The Permanent Opposition

On April 5^th, a year after Connecticut’s predominantly Democratic General Assembly had passed into law the most restrictive gun legislation in the nation, opponents of the legislation rallied on the North side of the Capitol in Hartford.

The event was well attended: Capitol police estimated the crowd at 3,000; those hosting the event, the Connecticut Citizens Defense League (CCDL), placed the figure at 5,000. None of those present at the rally had been called upon by the General Assembly to offer testimony on the final bill, which itself was billed as an adequate and necessary response to a mass slaying at the Newtown Sandy Hook Elementary School. The final bill was passed without a public hearing by a legislature operating in the absence of information contained in a much too delayed criminal investigation.

Governor Dannel Malloy – once a prosecutor who, Mr. Malloy has often said, had tried criminal cases – declared at the time that the data contained in the criminal report was quite unnecessary; Mr. Malloy and the legislature knew enough about the events surrounding the massacre at Sandy Hook to write legislation that would in the future serve to prevent such occurrences everywhere in the state. The gun regulation bill would advance the public safety, the public was assured, public safety being the primary responsibility of both national and state governments.

That was not all the governor said. Early on, Mr. Malloy, the complete politician from head to toe, seemed to understand, almost intuitively, that gun regulation might be a useful prop in the coming political campaign. Indeed, Mr. Malloy’s campaign howitzer was pointed directly at the National Rifle Association (NRA), what he regards as unreasonable defenders of the U.S. Constitution’s 2^nd Amendment, Tea Party zanies and -- a bit surprising for the head of a state that has produced few jobs since 1991 -- gun manufacturers in what had been called since the American Revolution “the provision state.” Not only gun manufacturers but large corporations such as Pratt&Whitney still provide the U.S. government with war material. Even now, Connecticut is, to turn a phrase coined by Mr. Malloy, “still revolutionary.”

And yet here was the governor of a still revolutionary state telling gun manufacturers that they cared only for profits. “What this is about,” Mr. Malloy said on one of his frequent national television appearances, “is the ability of the gun industry to sell as many guns to as many people as possible -- even if they are deranged, even if they are mentally ill, even if they have a criminal background. They don’t care. They want to sell guns” -- meaning the flinty hearts of gun manufacturers did not bleed for the innocent victims of a mass murder in Sandy Hook. These sub-humans were interested only in filthy lucre.

Compassion for the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre, the people of Connecticut were to understand, was a rare and tender emotion cherished only by politicians such as Mr. Malloy and U.S. Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, all of whom were determined to blunt the outsized influence of the NRA. To date, more than a year after the slayings, Connecticut Senators Blumenthal and Murphy have not been successful in persuading U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to bring a gun restriction bill before the Democratic controlled Senate. We are given to understand that Mr. Reid is not uncompassionate; he simply lacks votes in the Democratic controlled chamber to pass a measure mirroring Connecticut’s highly restrictive gun law.

It is the insulting obduracy of Mr. Malloy and Mr. Murphy in particular  – Mr. Blumenthal has been slightly more cautious in his language – that has created what is now a permanent political opposition Connecticut. The trick in politics always is to slide your proposals, particularly pointless ones, past the noses of those deleteriously affected by them, not to bash them with inept demagoguery. Mr. Murphy and Mr. Malloy have made it impossible for their most virulent opponents to shrug off their persistent attacks as political posturing, the principal aim of which is to attract votes.

The CCDL rally in Harford, four months in the making, was by any measure a success. The large crowd -- rallying around the U.S. and State Constitutions, the flag and what they consider misguided legislation -- were animated and goal directed: Their goal, of course, was to flush anti-constitutional demons from the building they faced and to prevent further legislative encroachments on liberties hard won by the architects of the American Republic. The statues of the founders of Connecticut looked down upon them from the heights of the building. Quotes from Jefferson and Madison adorned their signs. There were scores of women and children in the crowd -- and out of state participants from New Jersey, New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Mississippi, West Virginia, about a dozen states in total, according to CCDL organizers. Most of the speakers mentioned, in one way or another, the bountiful fruits of a politics of limits: Governments were not created to put men in chains, but rather to permit men and women to guard with their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor the God given fruits of liberty heralded in the founding documents.

Congress To Public, Let’em Eat ObamaCare

  

One of the founders of the American Republic, James Madison, wrote in Federalist No. 57 that the U.S. Congress would not likely frame laws that would be injurious to the general public because the members of Congress also would be affected by the same laws. The Congress, he wrote, “can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as on the great mass of the society.”

But the U.S. Congress, the Marie Antoinette of legislatures, has long since learned how to escape laws that members of Congress inflict upon others.

Marie Antoinette, not a Queen beloved by her subjects, was saddled with the quote “Let’em eat cake” by anti-monarchical revolutionists. She was supposed to have uttered this phrase after she had been told the French people were starving; in fact the phrase was launched into the hotbed of revolutionary France by Jean Jacques Rousseau in his autobiography published in 1782 but written in 1765 when the future Queen of France was nine years old. The phase was applied posthumously to the Queen, who actually was very charitable to the poor during her short reign.

No matter. The phrase today indicates the lofty unconcern of rulers with their subjects’ abject government induced conditions.

More than two years ago, commentator Stephen Carter, a Yale professor and author of several books, noted with a shrug of disapproval that Congress had just exempted its members from a pending law that applied to everyone else: “The recent publicity surrounding the very old news that members of Congress aren’t prohibited from trading stock using nonpublic information has the House and Senate running for cover. Hastily drafted bills are picking up co-sponsors on both sides of the aisle.

“Yet it is something of a wonder that there is so much public excitement at the discovery that regulations that apply to lots of other people turn out to be largely irrelevant to those who serve in Congress. This isn’t an exception to congressional practice. It is, far too often, business as usual.”

Mr. Carter provided some examples. Many businessmen, he noted, regard the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) as “the bane of their existence” because OSHA sometimes promulgates regulations that are just dumb. “Sometimes the rules are important. Sometimes they are silly. Either way, it’s no concern of our national legislature, which, in its wisdom, has exempted itself” from OSHA regulations.

Although the entire federal government is exempt from OSHA regulations, Congress, perhaps anticipating an adverse response from the toiling masses, the equivalent of Marie Antoinette’s starving masses, never-the-less required federal agencies to promulgate operational rules consistent with OSHA standards. These minimal requirements, however, do not apply to Congress – “which turns out not to be an agency.”

A sigh bursting from him, Mr. Carter notes: “Then there is financial regulation. Critics have lamented that no equivalent of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act applies to Congress. The chief executives of public companies must certify their accounts, and face fines of up to $5 million and as many as 20 years in prison if they do so falsely. Members of Congress (like all federal officials) can make up numbers out of whole cloth without any sanction at all. Incorrect corporate numbers can mislead markets. Incorrect federal budget numbers can mislead the nation. (Perhaps the federal budget, like corporate balance sheets, should be vetted by independent third-party auditors.)”

While federal minimum wage laws apply to private employers and federal agencies, Congress is exempt from the laws because it is not an agency. For the same reason, Congress is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. The National Labor Relations Act exempts the federal government generally, but special rules concerning collective bargaining and unfair labor practices apply to federal employees – but not to Congress.

No one should be surprised that the Congress is at it again, this time in connection with ObamaCare. Members of Congress and their staffs are required to participate in The Affordable Care Act (ACA). The requirement was supposed to acquaint congressmen with the rigors of ObamaCare they had imposed on the rest of the country. But some congressmen have slipped the noose.

Here in Connecticut, according to published reports, two members of Connecticut’s all Democratic Congressional delegation, U.S. Representative Elizabeth Esty and U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, have decided not to follow in the footsteps of President Harry Truman, who enrolled as the first Medicare beneficiary in 1965 when the program came on line.

"I support the act,” Mr. Blumenthal said, “and believe that federal employees and members of Congress should have access to the new options for health insurance provided by the ACA, including what is available on their local exchanges," Blumenthal said in a statement to a newspaper.

Since Mr. Blumenthal supports ObamaCare, he also supports its mandatory requirements. Under the old dispensation, before ObamaCare arrived on the scene to the blare of heavenly trumpets, Mr. Blumenthal’s younger constituents were not forced under penalty of fines to purchase medical insurance. Mr. Blumenthal, who may freely choose whether he does or does not wish to enlist in ObamaCare, will be spared the fines that hang like a Damoclean sword over the heads of  younger people who are not congressmen and do not have the luxury of writing laws that do not operate on them.

One wonders how James Madison, quoted above, would have voted on the exemptions enjoyed by congressmen who in effect have said to their constituents “Let’em eat cake.”

Democratic Arrogance And The Budget

Having raised taxes during his first term by $1.5 billion, the largest tax increase in state history, Governor Dannel Malloy is now poised to sign a biennial budget the bottom line of which is either $36.6 billion or $44 billion, according to CTMirror. Over two years,” CTMirror reports, “the new budget would spend $44 billion, based on the current method for reporting Medicaid spending,” a true figure of expenses now hidden behind an iron mask of gimmickry.

Democrats in the General Assembly – Republicans by design were excluded in the construction of both Mr. Malloy’s budgets – this year engaged in the most costly gimmick in state history, moving upwards of $6 billion in Medicaid costs outside the state’s constitutional cap, a sleigh of hand that makes a fiction of both the cap and the constitutional voice of all the citizens in Connecticut, whatever their political affiliation. Medicare costs for the next fiscal year amount to about $5.3 billion, part of which, about $3 billion, is offset by federal aid. The federal government -- now in arrears by about $17 trillion, a debt that has been increasing on an average of $2.77 billion per day since September 30, 2012 -- partially finances Medicaid for the first two years of Obamacare, after which the states assume payment for both the program and Medicaid liabilities, which will be considerable.

The constitutional cap was a legislative placebo offered by the administration of former Governor Lowell Weicker that enabled Mr. Weicker to harness a few votes in the General Assembly to pass his 1991 income tax – after Mr. Weicker had publically sworn in his gubernatorial campaign that instituting an income tax while the state was facing a deficit of a little over $1 billion would be like “pouring gas in a fire.” The ploy worked, the income tax was passed and, in the course of the following two decades, the bottom line of Connecticut’s budget more than tripled – that’s TRIPLED. Connecticut’s last pre-income tax budget was $7.5 billion; the current Malloy budget is $18.6 billion in the fiscal year beginning July 1 and $19 billion the next fiscal year.

In 2013, we may conclude positively and without any ambiguity 1) that spending follows in the rut of taxation so that increased taxation ALWAYS is followed by commensurate increases in spending, 2) the word “constitutional” is an term of art among Connecticut progressives in the legislature and the state house, and 3) Connecticut is now – like some of its corruption clogged, mismanaged cities – a one party state.

The two most important characteristics of progressivism are its disdain for limits and its blind faith in the omni-competence of government. Joined to a unitary state, the heady combination is both intoxicating and corrosive to liberties. Not only is the Malloy administration the most expensive in state history, it is also the most aggressively progressive.  

Democrats in Connecticut completed their absolute control of state government the day after Dannel Malloy was sworn in as Governor, and the problem with absolute power, Lord Acton reminds us, is that it corrupts absolutely. “Great men,” Lord Acton averred, “are almost always bad men.”

The limitless power now enjoyed by Democrats in Connecticut would make a saint stray in the direction of arrogance, and none of the members of the state’s General Assembly are saints. If men were saints, government itself would be unnecessary; so said James Madison, widely regarded as the father of the U.S. Constitution as well as the Bill of Rights, both of which set limits to governmental power.

Madison’s full quote, found in the Federalist Papers, should be swallowed whole unparsed:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

One of the auxiliary precautions that people supposed would prevent the state’s General Assembly from spending at will was the constitutional budget cap – RIP, June 1, 2013.