connecticut are returning to normal, but the legislature still isn’t ready to address the daily details.

The governor’s royal authority is scheduled to expire May 20 and Democratic legislators want to extend it for another month or two or three or maybe 10, probably taking their practical abdication well past the adjournment deadline for the current legislative session. This is because reviewing those scores of executive orders and deciding which to terminate and which to put into regular law would be work and distract from dreams of transformation.

The governor has said he doesn’t mind ruling by decree and indeed rather enjoys it, even as Democratic legislators are letting themselves be ruled by their dreams. So if the governor was filling out one of those new, politically correct biographical forms for a world where wishing makes it so, he’d be entitled to list his “preferred pronoun” as “Your Majesty.”

* * *

Now that the narrow Democratic majorities in Congress think money is infinite, President Biden wants legislation to guarantee all Americans 17 years of free education, which would add two years of preschool and two years of community college to what ordinarily is available to everyone now.

At first it may seem a lovely thought. Many of the youngest children can benefit from a year or two of enhanced day care before they get to kindergarten, and the education lobby has just about convinced the country that everybody should go to college as well.

Unfortunately student performance data suggests that more time in school produces less learning than educational inflation.

Most Connecticut students never master high school work and many require remedial courses when they are nevertheless promoted to a public state university. Last week the State Board of Education reported that the percentage of public state university students needing remedial high school courses has fallen from 50 to 41, as if that’s not still scandalous.

That figure provides a warning about “free” education. For as the American Revolutionary Thomas Paine wrote, “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. It is dearness only that gives everything its value.” Piling free college and free remedial high school courses on top of 12 years of social promotion may not be the best way of demonstrating the value of education, increasing society’s knowledge, and keeping the United States competitive.

But then free college may not be a gift to students as much as to educators, most of them being in the vanguard of the Democratic Party’s army of unionized government employees. At a typical Democratic national convention 10 percent or more of the delegates are members of teacher unions. And with the school-age population decreasing, keeping teacher union members employed may require keeping young people in school longer even if they’re not learning much of use for employability or general appreciation of life.

There might be some consolation if the president’s proposal for 17 years of free education could be boosted by just another year or two. Then maybe everybody could be a “doctor” like the president’s wife even while being unable to read beyond what used to be considered a fourth-grade level.

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

By Chris Powell

Amid dissension and turnover at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum, an art museum of international standing, Hartford Business Journal editor Greg Bordonaro wrote the other day that the city has an “image problem,” especially when compared to West Hartford, about which The New York Times recently published a report lauding, among other things, the suburb’s great restaurants. (The Times seldom cares much about anything in Connecticut unless it’s edible.)

But while the Times was merely patronizing, Bordonaro was profoundly mistaken. For the dissension at the art museum has no bearing on Hartford’s image, and the city doesn’t have an image problem but a reality problem.

Dissension at the art museum is nothing compared to the other recent widely publicized troubles of the city.

For starters, Hartford has a “shot spotter” system that is often in the news as it monitors all the gunplay in the city. While it is a small city, Hartford has murders every month, some especially depraved, like April’s murders of 3- and 17-year-old boys.

Even so, Hartford also has a cadre of political activists who want to “defund the police” and who last summer bullied Mayor Luke Bronin into cutting the police budget just before a spate of murders caused him to ask Governor Lamont to send in state troopers.

Some elected officials in West Hartford embody political correctness, but at least the town has a respectable school system, which Hartford doesn’t. Even as the city’s schools kept deteriorating a few years ago, Hartford put itself on the verge of bankruptcy by contracting to build a minor-league baseball stadium it couldn’t afford, leading to a bailout by state government, the assumption of more than $500 million of the city’s long-term debt.

Downtown West Hartford long ago superseded downtown Hartford as the hub of central Connecticut not because of the lovely restaurants lauded by the Times but because the suburb still has large middle and upper classes residing near its downtown, while misguided urban renewal in the 1960s turned downtown Hartford into an office district without a neighborhood.

Most of all West Hartford is desirable residentially because many of its children have two parents at home, while most children in Hartford are lucky if they have even one parent and so tend to live in financial, educational, and emotional poverty.

Art museums are nice but with or without them middle-class places can take care of themselves. Impoverished places can’t.

Now Hartford city government is considering paying a special stipend to single mothers in the hope that it will help them climb toward self-sufficiency. Such projects in other cities have not produced impressive results even as they risk inducing more women to adopt the single-parent lifestyle when they can’t even support themselves.

But Hartford can’t be blamed too much, for the city’s poverty is largely the consequence of state government policy — the failure of state welfare and education policy. Hartford and Connecticut’s other cities are what happens when welfare policy makes fathers seem unnecessary, relieves them of responsibility for their children, and aborts family formation, and when social promotion in school tells students they needn’t learn.

Of course social promotion is also policy in West Hartford and suburbs throughout the state, but those towns have parents who compel their kids to take education more seriously.

To achieve racial and economic class integration and to reduce housing prices generally, Connecticut urgently needs to build much more inexpensive housing in the suburbs and should outlaw the worst of their exclusive zoning. But the state has an even more urgent need to stop manufacturing the poverty that has been dragging the cities down for decades.

When the cities themselves are less poor, when more of their children have fathers at home and come to school ready to learn, when their home and school environments motivate rather than demoralize them, more people will want to live in Hartford just as people now want to live in West Hartford — and the management of the art museum won’t mean any more than it means now.

To change Hartford’s image — and Bridgeport’s and New Haven’s — state government has to change their reality.

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

By Chris Powell

Anyone watching television news in Connecticut last week might have gotten the impression that the state was being invaded by Nazi stormtroopers and the Ku Klux Klan.

Prompting the hysteria on the airwaves was, first, the arrest of a student at the University of Connecticut at Storrs for spray-painting a swastika on a university building across the street from the Jewish student organization.

Hours later a rope noose and a few ropes police said could be “interpreted” as nooses were found in a warehouse under construction in Windsor.

Jewish students at UConn reacted as if they had just gone through another Kristallnacht, as if some vandal somewhere isn’t always spray-painting swastikas or other vile graffiti on something. The Jewish students pledged to increase their efforts against anti-Semitism, as if there won’t always be some Jew haters and as if Jews aren’t safer, freer, and more secure in the national fabric here than they are anywhere else, including Israel itself.

Black politicians made angry statements, and at a news conference outside the Windsor warehouse a spokesman for the Hartford chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People shouted at the cameras that what had happened there was a hate crime requiring investigation.

Good luck to such investigation, since the building was little more than a skeleton and wide open without security. Presumably Connecticut’s many unsolved murders can wait while the warehouse ropes are investigated and “interpreted” some more.

But nobody had gotten hurt or even threatened directly in the Storrs and Windsor incidents, and such incidents are often found to be “false flag” provocations anyway. While swastikas evoke the Nazi genocide of European Jewry, nooses long have had many targets besides Blacks being lynched in the old South. For centuries nooses were the mechanism of execution for anyone convicted of a capital crime in this country, going back to the imagined witches of Connecticut’s earliest colonial days.

But the NAACP seemed eager to claim a threat, since victimhood now is so politically powerful. If you’re seen as a victim, everyone is supposed to be intimidated and to do whatever you want, even if what you want has nothing to do with what wronged you. Indeed, victimhood now rationalizes any broad political agenda.

Nevertheless, Black people are less likely to be harmed by ropes lying around a construction site than by the bullets fired daily in their own neighborhoods, like the bullet that killed a 3-year-old boy in Hartford last month.

These politically opportunistic racial obsessions are sweeping over Connecticut and the country. For also last week South Windsor’s new Equity Council held a meeting with the Board of Education to air complaints of racial abuse in the town’s schools. While the complaints seemed to involve mainly the cruel and stupid talk in which teenagers excel, rather than matters of school administration, what was most remarkable about the meeting was the irrelevance to the problem of the remedies contemplated.

These remedies include replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day, as if every racist in South Windsor isn’t as “indigenous” as anyone else ever was; celebrating the Hindu holiday of Diwali; and loading the school bureaucracy with more “diversity” babble.

What about just identifying and prosecuting the perpetrators of racist abuse like that cited at the meeting? Such relevance doesn’t seem to be on the agenda, maybe because these days in Connecticut even the most disruptive students can’t be expelled but must be coddled even as they impair the education of others. So South Windsor will blame Columbus instead.

Of course Connecticut has racial problems, especially the educational and economic lagging of minority groups. These problems can be uncomfortable to discuss. But the bloviating increasingly done about trivia only discourages people from discussing the problems and builds resentment.

Nearly everyone in Connecticut wants everyone else to do well, and most people really don’t care much about race. Intimidation and race mongering may work for a while politically but they won’t persuade, and only persuasion will accomplish much for the long term.

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

By Chris Powell

Recent leftist street theater in Connecticut raised issues that deserve more analysis than street theater can provide.

First, unionized members of the faculty of the four regional state universities brought their 14–foot inflatable skunk to Southern Connecticut State University for a rally protesting “stinky” contract proposals by the Board of Regents. Union members complained that the board wants them to work more and to control which research grants they apply for.

It’s unclear why the union members think such complaints would resonate with the public. While there isn’t much management in state government — nearly everyone there is unionized against management and thus organized against the public interest — the Board of Regents is supposed to manage the universities. Determining employee workloads is part of that, as is supervising research done by faculty. But the union thinks that faculty members should decide by themselves what research they undertake on the job.

To hear the faculty union members tell it as they escort their inflatable skunk from campus to campus, they are oppressed despite their generous salaries, gold-plated medical insurance, and defined-benefit pensions, which make them far more compensated than most private-sector workers.

A few days after the protest at Southern, the Working Families Party, which pushes Democratic state legislators to the left by threatening to run leftist candidates against them, held a “die-in” protest in Simsbury outside the home of the chief executive of medical insurer Cigna. The protesters were mad at him for opposing legislation to have state government sell medical insurance to small businesses. They said he and his company are killing people.

Advocates of the legislation complain about the profits of medical insurers and the huge salaries of their top executives. One of the protesters in Simsbury, the Rev. Tony Lorenzen, a minister for Unitarian congregations in Meriden and Woodbury, asked indignantly: “How is taking care of people’s health and well-being something anyone should make a profit from?”

But while the profits of medical insurers may be a fair issue, the insurers don’t keep most of the money they collect in policy premiums. Instead most of that money is paid to hospitals, doctors, and nurses. If that minister and the Working Families Party could persuade hospitals, doctors, and nurses to work for free, medical insurance companies would go out of business.

Indeed, as state budget director Ben Barnes famously explained at a General Assembly hearing in 2015, Connecticut heavily taxes hospitals for the same reason the career criminal Willie Sutton gave for robbing banks: “That’s where the money is.”

Improving access to medical insurance is a compelling objective for government. But how much can it be achieved without diminishing competition, choice, and individual freedom, running up government expense, and squeezing medical providers too hard? How much should it be done at the expense of an industry on which Connecticut long has heavily relied?

Those are complicated policy questions that are not answered by street theater, as much as that theater makes its participants feel righteous.

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FELONS SHOULD WAIT: Striving to get more members of racial minorities into court somewhere besides the criminal defendant’s table, the state Judicial Department is proposing legislation that would, among other things, allow felons to serve on juries as soon as they are released from prison, eliminating the seven-year buffer period now in force, and let noncitizen permanent legal residents serve on juries.

This pursuit is noble but it lowers standards too much. People whose involvement with the punishment side of the criminal-justice system is so fresh are bound to harbor resentments that could impair their jury service, and most people released from prison get in trouble with the law again soon. Time is needed for them to prove themselves good citizens.

Yes, the limited peremptory challenges allowed to the prosecution and defense could be used to disqualify former felons, but allowing recent ones to serve would disadvantage the prosecution far more than the defense.

Letting noncitizens serve on juries would pose less risk but still would devalue citizenship, which is already being devalued by the failure to enforce immigration law.

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