Malloy the Progressive

According to Public Policy Polling, Governor Dannel Malloy “continues to be one of the most unpopular Governors in the country in our polling.”

Mr. Malloy’s approval-disapproval spread likely astonished most political actors in the state, with the possible exception of the phlegmatic Roy Occhiogrosso, the governor chief flack catcher, whose response to a reputable, non-partisan poll showing the governor with an approval rating of a slender 33 percent and a disapproval rating of 51 percent was a barely suppressed yawn.

“We generally don’t comment on polls,” said Mr. Occhiogrosso, “because what’s there to say? Polls come and go, numbers go up and down. The governor always tries to do what he thinks is in the best interests of the people of Connecticut, irrespective of the political consequences.”

Politicians also come and go, and their comings and goings are sometimes intimately connected with sliding approval ratings.

On previous occasions, Mr. Malloy has said that he is uninterested in popularity contests. His principle business lies in re-inventing Connecticut; in this ambition, he has patterned his political program after that of President Barack Obama, who has been during his first term in office busily re-inventing America.

Actually, it may be the other way around. It is always difficult in these circumstances to determine precisely which came first, the chicken or the egg. In his second campaign for the presidency, Mr. Obama – slipping in the polls, but not quite as precipitously as Mr. Malloy – has begun to chatter about millionaires paying their “fair share”; in Mr. Obama’s view, a millionaire is anyone who earns by the sweat of his brow more than $250,000 per year, well short of a million. With the Damoclean sword of a $15 trillion deficit hanging over their heads, most non-millionaire taxpayers in the country are beginning to brace themselves for a massive tax increase.  Mr. Malloy, it will be recalled, is the father of the largest tax increase in Connecticut history, compared to which his spending cuts have been indeterminate and modest.

The similarities between Mr. Obama and Mr. Malloy are telling. Both are young, and it is said that Mr. Obama has some Irish blood rolling his veins.

Both are ardent travelers. According to a recent story, Mr. Malloy will be on his way to China sometime in September, there to explore the possibility of persuading his equivalent in China’s fascist government to invest in Connecticut. The Chinese already are heavily invested in the foundering U.S. economy. Mr. Malloy possibly has more miles on his pedometer than any other Connecticut governor and has shown himself to be – the views of Jonathan Pelto notwithstanding – a faithful progressive.         

Support for unions was one of the identifying characteristics of the 1912 presidential campaign involving trust buster and former Republican President Teddy Roosevelt, a convert to progressive causes, Republican President Howard Taft, a golfer whose real political ambitions would later be fulfilled when he was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, Democratic candidate and dilettante progressive Woodrow Wilson, and socialist candidate Eugene Debs, the real progressive deal. In the coming 2012 election, the United States will be reprising its 1912 counterpart, which some political scientists consider one of the most defining elections in U.S. History. The 1912 election, in which progressivism made its first and most lasting impression on American politics, introduced into the political mainstream the central tenants of a progressive program that reached its zenith during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt.

Mr. Roosevelt favored the unionization of private industry but drew a line in the sand concerning the unionization of government workers. Willing to help union workers obtain more of the profits they helped generate in the private sector, Mr. Roosevelt said “It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government,” because government workers do not generate profits; they negotiate for more tax money. A union strike against taxpayers, Mr. Roosevelt said, would be “unthinkable and intolerable.”

In Connecticut, government workers have become the pampered pets of politicians like Mr. Malloy and Speaker of the State House of Representatives Chris Dovovan, both of whom were quite willing to exclude from budget deliberations Republican leaders who had not yet bowed their necks to union demands. Indeed, the Democratic dominated General Assembly pre-approved a budget that later was substantially changed by Mr. Malloy negotiating in concert with the very same union bargainers Mr. Roosevelt thought should never have a claim on public money.

Ah well, it is the nature of progressivism to progress. Accordingly, Connecticut has witnessed in recent days it’s governor andattorney general marching in a picket line in support of union workers against nursing home administrators, sounding for all the world like Mr. Debs accusing greedy administrators of the Pullman Company of buying the favors of politicians. Not one commentator has yet accused SEBAC of purchasing the favors of Mr. Malloy and Attorney General George Jepsen through donations and in-kind contributions to their campaigns, the nightmare that haunted Mr. Roosevelt’s otherwise placid nights.      

Fishwrap For July

Russians Mull Burying Soviet Leader Lenin

The corpse if V.I. Lenin has been awaiting burial since the Soviet Union was thrown on the ash heap of history during the administration of President Ronald Reagan.

Comments by Russia’s new culture minister suggest, according to a report in the Washington Times, that Mr. Lenin is, finally, on his way out:

“But recent comments by Russia’s new culture minister have brought closer the possibility that the father of the Bolshevik Revolution could finally be laid to rest, signaling an end to the cult of Lenin.

“’Many things in our life would symbolically change for the better after this [burial],’ Mr. Medinskysaid, adding that he thinks Lenin should be buried with full state honors and his Red Square mausoleum turned into a museum of the Sovietera.”

Nancy Pelosi Rakes In The Dough

Borrowing a page from the 1912 election featuring socialist Eugene Debs on the far left, William Howard Taft in the center, Woodrow Wilson at left of center and Bull Moose candidate Teddy Roosevelt, the archangel of progressivism, Democrats this year have chosen to belabor Wall Street -- not that there’s anything wrong with that.

The boiler-plate assaults by President Barack Obama, in full campaign mode for the past three years, and former Speaker of the U.S. House Nancy Pelosi have been typical.

Unfortunately, financial disclosure statements are readily available; and Mrs. Pelosi’s statement shows she has been priming the outsourcing pump she has condemned from sea to shining sea, according to theDaily Caller:

“According to Pelosi’s 2011 financial disclosure statement, the Democratic House Minority Leader received between $1 million and $5 million in partnership income from ‘Matthews International Capital Management LLC,’ a group that emphasizes that it has a ‘A Singular Focus on Investing in Asia.’ A quick trip to the company website reveals a featured post extolling the virtues of outsourcing.”

When the Pullman’s strike was finally put down and a combine of Big Business, Big Government and Big Union ( represented by Samuel Gompers) finally destroyed Deb’s railroad union, the unflinching Debs refused ever again to ride in a Pullman car.

If the Democrats this year wish seriously to embrace progressivism, they must dress in sackcloth and ashes and refrain from decking themselves out in Wall Street baubles.

Obama A No Show At NAACP Convention Disappoints Some, But Not Malloy

At the NAACP Convention, Governor Dannel Malloy of Connecticut was honored for having played a major role in abolishing thestate’s death penalty. As he was acknowledging the plaudits, Mr. Malloy took a swipe at Texas Governor Rock Perry, a no-show at the convention.

But Perry was not the only MIA politician, according to anaccount in Buzzfeed:

“Convention organizers said the president's office cited a‘scheduling conflict’ as the reason he couldn't attend. (Obama spent today in Washington D.C., and has no major public events.) And the president did make an effort to ensure the convention that he hadn't forgotten them, appearing in a brief, pre-taped video praising the organization that aired before Biden's address.”

The Progressive Calls Dodd Loathsome, Depraved

The Progressive magazine was hatched in 1909 by Mr. Progressive himself, Senator Robert M. La Follette Sr. of Wisconsin, the founder of La Follette’s Weekly, renamed in 1929 The Progressive.

It’s current issue takes aim at despicable lobbyists and finds former senator Chris Dodd, now a Hollywood mogul, abhorrent. Dodd is rated as the 9^th most depraved lobbyist money can buy:

“The former Connecticut Senator, and internationally renowned eyebrow-haver, isn’t the most prodigious scum in the Beltway swamp, but he may be the most hypocritical. When asked in 2010 what would follow his thirty-year legislative career, which ended amid financial scandal, Dodd bluntly said, “No lobbying, no lobbying.” He then promptly became, as The Hill put it, “Hollywood’s leading man in Washington, taking the most prestigious job on K Street,” as chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America. The gig comes with a $1.2 million annual salary, and complimentary tickets to the Academy Awards.

“Dodd’s most public, and ultimately ill-fated, advocacy was in pushing two potentially disastrous bills: the Stop Online Piracy Act, and its Senate counterpart, Protect IP Act—both of which would’ve given the federal government the right to shut down any website that was merely being accused of copyright infringement.”

Scalia At Wesleyan

Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Antonin Scalia is perhaps the nation’s foremost advocate and interpreter of orginalism, a mode of constitutional interpretation. The chief business of the Supreme Court, both originalists and non-originalists will agree, lies in Constitutional interpretation, a task that no Supreme Court justice may responsibly avoid.

Mr. Scalia’s views on originalism have been widely disseminated; the justice has not in the past hidden his light under a bushel basket. An address on orginalism delivered twenty three years ago at the University of Cincinnati during the William Howard Taft Constitutional Law Lecture is available to every reporter in the state at the click of a mouse.

In that widely available lecture, Mr. Scalia dilates on the defects of non-orginalist interpretation. Briefly, non-orginalism binds constitutional interpretation to what has been called “the living constitution,” which is to say the constitution as interpreted by justices of the moment who feel that the ancient provisions of the constitution must be translated with reference to current sociological considerations that carry greater weight than historical interpretation.

The origanalist interpreter acknowledges that some language in the Constitution may be ambiguous and in need of interpretation. Faced with a difficult constitutional term, the originalist will first consider the constitutional text. Not every Constitutional referent is ambiguous, but some are. If the referent is unclear, he then will seek its meaning in other contemporary texts such as state constitutions, constitutional deliberations, newspaper accounts, historical journals and the like. In Mr. Scalia’s understanding, proponents of a “living constitution” may dispense with such bothersome tasks, because the non-originalist is engaged in a procrustean effort to trim the appendages of the Constitution so they may better fit the bed of modernist subjective interpretation.

If one does not give proper weight to the original meaning of the Constitution, the document itself becomes a mere fantasy in the minds of judicial interpreters -- judicial interpretation as fad, and there is nothing so impermanent, changeable and fickle, G. K. Chesterton reminds us, as a fad. Under this scheme of interpretation, interpretive responsibilities simply disappear, and constitutional meaning becomes a meaning of the moment loosed from constitutional moorings.

Mr. Scalia is concerned with moorings and bindings and constitutional interpretive boundaries, as any reporter might have discovered by reading his twenty-three-year-old University of Cincinnati lecture, one always hopes, in preparation for reporting on the justice’s Wesleyan lecture.

Mr. Scalia arrived at the university at about twelve noon. He graciously spent about ten hours at Wesleyan, lunching with the students, talking with students and faculty, giving a well prepared lecture that lasted more than an hour, entertaining questions afterwards, and commenting good naturedly on the antics of professional protesters who unfurled banners wrong side out, so that the message on them was obscured, and sprinkled those attending the lecture with a shower of condoms. These happy warriors, some of whom were veterans of the ""Occupy Wall Street" movement, bearing signs outside, one of which read “The GOP Hates Women”, left the premises before Mr. Scalia explained that non-originalists were more likely than originalists to deprive them of their First Amendment rights of free speech, originalists being bound by constitutional provisions the import of which are made clear by hard historical research, while non-originalists rely on a capricious, ever changing interpretive standard that is faddish and subject to the fanciful imaginations of fallible justices.

Both originalist and non-originalists, Mr. Scalia said in his address, may make errors in judgment; and, in fact, Mr. Scalia mentioned in his address an instance in which, on reflection, he determined that the consequences of one his own originalist interpretation was too severe to be borne. But, he insisted, orginalism, while not error free, a least applies a measurable standard to judicial interpretation. Its great virtue is that its rigorous standard binds judges and leaves people free, while non-orginalism frees the judicial imagination and more often deprives people of their constitutional liberties.

An excellent report on Mr. Scalia’s appearance at Weselyan by David Lat may be found on his site, “Above the Law”