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.

Malloy On The Stump

It should surprise no one that Governor Dannel Malloy is on the road again selling the usual product. This time, because elections are looming, he will be followed by Republican candidates for governor anxious to peddle their own prescriptions for what ails us.

Returning from a Middletown town hall meeting, though some in the audience objected to the format, Mr. Malloy sent around a sermon to the Hartford Courant. He began by noting that “Every budget is about setting priorities. That's true for every family in Connecticut, especially during tough economic times. It is equally true for state government.” Indeed, are we to suppose that President Barack Obama has set no priorities because he had presented no budget to Congress during his first term?

When middle class families in Connecticut encounter hard times, they cut back on spending, a remedy for budgetary red ink unknown in Washington and many states, including Connecticut. That is because workers in the private sector in Connecticut cannot force their employers to raise their wages. In this respect, private enterprise is qualitatively different than government. When a government runs into hard times, it may raise taxes and usually does. That is because governments find it painful to say “no” to those who use and provide their services. Independent Governor Lowell Weicker responded to a pre-income tax deficit by instituting a new income tax. Governor Dannel Malloy’s Democratic forebearers, Governors Ella Grasso and O’Neill resisted the effortless solution to which Mr. Weicker and Mr. Malloy so easily succumbed. Tax raisers in Connecticut are always careful to sugar their bitter pill with a bit of honey: “We don’t like taxes any more than you do, honey.” But they slather on the taxes anyway, heedless of predictable consequences. Connecticut’s present budget is three times larger than Mr. O’Neill’s last pre-income tax budget, and the bottom line increase in our budgets is a true measure of spending increases.

So then, the precipitous increase in budgets strongly suggests that the priorities of the governors who followed Mr. O’Neill lay in raising taxes rather than in cutting spending. Mr. Malloy’s tax increase was the largest in state history, and his spending cuts, to judge from the massive revenue increase in his first budget, were not commensurate with his tax increases -- which, come to think of it, is the very definition of “shared sacrifice,” Mr. Malloy’s campaign slogan when he first ran for governor.

In his latest sermon, Mr. Malloy notes that he has become an old hand at town hall meetings, having “done more than 30 of these town hall events since taking office.” He values such gatherings not only because they give him an opportunity to peddle his product from a bully pulpit, but more importantly because “they present the best opportunity for me to listen directly to the concerns of my fellow Connecticut residents.” And “Based on what I heard in Middletown, it is clearer to me than ever that many people share some simple, common-sense perspectives on what our state needs.”

Fortunately for Mr. Malloy, what he hears from citizens at these town meetings conforms precisely to his own prescriptions, which he is certain will bring prosperity and good fortune to the middle class in his state: “Connecticut's middle class doesn't need any more burdens. The middle class needs some breaks,” especially in these difficult days following “the worst recession since the Great Depression, and with a national economy that continues to grow too slowly.”

George Will’s definition of a “need” – a want that’s 24 hours old – is especially pertinent in the Malloy administration.

Surely in the course of 30 Connecticut town hall meetings, someone must have whispered in Mr. Malloy's ear that cuts in spending proportional to his tax increases might help middle class tax payers balance their own budgets. God, we are told, whispers to us in the whirlwind because He wishes us to attend to his message and wants us to learn how to listen. Perhaps Mr. Malloy has not been attentive to the whisperings of the state’s middle class: He is a very busy guy, and never busier than when he is telling the middle class to cough up a few more bucks he might distribute to Connecticut’s prosperous insurance companies, one of which is moving its in-state operations to South Carolina.

The simplest and truest way to give the middle class a break is to reduce their taxes – or, at the very least, not to raise their taxes –thus leaving them in command of their own salaries and futures. Mr. Malloy has done quite the opposite.

But never mind honey, here comes the honey: “That's why my budget contains no new taxes and puts us on a path to reinstating the sales tax exemption on clothing valued under $50. And that's why my budget would do away with the single most burdensome, most regressive and most unfair tax in our state — the car tax.”

Ah yes, the car tax. The car tax is a levy imposed by, collected by and spent by town governments. A short time after Mr. Malloy imposed upon Connecticut the largest tax increase in its history, the Yankee Institute, a right of center think tank, published a list of Mr. Malloy’s new taxes, many of which were regressive. Any imposition levied on a taxpayer who cannot comfortably pay the tax without depriving himself of necessary income is a regressive tax. Mr. Malloy’s revenueincreases spanned 25 categories of taxes and eliminated exemptions in about 37 different categories. The elimination of town property taxes on cars worth less than $28,571, which municipalities depend upon to finance their operations, is an invitation to municipal governments to either raise property taxes on middle class owners of houses or to cut town budgets. It takes little political courage for state politicians to eliminate someone else's tax. If Mr. Malloy wants to help the middle class by reducing state taxes, the list produced by the Yankee Institute presents some golden opportunities for him.

Democrats Call for Unity

Speaker of the state House Chris Donovan should have received by Monday a call from John Olsen, President of the AFL-CIO, beseeching the Democratic nominee for the U.S. House in the 5^th District to withdraw from the race.

Not a few members of Mr. Donovan’s campaign staff have been arrested by the FBI; other of Mr. Donovan’s political associates are even now being wrestled to the ground by FBI agents and prosecutors intent on uncovering what they know and when they knew it about  fraudulent campaign contributions.