An Irrelevant Republican Warns That His Former Party May Become Irrelevant

This may be the first time in Connecticut history that an irrelevant former Republican U.S. Senator of long standing has warned his former party that it faces irrelevancy.

The new crop of Republicans in Connecticut – young, brash, conservative and determined to remember but overcome their past – may have trouble recalling who former U.S. Senator and Governor Lowell Weicker was. The past tense is important because Mr. Weicker, who once dubbed himself “the turd in the Republican Party punchbowl,” scooted out the political door after he had, as an independent governor, imposed the second largest tax increases on young Republicans he now seductively courts in the op-ed pages of the Hartford Courant.

The First Prize in tax increases belongs to current Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy. When Mr. Malloy put the tax yoke around the shoulders of young Democrats, Republicans and Independents in Connecticut, someone, probably a left of center former Weickerite, corralled Mr. Weicker and pumped an opinion from him. Mr. Weicker said he quite understood the necessity of such a tax increase. The Democratic Party, after a long pregnancy, had finally given birth to a Weicker clone in Mr. Malloy: The two progressives were simpatico.

Throughout his career, both in the Senate and as Governor, Mr. Weicker has shown himself to be constitutionally unable of making a proper distinction between the state – i.e. all the people in Connecticut – and the state apparatus, or state government, which sometimes does and sometimes does not serve the interests of the people. The megalomaniacal politician will assume he is the state; it should not surprise serious students of history that democracy on occasion may produce a “Sun King” whose operative principle is "L'etat, c'est moi (I am the state)."

Mr. Weicker continues to defend his income tax as a boon to the state. And here lies the root of his confusion. The income tax was a boon to progressive politicians who would rather cut their own throats than cut taxes or trim spending. But such politicians are NOT the state.

Since the imposition of the Weicker tax, spending in Connecticut has increased threefold -- within the short space of four governors: Governor Weicker, an Independent, Republican Governors John Rowland and Jodi Rell, both moderate and far less vitriolic towards their own party than “Sun King” Weicker, and Dannel Malloy, a progressive.

The arc in Connecticut politics since Mr. Weicker was “booted from the GOP in 1988, when I lost my Senate election,” Mr. Weicker’s formulation in his Courant Op-Ed, has been from centrist politics to progressivism. Former Governor Ella Grasso, a moderate Democrat, fought tooth and claw against an income tax. The line of Democratic succession from Mrs. Grasso to Mr. Malloy is a movement from the kind of fiscal conservatism favored by William Buckley, Mr. Wicker’s nemeses, to the kind of progressivism once lauded by prairie populists and Woodrow Wilson progressives.

Where in Connecticut politics is the breaker that will prevent Connecticut from sliding absent-mindedly back – not forward – into the progressive era? Progressivism is the old, tried and failed thing; conservatism, at least that brand of it recommended by Mr. Buckley, is the new thing, and Mr. Weicker, who professes in his Op-Ed that he once took a lesson from Barry Goldwater, the Storm Petrel of the modern conservative party, HATES it, absolutely HATES it.

The reference to Mr. Goldwater in Mr. Weicker’s Op-Ed is precious: “I remember chatting with Barry Goldwater, R-Arizona, one day in the Senate cloakroom as he commented on a photograph in The Washington Post of my friend Sen. Bill Proxmire, D-Wisconsin, with his new hair transplant. In Barry's conservative words, ‘I don't mind what's on his head. I worry about what's in it!’ Well, so do I when it comes to the Republican hierarchy in Connecticut.”

One hardly knows where to begin in commenting upon Mr. Weicker’s comment on Mr. Goldwater, historically the red carpet to President Ronald Reagan and the author of “The Conscience of a Conservative,” said to be ghostwritten, at least in part, by Mr. Weicker’s chief Connecticut nemeses, Bill Buckley, who was partly responsible for booting Mr. Weicker from the GOP in 1988.

Mr. Goldwater, it will be recalled, was the guy who said about Mr. Weicker’s brand of left of center Republicanism as practiced in New England, “If you cut off New England and California, you’ve got a pretty good country.” But here in his Op-Ed, Mr. Weicker is appropriating Mr. Goldwater’s NAME only to give unction to Mr. Weicker’s deathless dream – the utter and absolute destruction of the Connecticut Republican Party that in 1988 gave Mr. Weicker the boot. In point of fact, it was Mr. Weicker who, during his long senatorial run in office, continually gave his state party the boot.

And in his latest advice to his cast off party in the current Courant Op-Ed, Mr. Weicker offers what he perceives to be a dying party a final and deadly sip of hemlock: The Republican Party should open its primaries to Independents. That proposal was first made by Mr. Weicker’s now diseased dear friend, Tom D’Amore, at a time when Mr. Weicker, the self-professed “turd in the Republican Party punchbowl” saw, if only in his imagination, the approach of a Democratic Party opponent who might spoil his game and succeed in booting him out of office. Enter Attorney General Joe Lieberman, and the rest, as the historians say, is history.

It may help the Connecticut Republican Party to remember that Mr. Weicker also is history, and that those who do not remember their history correctly are doomed to repeat its errors.

Republicans On The Run

The state Democratic Party, much wealthier than the state Republican Party, is now spending some of its dollars on imported gunslingers such as James Hallinan, a political hessian hired by party central to throw mud at Republican candidates for governor, a certain sign that the election season is upon us.  Democrats in Connecticut hold all the state’s constitutional offices, have veto proof majorities in the General Assembly, and presently have in their campaign coffers 14 times more cash than Republicans.

Some of the mudslinging has backfired. Even a few liberal commentators have winced at the slops that regularly cross their news desks but, as Cardinal John Henry Newman once said, “Throw enough mud and some will stick – stick but not stain.”

Governor Dannel Malloy’s low rating in the polls, some commentators have noted, may give Republicans an opportunity to win back the governorship, last held by Jodi Rell, Mr. Malloy’s polar opposite. Mr. Malloy is a pro-union, left of center politician; Mrs. Rell, a creature of the legislature, was a moderate Republican of a kind that once held office in most of New England, the land that conservatism forgot. Barry Goldwater, the Will Rogers of the modern conservative movement, used to say, “If you cut off New England and California, you’ve got a pretty good country.”

For reasons not yet explored by any of New England’s major research institutions, the moderate Republican in New England has become something of a vanishing species. In Connecticut, the species is as extinct as the Dodo bird. All the members of Connecticut U.S. Congressional delegation are left of center progressives, some more brash than others. U.S. Senator Chris Murphy shouts his progressivism from the rooftops, but then he is likely to moderate his tone when he next faces voters in three years. U.S. Representative Jim Himes is more discreet; he travels among progressives with his ideology tucked into the breast pocket of his expensive looking suit. Hip U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro is fearless, as anyone would be in a district that has not elected a Republican to the U.S. House in more than 30 years; ditto U.S. Representative John Larson of the gerrymandered 1st District, last held by a Republican nearly 60 years ago.

Whatever may be ailing the Republican Party in Connecticut, its losses cannot be attributed to conservative incumbents. There are none, though there is little doubt that Democrats running for office in 2014 will be banging the drums loudly against fictitious conservative threats and Tea Party “extremists,” northern Republicans clinging desperately to their guns, their wallets and their bibles – that sort of thing. The 2014 Democratic campaign script, however fantastic its claims, has already been written, much of it in Washington D.C. and Chicago, where President Barack Obama’s former campaign script writers hold court. Chicago is the murder capital of the United States, and the Democratic Party War Room in Washington D.C. is party central for propaganda that will be picked up by state parties.

Political reality in Connecticut is quite different than in other parts of the country. Here in the land of steady progressive habits, the Democratic Party has almost completely routed Republicans, especially in large, one-party cities such as New Haven, which this year had the distinction of electing as mayor a Democratic Party fixture whose husband, now diseased, was the top tax scofflaw in the city over which his wife, Toni Harp, now presides.

Speeding her plow in a Democratic primary were the usual notables: Governor Dannel Malloy, author of the largest tax increase in Connecticut history, U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, for more than 20 years a crusading Attorney General who, in his former position, used to scowl fiercely at folk who avoided paying their fair share of taxes, and U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, the National Rifle Association’s bête noir.

In one party states, politicians working the media get to choose not only their friends but their enemies as well – and never mind that the “enemy” is largely a Potemkin Village fiction. The Tea Party in Connecticut presents a greater threat to RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) than to progressive Democrats. And for this reason, they can be safely attacked by incumbent Democrats who never met a constitutional bulwark they could not leap over. Economic conservatives among Republican campaigners become poorer than Democrats in direct proportion to their defense of rational budgets, spending cuts and appeals to the self-interests of entrepreneurial wealth producers. This is an arc that has been visible over skies in Connecticut for more than 50 years.

Is it not a wonder that only a handful of reporters, editors and commentators in the state have noticed the debt pots at each end of the progressive rainbow? When, at the end of the downward plunge, Connecticut inevitably becomes the Venezuela of New England – Crumbling Venezuela was once considered the Paris of Latin America, but not even Paris is Paris anymore – those rooted in the rubble may well ask the tribunes of the people, “Why did you not warn us of the impending disaster?”

The McEnroe Itch

Any admission from Colin McEnroe, a Courant commentator and host of his own radio show on National Public Radio, “The Colin McEnroe Show,” that he is disposed to vote Republican should be taken, as Mark Twain once said, “with a ton of salt.”

Mr. McEnroe wrote in a December 07, 2012 column, “Searching The Ballot For Worthy Republicans,” that he was “itchin' to vote for a Republican.”  And he even provided some tantalizing biographical information: Both of his parents had been Goldwater Republicans. Political obligations to one’s parents, however, rarely survive a Yale education, the fifth commandment having been seriously eroded by sophomore year. Mr. McEnroe noticed that his father had been sliding towards the Democratic heresy at the end. In his later years, his father had “taken to slipping into the voting booth and quietly voting Democrat. I could tell this was happening because he slowly stopped saying anything about politics in front of my mother.”

Around the time he wrote his column, Mr. McEnroe had two rare opportunities to scratch his itch. And so did the Hartford Courant, which multiple times claimed or strongly suggested in its editorials that the GOP should offer up to voters more moderate (read: liberal), pragmatic (read: liberal), non-ideological (read: liberal) Republicans.

Of Ross Garber, then running for attorney general in a Republican Party primary, Mr. McEnroe wrote in his column, “I also would have considered voting for Ross Garber for attorney general, even though I have no significant problems with the Democrat who won, George Jepsen. I think highly of Ross, and I would have been able to say, ‘I do NOT always vote for Democrats. As recently as 2010, I blah-blah woof-woof.’"

Mr. McEnroe was robbed of the opportunity of voting in the general election for a Republican Party attorney general who suited his taste because the Republican Party nominee for attorney general that year was attorney Martha Dean, about whom Mr. McEnroe wrote, “Just the other day I was remarking to my colleague John Dankosky that perhaps we all should have voted for Martha Dean Christian Space Warrior™, because life would have been really exciting and because the state could have written down its debt by selling action figures. But I didn't vote for her because I was afraid to roll the dice on someone who might get the state bogged down in litigation with secular humanist mole people living in tunnels on one of Jupiter's moons.”

The ghost of Mr. McEnroe’s politically active father, not to mention the ghost of his Goldwater supporting mother, could have advised Mr. McEnroe that he might easily have registered as Republican that year so as to have had the pleasure of scratching his itch by voting against the “Christian Space Warrior™” and for his preferred Republican Party candidate, Mr. Garber, in the Republican Party primary. Perhaps that route was too troublesome for Mr. McEnroe; or, as seems more likely, the itch to vote Republican was not very itchy.

Mr. Roraback that year did make it past the Republican Party primary filter to become the GOP’s nominee for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut’s 5th District. Mr. Roraback edged out three other Republican Party U.S. Congressional contestants when Mark Greenberg, since pilloried by Mr. McEnroe, pledged his support to Mr. Roraback, who was without question Mr. McEnroe’s kind of Republican.

In his most recent column, “State Republicans Shouldn't Squander Chances," Mr. McEnroe writes, “The Connecticut GOP's leprous condition leaves too much room for rich guys who don't know what they're talking about and don't seem to care. Yes, Mark Greenberg, I'm looking at you.”

Mr. Roraback was the Courant’s kind of Republican too, uber-liberal on social issues and what has been called in Connecticut a “fiscal conservative” on economic issues. Indeed, Mr. Roraback styled himself during the general campaign a fiscal conservative and a social liberal. On the social issue front, Mr. Roraback’s bona fides were unimpeachable – almost. As noted in Connecticut Commentary,  Mr.  Roraback’s cousin, Catharine Roraback, “was a civil rights attorney in Connecticut best known for representing Estelle Griswold and Dr. C. Lee Buxton in the famous 1965 Supreme Court case, Griswold v. Connecticut, which legalized the use of birth control and created the precedent of the ‘right to privacy’ later employed by an imaginative Supreme Court to rid the United States of its anti-abortion demons.”

Mr. Roraback had been praised by the Courant in previous editorials for having had a perfect attendance record in the state Senate. He never missed a vote, according to The Register Citizen Papers: ”Since beginning his service in the General Assembly on Jan. 4, 1995, Senator Roraback has cast 7,432 votes and has been present for every vote taken in his 15 legislative sessions.” Mr. Roraback’s score card on social issues was perfect, as noted by the usual left of center rating agencies. And Mr. Roraback had far more political experience under his belt than his Democratic challenger in the 5^th District, Elizabeth Esty, the wife of Governor Dannel Malloy’s Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP).

The Courant fulsomely endorsed Mr. Roraback over other challengers in the Republican Party primary, noting with some relief that ”Mr. Roraback is a fiscal conservative but not an ideologue” – i.e. not a social conservative.

Yet in the general election, the Courant endorsed Ms. Esty over Mr. Roraback, the Republican Party endorsed candidate embraced by Mr. Greenberg who, according to Mr. McEnroe, “doesn’t know what he’s talking about” and “doesn’t seem to care,” a formulation that, as it rolls off Mr. McEnroe’s tongue, may mean little more than this: “Mr. Greenberg’s political prescriptions for what ails the United States do not correspond to my own.”

The Courant’s general election endorsement of Ms. Esty over Mr. Roraback was soddened with remorse: “… it is hard not to endorse Mr. Roraback. In his 18 years in the legislature, he has been a thoughtful and productive lawmaker with a reputation for hard work and personal integrity. There's no reason to think that wouldn't continue in Washington, should he be elected.”

Mr. McEnroe’s political prescriptions for most large issues affecting the nation are, as always, amusing but amorphous.

Neither the Courant nor Mr. McEnroe will have a future opportunity to scratch their respective itches and endorse or vote for Mr. Roraback as a Republican U.S. Congressional candidate in the 5^th District, because some months ago he was appointed by Mr. Malloy as a Superior Court Judge, removing Mr. Roraback as a potential candidate for the U .S. Congress.

Both the Courant and Mr. McEnroe no doubt were pleased with the selection. It eliminated permanently a terribly inconvenient itch. 

Republican Prospects

During the last presidential election, Republicans put up against a popular president a candidate, Mitt Romney, who had a deep and admirable political and business history. Republicans were surprised when President Barack Obama, perhaps the most progressive political candidate since progressivism was showcased in a serious way in the 1912 national election, walked back into the Oval Office unruffled and unscathed.

The election was supposed to have pivoted on the economy – stupid. Instead, a majority of voters, overlooking economic indicators that almost certainly would have sunk the prospects of a lesser candidate, were persuaded to give Mr. Obama a second chance.

For Republicans, the “take-away” from the election ought to have been: Social issues trump economic issues – stupid.

During the last election, especially in Connecticut, Republicans had managed to keep a ten foot pole between themselves and social issues, while Democrats joyously embraced the notion of a paternalistic state. Mr. Obama had managed to cobble together a new coalition that gave him a significant margin in the election. He pulled others with him into office, especially within Connecticut and the New England states. Moderate Republicans – left of center on social issues – lost heavily to progressive Democrats disguised, for purposes of the election, as left of center traditional Democrats. After the election, the masks quickly came off.

No one should have been surprised at the magnitude of the losses for moderate Republicans in Connecticut and throughout the Northeast. The moderate Republican has been a species slated for extinction for a couple of decades. When Chris Shays lost his bid for the U.S. House in 2008, he was the last left of center House Republican in all of New England.

Barry Goldwater used to joke that if you lopped off California and New England, “You’ve got a pretty good country.” Connecticut, for all practical purposes now a one party state, has been effectively lopped off and added to the Democratic basket as an economic basket case.  All the state’s Constitutional offices are held by Democrats; the Democrats have controlled the state Senate since 1996 and the state House since 1986; and with the ascendancy of Dannel Malloy to the governor’s office in 2011, the Democrats were able to breech the so called Republican gubernatorial “fire wall’ for the first time since Governor William O’Neill had occupied the office. The clean sweep has made it possible for Mr. Malloy effectively to marginalize Republicans in the General Assembly. Republican leaders in the legislature were not permitted to put their fingerprints on either of the two budgets cobbled together by Mr. Malloy, progressive Democrats in the General Assembly with knives in their brains and SEBAC, the coalition of Connecticut unions authorized to negotiate contracts with the state.

The media in Connecticut -- for ideological and business reasons warmly attached to the Democratic Party – only lately has begun to notice that the state is slipping beneath an economic receding tide. The news that Connecticut had come in dead last among the 50 states in economic growth, according to a Bureau of Economic Analysis report made public on the day following the close of the budget session, was greeted by the state’s astonished left of center media with a gasp of astonishment. Business reporter for the Hartford Courant Dan Haar wrote, “In 18 years of following economic reports daily, this is the most shocking piece of news I've seen, period. As a bombshell, it rivals the $2.2 billion loss posted in January 1989 by Bank of New England — heralding the region's worst recession since World War II.”

Considering the nearly universal left of center bias of the state’s media, Republicans – if they ever should successfully raise a barricade against improvident spending – will not find the media on the right side of the fortification.  Connecticut’s media is uniformly convinced that hard times necessitates a strong central government to spur the economy by diverting tax dollars gathered from businesses already flagellated by burdensome regulations and high taxes to other promising companies the directing state regards as fruitful “investments.” The unitary state and high taxation invariably leads to a self-defeating crony capitalism in which taxpayers, rather than company investors, are forced to bear the burden of failure while one percenters enjoy infrequent successes.

Democrats this year have increased spending about 10 percent, when economic indicators show a flat-lining economy. They have imposed on the state the largest tax increase in its history. They have abolished the death penalty following a horrific multiple murder in Cheshire, which was followed by an even more horrific mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School. (The shooter in that instance committed suicide; but, had he survived, Connecticut would have been forced to incarcerate the 20 year-old Adam Lanza for life. The death penalty abolition was passed by a cowardly, election conscious General Assembly that left in place the punishment for 11 prisoners on death row in clear violation of a principle underlying all jurisprudence pithily stated in Latin: Nulla poena sine lege – “Where there is no law, there is no transgression.”  Reporting on debates in the House of Commons, Samuel Johnson drew the proper corollary from the centuries old legal doctrine: “That where there is no law there is no transgression, is a maxim not only established by universal consent, but in itself evident and undeniable; and it is, Sir, surely no less certain that where there is no transgression, there can be no punishment.”)

Somewhere in this mush of progressivism an effective Republican counter campaign awaits birth. Whether Connecticut Republicans can tease from it a message that will spark a cleansing rebellion in Connecticut’s cities and towns depends ultimately upon the indispensable three M’s of any successful campaign: message, money and media.

Malloy’s Hobgoblins

Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy was in a frightful and frightening mood when he visited the Hampton Democratic Committee's picnic, an affair held at the home of Toni and Jim Trotzer in Hampton, New Hampshire.

Speaking on behalf of President Barack Obama and reading pretty much from his campaign playbook, Mr. Malloy held up to the people of Hampton several hobgoblins.

Should Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan be elected to the White House, Mr. Malloy told the assembled Democrats, the two would “take apart America as we know it.” And later, after he had arrived home, the mood still being upon him, Mr. Malloy said Romney-Ryan wanted to “force senior citizens into poverty.”

Eric Holder, The First African-American Nixon

The important thing to remember about Watergate – other than the notorious cover-up, the stonewalling, the raft of lies told to the media, the imperious claims of “executive privilege” – is that nobody died there.

Some of the principal presidential miscreants responsible for Watergate were rounded up, paraded before various congressional committees and suitably harassed by the media. Some of them sang to avoid a term in jail, others went to the hoosegow. A grand jury indicted the “Watergate Seven” – President Richard Nixon’s Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Attorney General John Mitchell, Charles Colson, Gordon C. Strachan, Robert Mardian and Kenneth Parkinson -- in March of 1974, and Mr. Nixon was secretly named as an unindicted co-conspirator. Mr. Nixon, Time Magazine said, was undergoing “daily Hell and very little trust.”

The fires of Hell were stoked and the trust disappeared altogether when a “smoking gun” tape was produced showing Mr. Nixon approving a plan to cover up a break-in at Democratic headquarters by his own operatives. Mr. Nixon’s own lawyers said of the tape that it “proved that the President had lied to the nation, to his closest aides, and to his own lawyers – for more than two years." Shortly after the tape came to light, a contingent of notable Republicans, Barry Goldwater among them, persuaded the president to resign his office.

The unraveling of Watergate began in 1973 after Chief Minority Counsel Fred Thompson asked White House assistant Alexander Butterfield in front of a live television audience whether he was "aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the President?" Following Butterfield’s disclosure of the taping system, the tapes were subpoenaed by both the special prosecutor and the U.S. Senate. Claiming executive privilege as President of the United States, Mr. Nixon refused to release them. When the special prosecutor insisted, he was summarily fired. Access to the tapes was decided in July of 1974 by the Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously that claims of executive privilege were void.

When the curtain was rung down on the Watergate scandal, 69 government officials had been charged and 48 were found guilty. It was a glorious mess that began with a presidential approved plan to bug Democratic Party headquarters and ended with the destruction of a president.

But no one died.

Currently the U.S. Senate is investigating a botched operation in which Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was murdered in December 2010 by persons whose guns were supplied to them courtesy of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The bureau, operating under the auspices of the Justice Department, lost track of more than 1,400 weapons sold to low-level straw purchasers believed to be supplying Mexican drug gangs and other criminals. About half the weapons connected to suspects in the investigation were recovered, some of which were utilized in crime scenes in both Mexico the United States. Terry was murdered in Nogales, Arizona. Mr. Terry’s family has advised the U.S. government that if it does not respond to its inquiries concerning Mr. Terry’s murder, it will face a $25 million lawsuit.

When asked at a Senate hearing whether his assistants, Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler or Assistant Attorney Lanny Breuer, the head of the department's Criminal Division, ever authorized gunwalking or the tactics employed in Fast and Furious, Holder said not to his knowledge: "Not only did I not authorize those tactics, when I found out about them I told the field and everybody in the United States Department of Justice that those tactics had to stop. That they were not acceptable and that gunwalking was to stop. That was what my reaction [was] to my finding out about the use of that technique."

Questioned as to whether he had been forthright in responding to requests of the House Oversight and Government Relations Committee led by Chairman Darrell Issa, a California Republican, Mr. Holder assured the committed, "There's no attempt at any kind of cover-up. We're not going to be hiding behind any kind of privileges or anything.”

At the same time, Mr. Holder pointedly refused in written testimony before the investigating committee to produce “additional deliberative materials about the response to congressional oversight or media requests that postdate the commencement of congressional review.”

And his rational for refusing to disclose information demanded by Congress is that such disclosure would “chill” relations between the executive and legislative branches “if our internal communications concerning our responses to congressional oversight were disclosed to Congress” and perhaps violate “the constitutionally-protected separation of powers.”

Mr. Holder’s written statement might easily have been composed by some legal functionary in the Nixon administration prior to the disclosure of the “smoking gun” tape:

“As I testified in a previous hearing, the Department does not intend to produce additional deliberative materials about the response to congressional oversight or media requests that postdate the commencement of congressional review. This decision is consistent with the long-standing approach taken by the Department, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, and reflects concerns for the constitutionally-protected separation of powers.

“Prior administrations have recognized that robust internal communications would be chilled, and the Executive Branch’s ability to respond to oversight requests thereby impeded, if our internal communications concerning our responses to congressional oversight were disclosed to Congress. For both Branches, this would be an undesirable outcome. The appropriate functioning of the separation of powers requires that Executive Branch officials have the ability to communicate confidentially as they discuss how to respond to inquiries from Congress. I want to note that the separation of powers concerns are particularly acute here, because the Committee has sought information about open criminal investigations and prosecutions. This has required Department officials to confer about how to accommodate congressional oversight interests while also ensuring that critical ongoing law enforcement decision-making is not compromised, and is free from even the appearance of political influence. Such candid internal deliberations are necessary to preserve the independence, integrity, and effectiveness of the Department’s law enforcement activities and would be chilled by disclosure to Congress of such materials. Just as we have worked to accommodate the Committee’s legitimate oversight needs, I trust that the Committee will equally recognize the Executive Branch’s constitutional interests and will work with us to avoid further conflict on this matter.”

The Senate investigating committee has pledged to press on. What the committee may need is a Watergate “deep throat,” a more courageous and steadfast news media, and perhaps a little assistance from ethically upright Democratic U.S. Senators such as newly installed Senator Richard Blumenthal who, as Attorney general of Connecticut, had been intolerant of law breakers, constitutional scoffers and morally disoriented politicians.

Who Are The Ron Paul Independents?

Reporting on the New Hampshire primary, NBC Politics on MSNBC noted:

“Remarkably, self-described independents accounted for nearly half of all voters Tuesday – a piece of data which has implications for November. Paul won 32 percent of independents, with Romney getting 29 percent, and Huntsman picking up 23 percent of them.”

The datum on the Independent vote is important for a number of reasons.

New Hampshire and New England is considered fertile political ground for liberals, which is why Barry Goldwater said many years ago that if you lop off California and New England, you have “a pretty good country.” It is remarkable that half of people voting in the Republican primary were Independents. And it is equally remarkable that Mr. Paul, a libertarian who is by no means moderate, was able to garner such a large chunk of the Independent vote.

The literature on Independents is scant. Woodrow Wilson International Center scholar Linda Killian has written a book due out in May titled “The Swing Vote: The Untapped Power Of Independents” that identifies various independent groups: “NPR Republicans,” socially moderate and fiscally conservatives; “America First Democrats,” working class Midwesterners armored in traditional values; “Facebook Generation” voters, usually under 35 and reluctant to join groups other than those organized on the internet; and “Starbuck Moms And Dads… real power voters,” socially moderate, chiefly concerned with education and security, split evenly between Republicans and Democrats.

Perhaps the Independent species in New Hampshire is different in the rest of the country. But if it is not, President Barack Obama should begin worrying.

The Komisarjevsky Trial And The Significance Of Pins

There was a point during the Cheshire murder trial when one of the defense attorneys representing accused murderer Joshua Komisarjevsky became concerned that small pins worn by family members of the murder victims might unduly prejudice the jury against their client.

The judge in the case, Jon Blue, ruled that the pins were not so indiscrete as to trip the prejudices of jurors.

The pin challenge by the defense followed by some months the publication of an interview Mr. Komisarjevsky gave to a reporter while incarcerated that was, the First Amendment still being the law of the land, widely covered by several state newspapers. The Komisarjevsky prison interview was fashioned into a hastily written book that found its way into libraries across the state. An effort was made, unsuccessfully, to pry the book from the hands of aggressive librarians conversant with the First Amendment.

Mr. Komisarjevsky, a very talkative fellow, also made a statement to police shortly after he was apprehended that was, most lawyers would agree, high incriminating, though Mr. Komisarjevsky was prudent enough to suggest in his statement that his companion in crime, Steven Hayes, earlier convicted of capital murder, had spread gasoline throughout the house and lit the fire intended to destroy evidence of their crime. This “evidence” included three victims, the wife of Dr. Petit and his two daughters, 11 years old Michaela and 17 year old Hayley.

So then, were the pins more or less prejudicial than Mr. Komisarjevsky several statements?

Most non-defense lawyers might agree that Mr. Komisarjevsky’s frequent admissions of participation in the Cheshire murders would more powerfully sway a jury in the direction of a guilty verdict than the discrete pins worn by family members that so alarmed defense attorney Jeremiah Donovan.

Catching sight of the pins, Mr. Donovan referred to those wearing them as the “Petit posse” and sought to prevent the members of the hanging mob from displaying the prejudicial pins in sight of prospective jurors. The pins, worn in memory of Mr. Petit’s wife and daughters, were intended to support, according to one report, “the education of young people, especially women in the sciences, and those affected by chronic illness and violence.”

Possibly it was at this point, in the early jousting among prosecutors and defense attorneys that usually occurs before any trial’s main event, that some trial watchers may have concluded Mr. Donovan was, in his assault on discreet pins, tilling the ground for future appeals. In death penalty conviction cases, appeals are necessary to run out the clock. And the more appeals the better, because protracted capital offense cases run up a tab. And the more tabs the better, because one of the generic arguments urged by death penalty opponents is that capital punishment is prohibitively expensive.


Since the death penalty itself is both an offense against God and nature, one should use every means at one’s disposal to overthrow it. Extremism in defense of virtue, the virulently conservative Barry Goldwater once said, is no vice. And if one must use a justly convicted murderer as a mere prop to overthrow a moral evil such as capital punishment, well then …

This argument is akin to that used by brother-in-law Roper in the Robert Bolt play, “A man for all seasons. Mr. Roper was asked by Thomas More how far he would go to cage the devil, to which he responded that he would cut down ever law in England to do it, receiving from the soon to be martyred More the following rebuke:

“And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you-where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? (He leaves him) This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast -- man's laws, not God's -- and if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? (Quietly) Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.”

Roper responds that the law itself has become More’s “golden calf,” a mere fetish that must be overthrown in the defense of a greater moral good.

The real question involved in all death penalty cases – What winds would blow if the law were to be cut down? – is not one that should be decided by clever Ropers committed to subverting death penalty laws. Jurists should aim at justice, which is the giving to all what is due them under the law. If the law must be changed, it should not be changed by legal chicanery – but by sober, morally driven legislators, like More.