New Year Rip Van Winkle “Republicans” In Connecticut’s Commentariat

Around this time of year, prior to the elections, numberless political commentators become Republicans – if only in spirit – the better to advise leading Republicans in the Grand Old Party what they should think and say and do about the many problems besetting Connecticut. Their daddies voted for Goldwater in 1964, they tell us. Their mommies subscribed to National Review in the glory days of Reagan. They remember with some affection William Buckley’s attempt to snatch the New York mayoralty from the jaws of John Lindsey and Abe Beame. Asked by a New York Times reporter what he would do if he actually won the election, Mr. Buckley replied he would hang a net on the first floor of the New York Times building to catch the falling bodies. Virtually all of them used to vote Republican when the Republican Party in Connecticut was sagacious enough to put up moderates such as Chris Shays for office, hardly noticing that in the interim all the moderate Republicans in Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional delegation, including Mr. Shays, have been displaced by progressive Democrats. They genuflect whenever Lowell Weicker is among them. He was a Republican, wasn’t he?

But now…

Just as December 2013 was creeping towards the dust bin of history, Colin McEnroe, for 30 years a Courant columnist and now a radio talk show personality on public supported WNPR, penned a piece for the Courant lamenting the poor choices Republicans leaders will be offering to the general public as prospective governors in 2014.

It’s an old meme, as the leftists might say.

Way back in May 2011, Rick Green, the proprietor of a Courant blog “CTConfidential: What’s really Happening," since defunct, threw down the left of center gauntlet. Connecticut Commentary remarked on Mr. Green’s blog post at the time: What better way to introduce the New Year of Connecticut commentary by glancing back at a political “Dear Abby” of 2011:

Rick Green Advises Republicans To Become More Blue

Saturday, May 07, 2011

In a piece written on May 5 by Courant commentator Rick Green, proprietor of a Courant blog called “CTConfidential: What’s really Happening," Mr. Green asserts that the Connecticut Republican Party would be suicidal to follow the lead of conservatives elsewhere in the nation who delivered the U.S. House of Representatives and several state houses to the GOP.

A move to the right in Connecticut would, Mr. Green warns, drive the Republican Party right off a cliff:

“There's little evidence that Connecticut's vast middle of moderate-thinking unaffiliated voters are ready to embrace the sort of anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, Planned Parenthood-bashing message that plays well in Texas.

“But that's the modus operandi of a new group founded by Jack Fowler, publisher of the conservative National Review. Fowler, who lives in Milford, sees great hope in the General Assembly victories last fall of fiscal and social conservatives Joe Markley and Len Suzio.”

Mr. Green’s chief objection to Mr. Fowler and Tom Scott is that both, recent founders of The Roger Sherman Liberty Center, seem to be unwilling to toss social conservatives “right off a cliff.” Conservative advocates, Mr. Scott and Mr. Fowler persist in foolishly supporting such disturbers of the peace as Peter Wolfgang, the Executive Director of The Family Institute of Connecticut (FIC)), who does not consider abortion, gay marriage and transgender rights to be normative, desirable or politically useful for moderate Republicans.

Connecticut’s very blue legislature recently has passed or is considering the passage of bills that would abolish the state’s death penalty (Since done), fold transgenders into legislation that prohibits discrimination against disabled Connecticut citizens (Since done) and grants to gays marriage rights pressed upon the General Assembly by a Supreme Court that decided the issue in a case in which then Attorney General Richard Blumenthal pointedly did not choose to defend the state against the judicial imposition by stressing a connection between normative male-female marriage and child birth (Since done).

Mr. Green, who changed his party affiliation some time ago from Independent to Republican,” considers these and other matters to be “social issues” and, freshly arrived as a Republican Party journalistic consultant, he councils the state GOP to avoid such divisive issues if the party wishes to elect Republicans to office. Once, in the long ago, moderate Republican giants strode Connecticut’s earth. Mr. Green calls the roll: Nancy Johnson, Chris Shays and Rob Simmons, all former U.S. House Representatives. He fails to mention Lowell Weicker, for many years a “moderate” though somewhat abrasive Republican.

Now, if in the interest of fair commentary the Courant were to open its pages to conservatives -- perhaps even courageously venturing to hire a few in order balance the consistent leftward tilt of its editorial pages -- those commentators might wish to dispute several of Mr. Green’s assertions and assumption, even at the risk of falling off a cliff.

The conservative point of view would not fail to note that all the Republican “moderates” mentioned by Mr. Green have been turned out of office, sadly having been replaced by Democrats who are considerably less moderate.

Moderation in Connecticut, like love, is largely in the eye of the beholder. The Courant’s ambition is to make sure that the preponderance of the beholders who write within its pages are, like Mr. Green, reliable liberals. Mr. Green can mention only two conservative politicians in the General Assembly, both of whom are recent arrivals, which suggest that conservative politics in Connecticut, far from being tried and found wanting, has not been tried at all.

Mr. Shays, in fact, was the very last Republican “moderate” – though some considered him a liberal on what Mr. Green perceives to be social issues – in all of New England. The species “moderate New England Republican” is, to put it in ecological jargon, now as extinct as the wooly mammoth.

Never-the-less, Mr. Green wishes to breathe some life into these dead dry bones, but Mr. Fowler, Mr. Scott and the sort of people with whom Mr. Green would never choose to break liberal bread are standing Mr. Green’s way and must be bowled over, if only rhetorically.

The sharp division of the political sphere into social conservatives and economic conservatives, while it may be convenient for liberal rhetoricians, is highly misleading, because in the real world, outside the fevered imaginations of utopians who wish to make it over, the two spheres leech into each other, even in that part of it in which liberals like Mr. Green attack social conservatives with rhetorical weapons forged in the smithy of social liberalism. Abortion on demand and what is now being called in Connecticut transgender rights, both urged by liberals, surely falls within the precincts of the so called social doctrine Mr. Green finds repugnant. In what sense is the struggle to make abortion more available not both a social and an economic issue?

Relatively speaking, abortion is the new kid on the block. Some of the oldest prohibitions affecting abortion were promulgated by the early Christian church in response to the widespread use of abortion in the Roman period. In that time, the paterfamilias, the Roman father of the family, enjoyed – if that is the word for it – life and death powers over children, born and unborn. Unwanted children, often females, were either aborted or exposed until they died. A similar situation may be observed today in China where the state, which regulates birth, determines precisely how many children will be born into each family.

Now, we can all agree to disagree on the utility and humaneness of abortion; some very late term abortions were repugnant enough to cause Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a respectable liberal, to characterize partial birth abortion as a form of infanticide of a kind once practiced by the Roman paterfamilias. But the question of abortion’s relatively recent arrival on the scene is not arguable. Laws prohibiting abortion are older by several centuries than the changes in the law – here in the United States mostly by judicial fiat – that allowed abortion, from which we may conclude that abortion, now legally permitted pretty much every stage of pregnancy, is the new normal. If Connecticut’s Democratic dominated General Assembly is successful in clothing transgenders with the same statutory protections it affords to, say, the blind, in time these statutory affirmations will become the new normal.

Mr. Green is free to marshal his arguments in favor of abortion at every stage of pregnancy or transgender rights or the abolition of the death penalty or any other issue he chooses to champion in his columns and blogs. We are still a free country, sort of. But when Mr. Green says that conservatives who uphold the traditional view of the family against those who would change it have ruptured tradition, he should be vigorously challenged on the point. Opposition to abortion certainly is less extreme than partial birth abortion if for no other reason than that it does not involve the destruction of life.

Mr. Fowler is the publisher of National Review, the magazine founded by Bill Buckley, who was a conservative and a close friend of Mr. Moynihan. It is true the magazine is not unattached to economic or political theory: Bill Buckley described himself as being somewhat addicted to ordered thought. But political philosophy alone does not an extremist make.

Both Mr. Fowler and Mr. Scott are comfortable with traditional views of marriage, religious precepts and the economic ideas of Ludwig Von Mises and Fredrick Hayek, the author, among other books, of “The Constitution of Liberty.” Mr. Hayek, Mr. Von Mises, Mr. Scott, Mr. Fowler, Mr. Wolfgang – whom Mr. Green attempted unsuccessfully to “friend” on Facebook – would all of them resist the notion that social conservativism and its opposite, social liberalism, do not impinge on economic matters.

One hopes Mr. Green would agree on the point.

Abortion, which Mr. Green considers a social issue, was instituted in China principally for economic reasons: Fewer people, if they are productive, allow higher salaries and a more manageable population. Once a government is able to manage what one might call the social DNA of a society, it will be able to bend and twist the economic fabric to its liking. Under a totalitarian socialist dispensation, less is more. Constitutions are unknown in China, and organized faiths are ruthlessly abolished. The assault on women in China through abortion, rarely noticed here in the United States, is an essential part of China’s new fascism. Birth rates have a direct and profound impact on the economy. In some sense, nearly every social issue is an economic issue as well, and the reverse is also true: The social thigh bone is connected to the economic hip bone. Conservatives are those who perceive connections that liberals, for tendentious political reasons, prefer to ignore.

Virtually all the nations in Europe that gave birth to Western civilization are now incapable of sustaining their populations because birth rates in Britain, France, Italy – that’s where the Vatican is – Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands have dipped below the replacement figure necessary to sustain population growth. The United States shortly will join the group. Is the disappearance of Western civilization through birth attrition a social problem or an economic problem? Is it reasonable to suppose that people who wish pass on their culture to a future generation should not concern themselves with low birth rates or the deteriorating financial and social condition of the traditional family unit – mom, dad and two and a half kids?

In a commentary published in the Chicago Tribune, not a conservative media outlet, an author of indeterminate ideology, managed to smuggle into his piece the following statistic: “According to the Census Bureau, the rate of abortions in 2006 among black women was 50 per 1,000, compared with 14 for white women and 22 for "other" women.”

Surely Mr. Green will agree that this is an astonishing figure. It is not a conservative figure, it is not a liberal figure, it is merely a true figure.

In days gone by, a robust African American demagogue -- I use the word here in its positive sense -- such as Malcolm X might easily have deployed that figure to show that abortion has become one of the most successful instruments in the tool box of new white racists. But this is not a whisper one is likely to hear from the progeny of those brave few who marched on Selma with Martin Luther King to kill Jim Crow. Jesse Jackson, the liberal preacher politician, used to warn African Americans that abortion has its dark side, but he has since reformed. Mr. Jackson is more placid now, more manageable. Faced with figures of this kind, the silence of the leftist lambs is simply shattering.

In poor inner cities, the traditional family structure has all but disappeared. Is poverty among African Americans in inner cities related in any way to the kind of social structure one is more likely to find among wealthy brats in Hollywood or supremely wealthy but stressed commodities traders in blue chip Connecticut: out of wedlock children, multiple marriages and multiple divorces, a high incidence of drug use, narcissistic fixations. African American fathers in poor inner cities have all but disappeared which, come to think of it, is one of the reasons why the inner cities are poor, flooded with gangs and lawless young men. Is this a social phenomenon or an economic one?

When Mr. Wolfgang defends the sanctity of marriage in the same tones that Sam Adams once defended the sanctity of natural rights, is he making a religious point, an economic point or a sociological point?

When Martha Dean, whom Mr. Green in an uncharitable lapse of judgment compared to a cyborg, says that the state and federal strictures embodied in constitutions really should CONSTRICT the authoritarian hand of those who govern us, is she making a sociological point, a constitutional point, a religious point or an economic point? Dean, whose manners are exquisite but whose crap tolerance level is refreshingly low, would say -- and indeed she has said it in nearly all her pronouncements -- that the human being is indivisible; that religious rights, constitutional rights and human rights all hang together in the sanctity of personhood.

Among some people on the left the indivisibility of the person is a doctrine that must fall on deaf ears: The doctrine is incompatible with a rigid statism. Leftists know that if they can persuade others, as they have persuaded themselves, that this doctrine is the special preserve of a despicable interest group, they can more easily dispense with it and get along with producing a brave new world from the rubble they have made of an old world in which first things – the family, organized religion, constitutional rights and the sanctity of the individual – have been relegated to the dust bin of history.

Truly, there is nothing new under Connecticut’s left of center sun. People in the state’s commentariate change, but the progressive message moves deathlessly on.

Secrecy, The One Party State And The Public Interest

So then, what’s wrong with secrecy in politics?

Former U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a Democrat from New York, was the chairman of a congressional commission that in the post-Cold War period inquired into the uses of governmental secrecy. Moynihan felt that a “culture of secrecy” had pervaded the U.S. government and its intelligence services for 80 years, starting with the Espionage Act of 1917.

The Commission’s findings were presented to President Bill Clinton in 1997. As part of his presentation, Mr. Moynihan secured the release of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Venona file, which documented Soviet espionage efforts in the United States during the preceding 50 years, a treasure trove of information that ought to have been released much earlier.

Moynihan’s view of unnecessary secrecy might be summed up as follows: In many cases, governmental secrecy IS the disease it purports to cure. The information in custody of the FBI for 50 years provided data necessary for Congressional overview of foreign policy. Good government depends on the public vetting of data necessary for good government, and this axiom applies to all forms of governmental secrecy.

This same view, that secrecy in government damages the constitutional fabric of the Republic, animated Connecticut’s Freedom of Information (FOI) law, which was promulgated in 1975. A broad brush law that applies to both municipal and state agencies, Connecticut’s Freedom of Information law placed windows in formerly insular smoke filled back rooms so that citizens could more easily discharge their watchdog roles as the primary guardians of liberty and good government in the state.

Most people believe that the free flow of information is necessary to prevent politicians from pilfering the government for their own private nefarious purposes, and that certainly is true. But the primary purpose of the Connecticut’s FOI law, as well as similar laws enacted in other states, is to assure good government – a government shorn of the secrecy necessary to politicians who seek secretly to act against the public’s interest.

So, the answer to the question “What’s wrong with secrecy in politics?” is that good government in a constitutional Republic such as ours cannot be maintained in the absence of transparency. In a Republic of laws not of men, the people and not its governors or judges are the final arbiters of good government. Just as in the private marketplace creativity and the free flow of information is essential to wealth creation, so in the public arena transparency is essential to good government.

Even in a state government with strong FOI regulations, many are the ways of concealing government operations. When it comes to drawing the veil over open government processes, the Malloy administration is no slouch.

Governor Dannel Malloy’s administration recently came under fire when a Hartford political columnist who had filed an FOI complaint discovered that Malloyalists were using non-official e-mails to correspond with each other concerning state business. Work on Mr. Malloy’s first two budgets was effectively concealed from Republican legislators who, for the first time since the state had elected a Democratic governor, were excluded from budget negotiations. A budget is a government’s action plan for the fiscal year. A major penological reform initiated by Mike Lawlor, Mr. Malloy’s Under Secretary for Criminal Justice Policy and Planning, was launched through an implementer bill, a haystack of legislation originally designed to implement bills already considered and approved by the General Assembly. Mr. Lawlor’s needle, the Risk Reduction Earned Credit Program, a new piece of legislation not reviewed by relevant legislative committees, was cleverly concealed in an omnibus implementer bill. Republican legislators thus far have been unable to prevail upon Mr. Lawlor to exclude from his program violent criminals convicted of manslaughter, assault in the first degree, rape and other violent crimes. A state senator who petitioned Mr. Lawlor for information that would allow the legislature to gauge the effect of Mr. Lawlor’s “get out of jail early” credits on recidivism rates has, he says, been given the runaround. A criminal report concerning a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School has not yet been released; the General Assembly voted in favor of a gun restriction bill without the advantage of having seen the authoritative data included in the criminal report, the release of which has been twice delayed by Danbury State Attorney Stephen Sedensky on the grounds that the criminal investigation is still open – even though the prospect of future prosecutions is not likely.

Whatever else all this concealment and dodging represents – it is NOT transparency. The Malloy administration, particularly since Democrats now control both the General Assembly and the governor’s office, very well may be the most secretive government in living memory, and the itch to conceal from the public the public’s business certainly is not in keeping with the spirit that nearly forty years ago inspired Connecticut legislators to pass the state’s Freedom of Information law.

Race And Politics In Connecticut

The 2014 Democratic campaign for urban hegemony is now officially underway.

It will involve the usual tousle among Democrats for political prestige and power in Connecticut’s larger cities. During his first campaign for governor, then Mayor of Stamford Dan Malloy – on becoming governor, Dan requested that the media refer to him henceforward as Dannel -- easily captured the urban vote and slid past Republican gubernatorial nominee Tom Foley by the slenderest of margins. Mr. Malloy, once again in his reelection contest, may face Mr. Foley -- or some other worthy Republican champion; State Senator John McKinney has announced and Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton is teasing from the sidelines -- and the remembrance of slender margins past has caused some wonderment among the state’s left of center media concerning Mr. Malloy’s recent campaign endorsements.

A Hartford newspaper has wondered aloud editorially whether it is politically prudent for the governor to pick winners and losers in urban primaries. Mr. Malloy recently traveled to New Haven to offer a ringing endorsement of Toni Harp as mayor, even though it had been widely reported that Ms. Harp’s now deceased husband is the city’s most celebrated tax scofflaw.  Most recently, the former mayor of Stamford publicly rejected the mayoralty choice of Stamford’s Democratic Town Committee by endorsing a non-party endorsed candidate.  People took notice. This is not the way to gain friends and influence Democrats in Stamford. Then too, the governor’s primary endorsements feed the growing apprehension that Mr. Malloy just can’t restrain himself from upsetting apple carts and sticking his thumb in every warm pie.

The Connecticut Republican Party, unfortunately, has withered away in the state’s larger cities. Urban populations, fleeing urban problems, have left behind a minority residue wholly at the mercy of a party that has made no serious attempt to drive people at the economic margins of society into jobs and social configurations that would not leave them at the mercy of urban gangs and ubiquitous social service agencies. President Bill Clinton’s noble attempt to “end welfare as we know it” has in recent times suffered a perhaps irreversible decline under an increasingly progressive regime. Any attempt seriously to address the issue of social disintegration in cities – fatherless families or single parent families locked into a ridged and unalterable social service structure -- is hooted down as an indication of racist bias.

Republicans in Connecticut are so fearful of being thus tainted that they have simply surrendered the “social issues” front  to Democrats who, especially in cities, are finding it more and more difficult to quiet a restive population that wants what Martin Luther King said it wanted half a century ago – their piece of the American dream. Among African Americans in cities, fifty years after the “I Have A Dream” speech in Washington D.C., the traditional African American family, robustly restored in Northern cities after the Civil War, is now a byword.

The decimation of the African American family has accelerated at a rapid pace from the 1960s forward. The statistics are too astonishing to be any longer ignored.  The most recent Urban Institute Report finds that 17 percent of African-American children lived in a home with their mother but not their father in 1950. By 2010, the number had increased to 50 percent. Out of wedlock childbirths from 1965 to 2010 increased from 8 to 41 percent; the figure today has risen to an astonishing 72 percent. In 1950, the number of African American women married and living with their spouses was 53 percent. That figure has been reduced today to 25 percent.

Many of these figures have been in the public domain since 1965, when then Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan from New York released “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”  The recent Urban Institute report updates the figures to 2010. The Moynihan report is not dated in its principal conclusion: “…at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time.”

There is a Berlin Wall of silence surrounding these figures – and others: On average, 1,876 black babies are aborted every day in the United States, and black women, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, are more than 5 times as likely as white women to have an abortion; African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites. The conclusion that Mr. Moynihan has drawn in his earlier report is no less pertinent today than it was in 1965, two years after Martin Luther King had let loose his thunderclap before the Lincoln Memorial.

These figures, it may safely be predicted, will play NO part in any urban election in Connecticut – none. If you know what the problem is, hard solutions offer themselves. But politically, any effective remedy that disturbs the status quo causes a tighter breathing and chills the bones of politicians to zero. The road to Hell, as Martin Luther King well knew, is paved with cowardice; only courage can set you free. 

Abortion and Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Races

One of Linda McMahon’s most insistent critics, Chris Powell of the Journal Inquirer, noted in a post-debate column that Mrs. McMahon’s view on abortion was … ahem … “more nuanced” than that of Chris Murphy.

The views of President Barack Obama on abortion are, if possible, more extreme than those of Mr. Murphy. There are no circumstances in which the president would disallow an abortion. As an Illinois state senator, Mr. Obama had fulsomely supported legislation permitting abortion on demand, which would include the kind of sex selection abortion practiced in China and – this may surprise pro-abortion proponents – abortions condemned by the early church fathers in the late Roman Empire. The paterfamilias of a family in Rome at the time St. Augustine of Hippo was fulminating against the practice held life and death powers over his children, born and unborn. While infanticide was rare, in the Clintonian sense, during the reign of the Caesars, a father could not be punished under Roman law for committing infanticide, most often involving female infants, by exposing the born infant to the elements. Abortions were more common. The president also has opposed the so called “born alive” bill, a measure that would have extended to infants born alive during botched abortions the same legal protections afforded born babies.

It was Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, no tea partier, who declined to vote in favor of partial birth abortion because he regarded the practice as a form of infanticide.

Polls show a drift of women into the Republican camp. They also show that women’s views on abortion are more moderate than those of Democratic Planned Parenthood pied pipers. A July 2011 Gallup Poll measuring the favorability of restrictions on abortion shows preferences for a law making partial birth abortion illegal during the last six months of a pregnancy (64-31%); a law requiring doctors to inform patients about risks prior to performing abortions (87-11%); a law requiring parental consent for abortion (71-21%); a law requiring a 24 hour waiting period before an abortion is performed (69-28%); and the poll shows a slim majority (50-46%) in favor of a law requiring those seeking abortion to be shown an ultrasound image of the fetus.

Here in true blue Connecticut, as elsewhere in the nation, a long standing accommodation on the question of abortion had in the past tended to prevent unnecessary political abrasion between church and state. Such accommodation necessarily involves a resolve on the part of legislators to find a way to preserve religious rights guaranteed by the First Amendment – “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” -- while preserving other rights. Any constitutionalist worth his salt knows very well that you cannot extend a constitutional right infinitely in any direction without abridging other rights.

When the resolve on the part of the state to accommodate religious prescriptions is missing, it seems reasonable to impute extremism to the legislator unwilling to make the necessary accommodations. This year, for the first time in its history, the national Democratic Party pushed abortion rights to extreme limits -- at the expense of orthodox Christians who understandably are concerned with the erosion of their first amendment rights to freely exercise their religion according to long accepted religious precepts.

The Obama campaign appears to be operating on the supposition that extremism in the service of the “virtue” of abortion will result in a harvest of votes from women. So far, recent polls show a severe drop-off of votes from women, perhaps because women are conscious of themselves as integrated personalities rather than ovary containers. Mr. Romney has cutthe gender gap from 20 to 9 points. At the same time, Independents seem to be declaring their independence from a party that has more in common with Eugene Debs than Former President JohnKennedy, who sounded in a speech he gave in 1962 to Economic Club of New York very much like a Chicago school economist not unfamiliar with Frederick Hayek’s masterful “The Constitution of Liberty,” a book published in 1960, one year before Mr. Kennedy assumed the presidency.

In Connecticut, Republicans have ceded to Democrats positions on social issues that are not supported by a majority of voters. Who convinced them that elections do not turn on such social issues as abortion, much more prevalent among African Americans than whites, or the integrity of the traditional family unit in urban areas, where fatherhood is a distant memory and young men who have not yet landed in prison search and find an aberrant form of social definition in murderous gangs? Although only 13 percent of American women are black, figures from the Centers for Disease Control show they account for 35 percent of the abortions. What accounts for the massive retreat from so called social issues on the part of Republicans? And why do Republicans running for the U .S. Congress from the Northeast this year sound like larval progressives who cannot wait to march to Washington and protest their party’s positions – except on fiscal issues?

Abortion Extremists

Andrew Roraback is a “fiscal conservative,” which is to say he is not a “social conservative,” which is to say he is pro-abortion but not sufficiently enthusiastic concerning abortion to merit the approval of NARAL Pro-Choice Connecticut, a pro-abortion group that will admit no exceptions to abortion on demand.

The very term “social conservative” is highly misleading. There are no congressional bills or judicial decisions that have no social ramifications. Everything politicians say and do and think is said and done and thought with a view towards enforcing or changing the society affected by human action. Even budgets – the last real budget was passed by the U.S. Congress in1997 before Barack Obama was elected president in November 2008 -- profoundly affect the social sphere. The science of economics, dismal though it may be, is a science of human action.

Freedom of Information and the Public Good

Governor Dannel Malloy, hoping to save some small change, has proposed to fold the Freedom of Information Commission into a new administrative agency that would house the Freedom of Information Commission, the Office of State Ethics, the Elections Enforcement Commission, the Judicial Review Council and the State Contracting Standards Board.

This proposal has run into a buzz saw, particularly as it affects The Freedom of Information Commission.

News publications rely on an independent commission to shine a light on decisions made by various agencies that affect the welfare of the entire state. The possibility of changing decisions that restrict liberty or violate the precepts of justice depends upon a faithful distribution of facts that, in some cases, state agencies hope to thwart.

In most cases, as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan well knew, secrecy is the enemy of good government, which is why, when the state legislature passed the Freedom of Information bill in 1975, it used in describing its intent heroic language that might easily been borrowed from the founders of the country who left their imprint on both the U.S, Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

In passing the bill creating the FOI commission, Connecticut’s legislature affirmed that it was doing so because it understood:

“ … that secrecy in government is inherently inconsistent with a true democracy, that the people have a right to be fully informed of the action taken by public agencies in order that they may retain control over the instruments they have created; that the people do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies which serve them; that the people in delegating authority do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for them to know and that it is the intent of the law that actions taken by public agencies be taken openly and their deliberations be conducted openly and that the record of all public agencies be open to the public except in those instances where a superior public interest requires confidentiality.”

In his book “Secrecy,” Mr. Moynihan acknowledged that there is a need, particularly in foreign affairs and war, for secrecy and deception. Wishing to strike a cautionary note, even in areas in which it is understood that secrecy is necessary, Mr. Moynihan reached back to political analyst, advisor and diplomat George Kennan, the architect of the “containment” policy the United States employed so effectively against the Soviet Union at the end of World War II.

Kennan warned that those employing secrecy and methods of disinformation, even when advisable, should beware of the "the erection of false pretenses and elaborate efforts to deceive… We easily become ourselves, the sufferers from these methods of deception. For they inculcate in their authors, as well as their intended victims, unlimited cynicism, causing them to lose all realistic understanding of the inter-relationship, in what they are doing, of means and ends."

The freedom of information legislation passed by the General Assembly in 1975 makes the people of the state of Connecticut, not governors and administrations of the public’s business, the custodians of its own public records, and by doing so it sets as a watchdog over a future in which politicians are inclined to steal the liberties of the people a public alert to its responsibilities as citizens.

The end of secrecy is to clothe deeds in darkness, which may, when the liberties of the people are in danger from foreign foes, be a necessary evil. But a putatively democratic government that uses these means to clothe in darkness its own deeds, cannot do so without making an enemy of the people whose general interests it is bound to defend and maintain. And by so doing, by erecting false pretenses and elaborate deceptions, they become themselves, as Mr. Kennan and Mr. Moynihan affirmed “sufferers from their own methods of deception.”

It is one thing to fool by deceptions an enemy in war; quite another, through deception and manipulation, to make an enemy of people who in a healthy democracy one claims to represent. The first should be reluctantly tolerated, the second deplored by democrats everywhere and always. And a Freedom of Information Commission the members of which retain their freedom to embarrass governors and administrations by ripping from their false faces a veil of secrecy they employ to advance their own interests is a necessary means of advancing the cause of justice and democracy among us.

Far from eviscerating the means employed by the Freedom of Information Commission to bring to public notice the misdeeds of public figures, the sometimes feeble powers of the commission should be enhanced, according to past FOI commissioner Andy Thibault, who maintains a blog at Cool Justice Report.

In a column published in the Register Citizen, Mr. offers some modest reforms that would make the FOI Commission more effective:

• “Increase the maximum fine for FOI violations from $1,000 to $10,000 or more.

• “Ensure that those who violate their oaths of office by suppressing public information and are not acting under the color of law pay the fines themselves.

• “Require municipalities and state agencies who use taxpayer money to suppress public information to disclose the legal fees they incur on a daily basis.

• “Stop the Attorney General’s office from automatically representing state agencies that suppress public information. This could result in significant staff reductions.

• “Conduct a comprehensive statewide audit of all the money wasted by municipalities and state agencies to suppress public information. Hint: The FOI law is a tool for this. Because the governor needs those records to do his job, it wouldn’t cost him any money.

• “Close loopholes that allow public servants to hide documentation of legal fees they generate, e.g., municipalities or school boards using the cloak of insurance arrangements to hide a virtual welfare state for hack lawyers.

• “Vigorously enforce subpoenas compelling public officials to appear before the FOI Commission. If necessary, hire some cops from Wisconsin to tackle them.”

For reasons that may seem obvious to anyone who has consistently read this blog, the prohibition on the attorney general’s office is much overdue.