Malloy’s Non-Campaign, The Dog Lobby And The Coming Auto-De-Fé

At a press conference on Access Health CT (Obamacare), Governor Dannel Malloy was asked for the hundredth time whether he intends to run for governor.

Weary of having to handle the question gingerly, Mr. Malloy told the gaggle of reporters assembled for the event something like this:  If I answer “Yes” to your question, the campaign will begin at that moment. And once a campaign begins in earnest, I will lose control of the sub campaign, which is the event you are attending right now. On this occasion, I can say what I like without having to wend my way through a briar patch of questions you and the Republicans might consider more important than the possibility of a soda tax -- which, by the way, I do not favor.

“On a proposed 2 percent tax on sugary beverages, put forward by New Haven Mayor Toni Harp,” the Register reported, “Malloy said: ‘I wouldn’t hold my breath. I am not proposing a sugar tax, I can assure you of that... At some point, there is a degree of personal choice to be made.’”

In the post-Obamacare epoch now upon us, people will be less able to make their own decisions concerning the kinds of coverage they need, those crucial decisions already having been made by  Obamacare technicians in Washington D.C. Perfectly healthy young people, quite able to make their own personal choices,  who used to be able to defer purchasing health insurance they did not need, will no longer be able to do so, thanks to a Supreme Court decision packed with linguistic fudge that permits the chief executive of the United States to impose a tax -- but not a fee -- on non-compliant college students whose futures are even now mortgaged to unreasonably high student loans.

The court’s green light opened a new era in governing: For the first time in U.S. history, a government will be able to prescind product choices and force people, on pain of punishing fees – oops, sorry there; the court says they are taxes, not fees – to purchase a product shaped in large part by Beltway technicians. Issues such as these tend to flop into the background in the absence of a political campaign that Mr. Malloy wishes to put off as long as possible.

There is no need to guess why Mr. Malloy wishes to put off his campaign announcement; he told the Register why at his faux campaign event:

“’I want to get as late into the year without having made a decision and being able to avoid talking about politics,’ Malloy said of daily questions he gets on the gubernatorial race where as many as five Republicans could be heading toward a primary fight.

“’Those folks (Republican opponents), they have a job to do. They got to beat each other up. At some point, they are going to do that. I have a job to do, I got to be governor and I want to do that job as long as I can,’ Malloy said.

“Tongue in cheek, he added: ‘If I suddenly was to decide today about being a candidate, I’m fearful you wouldn’t show up at these things.’” 

At some point the press availability drifted towards the plastic bag crisis:

“Malloy said they will look at a bill state Sen. Edward Meyer, D-Guilford, proposed on banning plastic bags. The governor said part of the calculation is understanding what is burnable as far as plants that convert trash to energy.”

The press/campaign availability over, everyone went about his business. The gaggle of reporters was given to understand that the governor, who will run for re-election (wink, wink), did not wish to be bothered by questions that might well be put to him had he announced he was running for governor. Reporters likely returned to their desks to find on their computer terminals the next announcement of Mr. Malloy’s next campaign event.

It really is a pity no paper in Connecticut could hire Mort Sahl, now pushing 90, as a news editor.

Editor Sahl to Reporter:  “Now, listen here, at Mr. Malloy’s next non-campaign campaign event, I want you to hone in on a question. The proposal to eliminate plastic bags will be strenuously resisted by dog owners in Connecticut; that is – responsible dog owners who pick up after their dogs with plastic bags they bring home from grocery shopping. Find out how many dog owners there are in Connecticut. Ask them whether they plan to use paper grocery bags for the same purpose. They can’t, you know. Get usable quotes. Don’t shake your head at me, boy. Have you ever tried to pick up dog poop with a paper grocery bag?  I can see your life has not been a raw one. I can tell from your silken hands. Now then, I want to ask the governor: If plastic grocery bags are rendered illegal by the General Assembly, will the governor ask Brendan Sharkey or Don Williams to be on call when one of their constituents’ dogs feels the pull of nature? What we need in this state is an auto-de-fé for idiot law makers. Get going now, and don’t let’em take a detour around the question.”

The Democrats’ 10 Percent Solution With Malloy as Firewall

The split between Connecticut’s two major parties is most dramatic on the question of spending.

Governor Dannel Malloy took a pledge early in his administration, after he had imposed upon the state the largest tax increase in its history, reminiscent of a pledge made by former President H.W. Bush: No new tax increases. Internal pressures were such during the Bush administration that the president reneged on his pledge.

The pressures are always there, especially in tax prone Connecticut. It was the fashion during the administration of Republican Maverick turned Independent Lowell Weicker to regard deficits as revenue rather than spending problems; and, of course, the solution to a revenue problem is to boost revenue.

This misperception – always encouraged by politicians uncomfortable with spending cuts – had tripled the bottom line of Connecticut’s budgets within the space of three governors. Focused on revenue boosts, Mr. Weicker and succeeding Republican Governors John Rowland and Jodi Rell rarely were put in the uncomfortable position of having to disappoint powerful union interests. Spending inched inexorably up.

When Mr. Malloy was installed as governor, it was generally supposed that the spending tap would be turned wide open. The so called“firewalls,” Republican governors who had offered a mild resistance to spending increases, were gone: Laissez les bons temps rouler, as they say during Marti Gras in New Orleans that precedes an abstemious Lent .

Democratic leaders in the General Assembly, impatient with the snail’s pace progress of a self-proclaimed progressive governor, have now proposed changes in the Malloy budget that increase spending by 10 percent. There is every reason to believe that Democrats stuck on stupid are still in a “let the good times roll” frame of mind.

And why not? Moderate Republican office holders in Connecticut have been washed away by the onrushing progressive high tide. Consider the number of Republican moderates who have fallen in recent years under the boots of the progressive hordes in Connecticut. Within Connecticut’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional delegation alone, three moderate Republicans– Nancy Johnson, Rob Simmons and Chris Shays, the last moderate Republican in New England before he surrendered his seat to current Democratic U.S. Representative Jim Himes -- had been replaced by ambitious progressives. Mr. Malloy and his Lieutenant Governor Nancy Wyman proudly march cheek by jowl with striking union workers, and no one winces. The largest tax increase in Connecticut history was accompanied with a union deal that assured salary and benefit increases to state workers of 3 percent nine years out, an arrangement at first rejected by union representatives, which rejection was characterized by Edith Prague, a longtime supporter of Connecticut unions, as a form of unthinking madness.

Despite a stalled economy, the progressive parade in Connecticut marches merrily and heedlessly on. Occasional disputes with leaders in the opposition party are imperiously brushed aside by Democrats who outnumber Republicans in the state by a commanding two to one majority. The difference in sheer numbers relieves Democrats of the necessity of quibbling over crucial economic points imperfectly grasped by an easily distractible media in the grip of an economic vise that has considerably reduced its own numbers.

What all this really means is that Mr. Malloy has now become Connecticut’s spending “firewall.”And the governor is surrounded by progressive Democrats quite certain that more spending will hasten the arrival of better times, a philosophy of governance to which Mr. Malloy also subscribes. On matters upon which there are some discernible differences between Mr. Malloy and the Democrat dominated General Assembly –say, education reform – Mr. Malloy’s programs have been refined by progressive leaders in the legislature. Both President Pro Tem of the Senate Don Williams and Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey have had a good deal of practice in curbing the modest ambitions of past Republican governors, and there is no reason to suppose they will not employ their talents to frustrate a governor who proves to be insufficiently progressive on matters they consider ideologically important – like, to fetch for one example, ramping up the progressive income tax on Connecticut Gold Coast millionaires.

While Mr. Malloy has said he is averse to tax increases, he has moved steadily in the direction of increasing state revenue through a series of measures – borrowing money to pay off budget expenses, reneging on a gentleman’s agreement with “bad” energy producers to liquidate a “temporary” tax on the production of electricity, boosting the notorious gross receipt tax on gasoline, and short-sheeting hospitals, to cite but four examples – that most charitably may be described as revenue enhancers.

All eyes in the General Assembly are fastened on the governor. Given an inch, progressive legislators have now demanded a yard – a ten percent increase in spending. It is precisely incremental increasing in spending of this kind that has tripled the bottom line of Connecticut budgets since the imposition of the state income tax in 1991, a short two decades ago. Progressives in the General Assembly are betting that while the governor’s no tax increase spirit is willing, his progressive Democratic flesh is weak. Because taxing and spending are inextricably connected, the easiest way to drive up taxes by 10 percent is to increase spending by 10 percent. And the red ink, in progressive strategy, is little more than an inducement to impose a steeper progressive tax on greedy hedge fund managers living the life in Fairfield County.

The Devil In Blumenthal’s Details

The expression “the devil is in the details,” first appearing in print in 1975, is a variation of an earlier expression, “The good God is in the detail,”sometimes attributed to Gustave Flaubert. Both expressions point to the importance of detail, what we moderns call verifiable data or facts.

Politicians, to no one’s surprise, sometimes traffic in facts, sometimes not.

In a recent copyrighted story in the Hartford Courant, U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal is shown expressing his disdain for the devilish details surrounding the Sandy Hook massacre: “Blumenthal dismissed the statistics and legal intricacies and focused on Begg and Heslin sitting at the witness table. He said, ‘Some or all of those 20 beautiful children and six great educators would be alive today if assault weapons had been banned along with high capacity magazines.’"

Mr. Blumenthal was speaking to reporters on the record following testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee of one of the parents of the children, 20 in number, who were slain in Sandy Hook Elementary School.

As expected, the testimony was heart rending. Only a heart of stone could fail to be moved by the personal testimony of Neil Heslin, whose 6-year-old-son, Jesse Lewis, was murdered in the savage attack.

Also present during the testimony was the sister of Victoria Soto, one of the heroic figures in the Sandy Hook mass murderer.

Ms. Soto was the First Grade teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary School who managed to save children’s lives by hiding several of them in a closet. When Adam Lanza entered her classroom after having killed fifteen students and two teachers, she told him, with great presence of mind, that the children were in the auditorium. Some students ran from their hiding place and Mr. Lanza shot them, also shooting Ms. Soto who, in an attempt to save their lives, threw herself in death’s path.

“We don’t want our sister to die for no reason,”Jillian Soto told the host of MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.” Courage runs deep in the Soto family.

“We lost our sister, tragically,” said Jillian, “and we are now honoring her by fighting for her name and for change–in her name, and all the other victims of Sandy Hook Elementary School and all the other school shootings. We don’t just want her to be a statistic. We want her to be known for who she is and the amazing teacher that she was -- the amazing sister she was -- and ask for something, demand that something be done so that nobody else has to go through this.”

“So that nobody else has to go through this…” These words should not be taken as a pointless rhetorical incantation. We should not allow the devil to ease a pathway for us around the details; for, if we do, we cannot arrive at a legislative destination that will assure family members of the innocent children slaughtered in Sandy Hook that other parents will not, like them, weep tears of blood when their innocent children are accosted by gunmen in what used to be considered here in Connecticut a sanctuary of peace and joy -- and this means that legislators must master the details, or the faults in their legislation will ride them like devils.

The architect of the federal bill preferred by Mr. Blumenthal is U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California. The Feinstein bill bans future sales of assault weapons, already illegal under Connecticut law, while permitting current owners to retain their weapons and, as such, would not have prevented Adam Lanza from acquiring the weapon he used to slaughter children in Sandy Hook. A confiscation of such weapons legally owned by their purchasers might have prevented Mr. Lanza’s use of the AR15, a semi-automatic long rifle, but then Mr. Lanza arrived at the school armed with two equally lethal handguns, the weapon of choice in urban areas where the preponderance of murders occur. Only a little less than three percent of homicides in 2011 were committed with long rifles. The Feinstein bill also limits easily replaceable magazines to ten bullets. According to a story the details of which have not been verified by the official criminal report, not due until the summer, Mr. Lanza replaced his thirty round magazines after having fired 15 rounds. The shotgun he left in the car and the two hand guns he carried with him into the school would have been as devastating.

When Mr. Blumenthal said, focusing dramatically on Mr. Heslin and dismissing as “unimportant”statistics and legal intricacies, “Some or all of those 20 beautiful children and six great educators would be alive today if assault weapons had been banned along with high capacity magazines," he was telling what Mark Twain used to call a stretcher, not that he will ever be reproved for it by the right people. Mr. Blumenthal, formerly an attorney general, did, after all, include the slither word “some” in his stretcher.

Back home, Democratic leaders in the General Assembly were spooking their brother legislators. The president pro tem of the Senate Don Williams and Majority Leader Martin Looney wrote a letter to their colleagues demanding that a legislative committee complete its work on time; and the bill presented to the General Assembly, they said, would be“emergency certified.”

An "emergency certified bill" is one that short circuits the legislative process because an “emergency”requiring short circuiting is at hand. The short circuiting, fortunately for legislators who do not wish to leave unsightly fingerprints on the resulting bill, renders hearings on proposed bills unnecessary. There is no emergency, only a legislative stampede made in Washington. Convenient emergencies of this kind are the enemy of the good and a shameless dereliction of legislative responsibility. If legislators don't want to create effective bills, they should find another means of employment.

The one notable Democratic legislator who appears to be committed to a tried and sure legislative process designed to produce efficacious legislation is Democratic Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey. Mr.Sharkey is reluctant to sign on to emergency legislation the provisions of which have not been approved by the General Assembly appointed bipartisan task force. Apparently, Mr. Sharkey prefers a more comprehensive bill written by Connecticut legislators for citizens of Connecticut. Hearings on proposed legislation allow legislators to shape bills with a view to particular circumstances. The notion that the General Assembly should be stampeded in its deliberations simply to meet a schedule imposed from Washington DC is more than preposterous; it is dangerous because it subverts a republican constitutional order and will likely produce a product useful only to politicians concerned with campaign sound bites.

An Interview With Don Pesci On Death Penalty Abolition

Q: The death penalty was abolished by the Senate on April 5. It’s a virtual certainty that the House also will approve the Democrat inspired bill. Do you feel safer?

A: Can’t say. Part of the abolition bluster was that the death penalty did not prevent murders, always a questionable assumption.

Q: “Bluster?” What ever can you mean?

A: It was never a serious proposition, just a useful piece of propaganda.

Q: But the polls!

A: Think of what is meant when it is said that a punishment deters crime. How do you collect reliable data showing that the death penalty – or, indeed, any punishment –deters an action? Reliable data retrieval showing that the death penalty has deterred Mr. Smith from murdering Mrs. Smith cannot be collected from Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith is invisible. And if he’s smart, he will choose to remain invisible. The pollster can’t find him. Mr. Smith is not likely to step out of the shadows and volunteer that he was contemplating the murder of his wife. The police still toss you into jail for attempted murder. Polls showing that murder is deterred OR NOT DETERRED by capital punishment are so highly attenuated as to border on surmise, mere guesswork. We assume that punishment deters because when we were little boys and girls punished by our parents for some innocent crime, we chose to refrain from recidivism. Dostoyevsky wrote a whole novel about crime and punishment, concluding at the end of it that a sense of honor, religious prescriptions and the tug of conscience very well might lead to confession and redemption. But crime prevention? In the absence of the virtues that may quicken the conscience and lead to genuine redemption, a policeman under every bed in the United States could not deter crime. Like the poor, crime will always be with us. The only question open for discussion is: What do you do with the criminal?

Q: You are not saying, are you, that punishment CANNOT deter crime?

A: That’s right. I am merely saying that deterrence cannot be accurately measured.

Q: The Democrats who approved abolition placed in their bill a provision that would retain Death Row for inmates who had been found guilty of heinous crimes; the death penalty was eliminated, but not Death Row. Why?

A: That is a good question. There are a number of possibilities. Politically, it was a shrewd thing to do. We do not know whether Mr. Williams’intention was punitive, but it seems so.In a post-repeal interview, Mr. Williams confessed that his ploy was primarily political. Following a visit to Death Row, Mr. Williams returned to meet with abolition legislators at the capitol. On April 9, a couple of days after the vote, CTMirror reporter Mark Pazniokas wrote“ Williams and Looney concluded that repeal was possible only if those sentenced to the new crime of murder with special circumstances faced conditions closer to death row than MacDougall.”
The Democrats could hardly argue that the new punishment tier they had established, “crime with special circumstances,” would deter murder, having argued that the death penalty itself was not a deterrent. Probably it was offered as political bait to draw in legislators fearful that a vote for abolition might be interpreted by voters in the upcoming election as indicating they were “soft on crime.” And, of course, the measure retains the union infused punishment apparatus. Democrats are big on unionization. One has the impression that any proposal made by any Democrat to save money through de-unionization might earn them a ticket to Death Row. Chris Powell, the managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer and its primary columnist, raised some questions about the new punishment tier, but he was the only one.       

Q: One of the other points raised against the death penalty by Senate President Don Williams prior to the vote to abolish was that it had been randomly applied: Not everyone who committed murder in Connecticut has been sentenced to death.

A: And a good thing too. In practice, Connecticut’s death penalty punishment was applied ONLY if certain circumstances had been met. Not every murderer qualified. You had to work really hard to merit the death penalty. It is no argument in favor of the abolition of a punishment – say, ticketing for speeding – to say that not everyone who commits the offense is punished. This is an infantile objection: “Mommy, he did it too. How come only I got sent to bed?” Should we abolish ticketing for excessive speed on the highways because – just to fetch for a figure – 98 percent of speeders are not ticketed and of those ticketed 99 percent are not brought to trial? Grow up!

Q: Personally, I would be in favor of abolishing the practice of ticketing for any reason, however specious.

A: Of course you would. I’ve driven with you.

Q: Another argument was that the penalty once applied was irreversible.

A: People who said that the death penalty could be applied in error had to travel outside the confines of Connecticut to find such instances. Or they presented their objection as a theoretical proposition. No one awaiting death on Connecticut’s death row has been mistakenly led there by judicial error.

Q: But the appeals!

A: A means of postponing punishment, a judicial means of jury nullification.

Q: And the money spent!

A: Legal assistance is expensive, most especially when it is supplied “for free” by the state. The economic argument for abolition is possibly the least convincing. If you want a Cadillac justice system, you have to pay Cadillac prices. Towards the end of the debate in the Senate, a provision was introduced in the bill designed expressly to turn some “moderate”legislators towards abolition. The state would create a special process for convicted murderers it no longer could execute. They would be treated in the same manner as death row inmates. The death penalty would be abolished, but death row – very expensive – would remain for murderers who, under the abolished law, were separated and treated differently than, say, prisoners who were jailed because they had too often been randomly arrested for speeding. Given an opportunity to abolish a dollar swallowing death row along with the death penalty, precisely those senators who had argued that the death penalty process was too expensive to maintain chose to retain death row. No one laughed. How expensive might it be to retain Joshua Komisarjevsky in prison for life in a death row like environment? He is a very young man and, of course, all the arguments utilized to abolish the death penalty minus one (irreversibility in case of error) may also be used to argue for the abolition of life in prison. No doubt, tax supported defense attorneys will be permitted to make just such very expensive arguments through the state’s sometimes redundant appeal system. The abolition bill does not and cannot prevent pointless appeals. These are measurable costs. Why have they not been measured? Why has no conscience stricken, economic minded opponent of the death penalty turned his rhetorical fire on a life in prison sentence that will be prohibitively expensive?

Q: Why?

A: Because dollars spent on the judicial system – the bulk of which find their way into the salaries of judges, lawyers, some of them legislators, and prison officials -- is a straw man issue, wholly irrelevant. If legislators were concerned about expense, they would have abolished death row.

Q: Well, you don’t have to get so huffy.

The Aftermath

Following the rejection by state unions of a deal thought to be too good to be true, left of center columnists in the state were grievously disappointed

A columnist watching “Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's union concession plan fall into a death spiral” wondered “what decade some state employees think they live in,” and a Hartford paper mused that state union selfishness would cost unions “support in Connecticut.” Translation: The union’s resistance to a fait accompli firmly established by union leaders and Mr. Malloy will be noted in a few stinging editorials.

But there is something more amazing still than the rejection of Plan A, a budget scheme thought to be less painful for everyone than Mr. Malloy’s alternative Plan B: The state for some time has been permitting a few unelected union negotiators veto power over budgets passed by the legislature, and we have become so used to the ritual we hardly notice that extraordinary powers, constitutionally reserved for governors or legislators, has been delegated to a handful of union budget negotiators. Unions have become a fourth branch of government in Connecticut. And because the union vote is dispositive, it may be argued that unions are more powerful than any of the three branches.

It is through the thoughtless surrender of constitutional powers belonging by right to the three legitimate branches of government that states, at first obliging, ultimately become wards of unions.

So certain was the Malloy administration that Plan A -- pre-approved by dominant Democrats in the legislature -- would not be rejected by the union rank and file, that Mr. Malloy allowed himself to travel to Washington D.C. when the fatal vote was in process, an assurance that came crashing to the ground on bloody Friday when the final vote was tallied.

Just before the roof fell in on Plan A, one of the principle negotiators, sensing the need of a scapegoat, petitioned Attorney General George Jepsen to sink his teeth into the Yankee Institute. Jepsen adroitly passed that political poison pill to state auditors.

Plan A did not fail because its critics were shuttling incorrect assessments to rank and file union members. The union members who voted down Plan A had been fully propagandized by union leaders who, seemingly, wanted them to approve the lesser of two evils. They voted against the plan because they felt, implausible as it may seem, that the plan was not in their best interest. And in the end it was the interest of a narrow – one might almost say narrow-minded -- political faction that determined the general interest, a turn of events that will continue until the legislature reasserts its authority and finds some means of readjusting the horse and cart so that the horse leads and the cart is pulled in a direction that benefits the general interest of the whole state. The union voting system, badly in need of reform, is a Rube Goldberg contraption that only a rocket scientist could pretend to understand.

Speaker of the House Chris Donovan’s political ambition was one of the temporary casualties of the collapse of Plan A.

Mr. Donovan, once a labor and community organizer, had intended to announce his intension to run for the U.S. House in the 5th District but patriotically put off the announcement when some units of AFSCME voted against Mr. Malloy’s attempt at shared sacrifice. When it was feared Plan A was doomed, Mr. Donovan said he felt his proper place was in the General Assembly. Until that moment, many suppose, Mr. Donovan had been careful to keep his fingerprints off union negotiations, a posture he likely will abandon in the near future.

Mr. Malloy’s “shared sacrifice” has taken an inordinate bite out of taxpayer wallets. The bite taken from state workers, mild by most accounts, has diminished during the negotiation process, relieved in part by an artificial “surplus” tucked into the budget. A re-negotiation led by Mr. Donovan in the House and Speaker of the Senate Don Williams, the unions may hope, will reduce it further.