Some notable politician who is not Catholic really ought to come to the defense of Catholics – because they are now under assault from anti-Catholic Catholic politicians. Just as there is no anti-communist so fierce as an ex-communist, so there is no anti-Catholic quite so energetically opposed to Catholic orthodoxy as a Catholic politician on the make and in need of votes from others who may share his distaste for all things Catholic.

The uninterrupted assault on Catholics, the Reverend Robert Barron points out in National Review, is bone wearingly old. Arthur Schlesinger, the reliably liberal historian and social critic, used to say that a poisonous anti-Catholicism was the oldest prejudice in the United States, an early bloom that washed upon our shore with the arrival of the Mayflower.

In the Boston of Sam Adams’ day, anti-Papists used to place an effigy of the pope in a chair that was paraded through the streets – Boston’s version of the English Guy Fawkes celebration – to be jeered at pelted with missiles launched by the equivalent of today’s anti-Catholic Catholic politicians.

Without the aid of Catholic France, General George Washington could not have prevailed over the British, and Washington, who rarely forgot the patriotic good deeds of his friends, recalled this saving service when he addressed his letter to the Catholic Church in America in 1790. It was Mr. Washington’s hope, he wrote, that “as mankind becomes more liberal they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protection of civil government.”

Thomas Jefferson, who wrote to Danbury Baptists a letter in which he used the phrase “separation of church and state,” showed his appreciation of the work of the Catholic Church in a world set against it.

When, following the acquisition of Louisiana from Napoleon, the Ursuline Sisters in New Orleans wrote to then President Jefferson expressing fears they might lose their property under the new governance of the United States, Mr. Jefferson wrote back to assure the nuns that the Constitution prevented the government of the United States from using its power to deprive them of their religious liberties:

To the Soeur Therese de St. Xavier Farjon Superior, and the Nuns of the order of St. Ursula at New Orleans.

I have received, holy sisters, the letter you have written me wherein you express anxiety for the property vested in your institution by the former governments of Louisiana. The principles of the constitution and government of the United States are a sure guarantee to you that it will be preserved to you sacred and inviolate, and that your institution will be permitted to govern itself according to it’s own voluntary rules, without interference from the civil authority. Whatever diversity of shade may appear in the religious opinions of our fellow citizens, the charitable objects of your institution cannot be indifferent to any; and it’s furtherance of the wholesome purposes of society, by training up it’s younger members in the way they should go, cannot fail to ensure it the patronage of the government it is under. Be assured it will meet all the protection which my office can give it.

I salute you, holy sisters, with friendship & respect.

Mr. Jefferson’s view that the government of the United States should – because it must constitutionally – make accommodations favorable to religious institutions was but a whisper in the wind for most Catholics in the United States who continued in the grip of oppression. In Boston, shortly after Mr. Jefferson issued his letter to the Ursulaine nuns, a Mother Superior in a Boston nunnery unsuccessfully held off a mob that burnt her nunnery to the ground.

To put it briefly, Catholics in America never had an easy time of it, especially just before and after the Civil War, when poor German and Irish immigrants, later Italians, began flooding major cities in the Northeast. Used to the Know-Nothings of the Lincoln period, the invidious, anti-Catholic Blaine laws, and what then must have seemed the unassuageable anti-Catholic animus of those whose motto seemed to be “We’re aboard, tow up the life-line,” Northeast Catholics were not at all surprised when then Senator of Massachusetts Jack Kennedy asserted in his campaign for the presidency that he could never become the Pope’s political stooge.

Some Catholics still prefer Hilaire Belloc’s more courageous formulation. On the stump in England, one of Mr. Belloc’s speeches was interrupted by a heckler who accused him of being a papist. Mr. Belloc fetched in his pocket for his rosary beads, flourished them over his head and thundered at the heckler, “Madam, do you see these beads? I pray on them every night before I go to bed, and every morning when I awake. And if that offends you, madam, I pray God that he spare me the ignominy of representing you in parliament.”

Jefferson might have applauded that remark. But not Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo.

Here’s Reverend Barron on Cuomo:

“In the course of a radio interview, Governor Andrew Cuomo blithely declared that anyone who is pro-life on the issue of abortion or who is opposed to gay marriage is ‘not welcome’ in his state of New York. Mind you, the governor did not simply say that such people are wrong-headed or misguided; he didn’t say that they should be opposed politically or that good arguments against their position should be mounted; he said they should be actively excluded from civil society! As many commentators have already pointed out, Governor Cuomo was thereby excluding roughly half of the citizens of the United States and, presumably, his own father, Mario Cuomo, who once famously declared that he was personally opposed to abortion. Again, the very hysterical quality of this statement suggests that an irrational prejudice gave rise to it.”

The reverend is a priest and therefore an interested party. G. K. Chesterton, Belloc’s friend, was a convert and so understood Catholicism from the outside in, and he saw Mr. Cuomo descending the staircase of history decades before he was born:

"Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense . . . becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined skepticism, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding to no form of creed and contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded."

Democratic Demagoguery in Connecticut

The first shots of the 2014 gubernatorial campaign were fired by Malloyalist pit bull Roy Occhiogrosso and state Democratic Party Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo shortly after former Ambassador to Ireland Tom Foley announced at the end of November his availability for the Republican nomination for governor.

Asked by a reporter to comment on Mr. Foley’s early entrance into the gubernatorial arena, Mr. Occhiogrosso sniffed, “We don’t comment on Tom Foley’s political ambitions. He lost one race. He’s more than welcome to lose another.”

Ms. DiNardo, coloring within the lines of Mr. Occhiogrosso’s curt dismissal, said in a media release, “Tom Foley just doesn’t get it. Like Mitt Romney, he doesn’t understand the challenges that average hardworking people face. He is just another out-of-touch vulture capitalist who sees the average resident as something less. It’s a toxic world view that the voters of this country rejected just a few weeks ago. And if ambassador Foley runs again, he’ll find out exactly what the voters of Connecticut think of his economic philosophy.”

Mr. Foley lost the governor’s race to Mr. Malloy in 2010, owing to the additional votes Mr. Malloy was able to garner while appearing on the “Working Families Party” line. In a recent suit decided by Connecticut’s Supreme Court, the court awarded the Republican Party the top line on the ballot in the recently concluded elections because Mr. Foley had received more votes on the Republican Party line than did Mr. Malloy on the Democratic Party line. The race was exceedingly close. Charges during the race that Mr. Foley was a “vulture capitalist,” as Mrs. DiNardo toxically puts it, did not appear to do much damage to Mr. Foley’s prospects, who lost to Mr. Malloy by a slender 6,400 vote margin. Democrats in Connecticut outnumber Republicans roughly by a ratio of two to one.

Other Republicans who have shown interest in running against Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy are perhaps, to Mrs. DiNardo’s way of thinking, less “out of touch’ in the toxic world of Connecticut politicking.

Both the Republican House and Senate leaders in the General Assembly, Senator John McKinney and House leader Larry Cafero, as well as Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton, have signaled their interests in running for governor, and all have considerably more direct experience in issues affecting the state than Ms. DiNardo and Mr. Occhiogrosso might wish.

The knock on Linda McMahon, when she ran twice for the U.S. Senate, was that she had little direct experience in politics, was redundantly wealthy, and made her millions in a way that caused some in the media to wrinkle their noses with displeasure. True, soon to be Senior Senator from Connecticut Dick Blumenthal and U.S. House fixture Rosa DeLauro are also millionaires, Mr. Blumenthal having been fortunate enough to marry a woman whose father owns the Empire State Building in New York and some few other valuable properties, and Mrs. DeLauro having had the luck to marry pollster to the Democratic stars Stan Greenberg.

Of the six richest U.S. Senators, only one is a Republican. John Kerry of Massachusetts, reported to be under consideration for departing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s position, is number one, weighing in with a net worth of $238,812,296; Mr. Blumenthal is number six, with assets amounting to $94,870,116.

Great wealth is not necessarily a bar to politicians who, ideally, serve all the people all the time. Franklin Roosevelt, after all, did not sell apples for pennies on a street corner, and George Washington, father of the early Republic, a capitalist enterprise, is still the richest man to have held presidential office. But even Mrs. DiNardo, if one could catch her in an honest non-political mood, might be forced to admit that the life styles of both Mr. McKinney and Mr. Cafero are more representative of the middle class than that of Mr. Blumenthal, who lives in a million dollar estate in toney Greenwich, as does Mrs. McMahon.

We see the future through a glass darkly, but none of it looks promising. Like California, Connecticut is broke and teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Both Mr. Malloy and Mr. Obama continue in their crony capitalist ways – transferring huge gobs of tax money not to the poor but to bribable large corporations – and demagoguery will only get you so far.

Mr. Foley is supposed to be out of touch with the usual Democratic constituency because he used the expression “little people” to condemn the seeming indifference of the party of the little people to the common man.

In an attempt to balance a chronically unbalanced budget,Mr. Foley told a TV news reporter, the governor was pulling the plug on needed services: “Now they're hurting the little people in the state: Alzheimer’s funding, the children's fund, the disabled, vets. They're stepping on the brake and hitting the accelerator at the same time.”

Here is an Obama voter, a 57-year-old African-American salesman in Calera, Ala., formerly a Republican, accounting for his switch: “Democrats stand for little people, regular people, common people like myself. My daddy was a Republican because Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, but the Republican Party changed and started being for people who had money.” And here is Democratic Party hero Andrew Cuomo, mayor of the Big Apple, hoisting his flag for the little people: "We're going to do all the hard things. We're going to bite the bullet. And we're going to do the courageous thing without punishing little people or exploiting the rich people."

Even within Democratic Party ranks, the expression “little people” is a synonym for “common people.” In rhetorical demonology, the expression’s antonym is – guess what? – “the rich.” One would think the head of the Democratic Party in Connecticut and Mr. Malloy’s chief flack catcher and demonologist-in chief would know all this; but then purposeful ignorance in pursuit of election victories is no vice for such as Ms. DiNardo and Mr. Occhiogrosso . 

Weicker And The Destruction Of The Republican Party

Lowell Weicker’s unvarying message to his long discarded Republican Party, iterated and reiterated countless times during his 21 year congressional stint, is always, wearily, the same: Republicans in Connecticut could win office if they were JUST LIKE ME.

The 81 year-old Weicker, still the darling of the Hartford Courant, Connecticut’s only state-wide newspaper, surfaced briefly in June 2011 at an event called “Conversations at Connecticut's Old State House." His appearance was covered by the paper in a story titled “Former Governor Endorses Obama, Same-Sex Marriage, Income Tax Hike, Ending Super PACs.”

It is safe to conclude that Republicans in Connecticut would not have been surprised by either the title or Mr. Weicker’s views reflected in the story, however much Republican Party dissents from the former Republican U.S. Senator.

Mr. Weicker’s state party has over the years grown used to being shamefully used as a political foil. When then Republican Senator Weicker described himself approvingly as “the turd in the Republican Party punchbowl,” few Republicans in his state were astonished by either the abusive sentiment or the scatological reference. Following the rapid and irreversible expansion of Weicker’s self-inflated ego, always easily pumped up, the senator’s relationship with his party quickly deteriorated. Eventually, the two parted ways when then Attorney General Joe Lieberman challenged Mr. Weicker and absconded with his seat, assisted by a Republican Party that manifestly did not wish to be Weicker.

The parting between the turd and the punchbowl was not, as lawyers sometimes say in messy divorces, amicable.

When Mr. Weicker became governor of Connecticut, he ran as an Independent. When the independent, maverick governor imposed an income tax on his state over the hearty objections of most Republicans, he likely felt a stab of joy carousing near his spine: The greatest joy a man can have, Genghis Khan used to say, is to dance on the chest of his enemy.

The very nearly impassible bridge between Mr. Weicker and his cast-off party has not prevented him from offering Republicans in Connecticut advice and council, most of it converging on the golden perception that if Republicans were more like him, they would win more elections.

Here is what Mr. Weicker said at the Old State House:

President Barack Obama “inherited”rather than caused the problems that confronted him when he entered office, a non sequitur as large and imposing as Gibraltar, or Mr. Weicker’s estimation of himself.

Should Mr. Weicker have a real“conversation” with his audience, someone eventually might ask the former governor and senator to point to one president who did NOT inherit the problems of his predecessor, George Washington, not preceded in office by a president, being the single exception that that proves the rule.

In truth, there are presidents who “own”problems left on their doorstep by their predecessors, and there are those who shuck off their own presidential responsibilities by pointing to the errors of others. Mr. Weicker did not speculate to which category Obama might belong.

Instead, he tossed at his rapt audience a rhetorical question, here defined as a self-serving probe meant to illustrate the brilliance of the questioner and the stupidity of the person questioned, whose answer the questioner loftily presumes is unnecessary. Acknowledging that the predecessor gambit is no excuse for failing to apply corrective action, Mr. Weicker asked: “… but how in God’s name do you move forward under these circumstances, if the Republican leadership just keeps saying no?”

Monologists frequently ask themselves questions they leave dangling.

Political watchers will notice that the hackneyed political expression “move forward” is in political discourse little more than a naked rhetorical appeal to the “forward looking” impetus of most red-blooded Americans. But it’s a directional expression that begs the question: Move forward where?

Suppose you resolve to take a bus from Hartford to Springfield. You get on a bus in Hartford marked“Springfield.” After a few miles, it becomes startlingly obvious that you are traveling toward New Haven. At this point, when you know further forward direction will take you farther from your appointed destination, what would Weicker consider the proper response to a call to “move forward?” Considering the anticipated point of arrival –Springfield, as announced by the arrival sign on the bus -- would it not be more fruitful, for the sake of all the passengers on board, to resist calls to “move forward” by saying “NO” and advise the bus driver that he must turn around and travel in the opposite direction?

Republicans ought to be different than Democrats: As the French say, “Vive la difference!” Weicker’s notion of a winning Republican Party is one that differs from the Democratic Party only in unimportant details. Mr. Weicker supports Obama; Republicans don’t. The father of Connecticut’s income tax is quite willing cheerfully to support the Malloy tax increase, the largest in state history. Why, indeed, would the author of the second largest tax increase in state history, Mr. Weicker, harpoon the author of the largest tax increase in state history, Mr. Malloy, when both are fraternal brothers in the Order of Reckless Spenders? Republicans are queasy about this sort of thing because they perceive a demonstrable and direct connection between high taxes and increased spending. On some social issues, Mr. Weicker hugs the far left periphery. Republicans more conservative than Mr. Weicker worry that forward motion on some social issues – unregulated abortion, gay marriage, impositions made by the federal government on religious enterprises that traditionally have been afforded a wide door of liberty, and the like – might entail unfortunate unintended consequences.

But, says Weicker, Connecticut is blue, like me. If Republicans want to win office, they’ll have to paint themselves blue, like me. Perhaps it’s time to start a new party, and appoint Tom D’Amore chairman of it. And so it goes with Mr. Weicker, perhaps the most successful camouflage artist in the last half century. The self-justification, the shameless puffery, the fatal advice to Republicans, will end with the man’s last dying curse of his party. In the meanwhile, the GOP in Connecticut, grander now that it has cast off its incubus, really would like to move forward –preferably to Springfield, not New Haven.

Who Done It? A Lesson In Constitutional Probity

When the convention that gave birth to the U.S. Constitution had finished its work, the great charter of liberties was left on a table so that the founders of the Republic might, if they wished, sign their names to it.

Ben Franklin had earlier warned his band of revolutionary brothers that if they did not hang together they would of a certainty “hang separately.” And he was not playing with metaphors. Had the agents of King George captured George Washington or any of those who had signed the Declaration of Independence, the father of our country most certainly would have been hanged, even as Nathan Hale, Connecticut’s Hero and one of Mr. Washington’s spies in New York, was hanged without benefit of trial. Mr. Hale, a school teacher, repented that he had but one life to give for his country.

John Hancock’s large and audacious signature, a defy that resounds through the years like a great shout of joy, leaps out of the Declaration of Independence five years before Lord Cornwallis surrendered to Mr. Washington at Yorktown. Mr. Hancock of Boston said he had signed his signature so conspicuously “so that the king would not miss it.”

When the constitution had been completed, the constitutional architects drifted one by one to the table where it lay and, on the understanding that a Bill of Rights was later to be added, claimed ownership of the nation’s foundational charter by signing the document. Since the founding, courageous architects of bills in both state and federal governments have signed their handiwork.

There are no signatures on Raised H.B. No. 5460, tendentiously titled “An act concerning captive audience meetings” -- because this bill, outlawing religious and political speech in the workplace, effectively repeals the First Amendment to the Constitution, which provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The bill is introduced by “LAB”; no names of those sponsoring the legislation are appended to this disgraceful piece of legislation.

The rights enumerated in the First Amendment quite literally hang together; they depend upon each other. Over the years, the antique expression “establishment of religion” has created some difficulties in interpretation, but the rights here specified clearly proscribe the national congress, and by extension state legislatures as well, from constructing bills that prohibit the free exercise of religion, abridge freedom of the press and speech – most especially political speech – as well as rights of assembly and the right of citizens to petition their governments for a redress of grievances.

Raised H.B. No. 5460, approved by the state’s labor and public employees committee, an ideological annex of Connecticut’s employee unions, now awaiting action by the House and Senate, prevents employers from talking about religious or political topics with their employees, the two forms of speech most protected by the First Amendment.

The new state bill, prompted by failed attempts to unionize Yale-New Haven Hospital in 2006, effectively repeals that portion of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) that affirms an employer’s right to express an opinion about unionization provided the employer does not threaten reprisal or promise a benefit that coerces employees. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) administers the law and rules on specific cases alleging unfair labor practices. The NLRB allows captive audience meetings more than 24 hours before a union election as long as the employer does not commit an unfair labor practice such as, for instance, threatening reprisal for supporting a union. The NLRB may order a new election if it finds either the employer or a union held a captive audience meeting of employees within 24 hours of a union election.

The bill under consideration by the General Assembly is inherently unjust and unconstitutional because it prohibits so called captive audience meetings for employers but not for union organizers and unconstitutionally restricts political and religious speech in the workplace. Given the already stringent impositions imposed by the NLRA, the constitutionally dubious union supported bill is a solution in search of a problem.

In addition to promoting “new and costly litigation,” said Andy Markowski, the state director of the National Federation of Independent Businesses, Connecticut’s leading small business association, portions of the bill are “ambiguous, overly broad and subject to varying interpretations,” a goldmine for lawyers, some of whom may be familiar with constitutional proscriptions.

Any ban on religious and political speech is content based, and the Supreme Court has not been silent on such issues. In a case involving the right of workers to picket, the court reversed on First Amendment grounds a prior court ruling prohibiting the picketing:

“To permit the continued building of our politics [p96] and culture, and to assure self-fulfillment for each individual, our people are guaranteed the right to express any thought, free from government censorship. The essence of this forbidden censorship is content control. Any restriction on expressive activity because of its content would completely undercut the profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.”

So grave a violation of the Constitution does this menacing bill entail that its legislative architects should be impeached for irreducible stupidity by offering it for serious consideration. But the cowards have taken care to hide themselves from public censure, and we do not know under what rock the slithering idiots may be found.

The New Nobility

In the Early American Republic of blessed memory, such eminences as George Washington declined titles, much in use in England at the time. The moderns, as Zach Janowski demonstrates in “Raising Hale,” have no such compunctions. In the 36-member Senate, there are 36 titled officials. In the more modest House, “only two out of three members gets a fancy title” – and an extra stipend to boot. The House listing by dollar is here, and the Senate listing here.

Mr. Janowski unwittingly has presented a strong argument for a unicameral legislature. Such an organ of popular representation would be less titled, more broadly representative and more responsible to the sort of people Washington thought were virtuous, economical and modest.