Malloy in Bethel

Governor Malloy appeared in Bethel to defend his educational reform proposals, and the going was not quite as rough as Mr. Malloy’s past appearances.

At Wilber Cross High School, the heckling, mostly from teachers, was blistering. Towards the end of the meeting in New Haven, union president David Cicarella conceded, according to one press report, “It doesn't do any good hooting and hollering at the guy.” Teacher unions have not conceded much to Mr. Malloy concerning his proposals to remake education in Connecticut.

Rhetorical grapeshot was fired in Bethel, but Mr. Malloy easily deflected it, perhaps because Bethel Superintendent Kevin Smith had advised the crowd to be on their best behavior, but possibly, as I like to think, because Bethelites are unusually cordial.

My wife and I lived in Bethel – the name means “house of God” – for eight peaceful and fruitful years, not very far from the brilliant white church where P.T. Barnum’s father, Philo, and his mother, Irena, rest in peace beneath the sod. On the occasion of the unveiling of a fountain given by the then famous showman to his home town, Mr. Barnum said:

“Among all the varied scenes of an active and eventful life, crowded with strange incidents of struggle and excitement, of joy and sorrow, taking me often through foreign lands and bringing me face to face with the King in his palace and the peasant in his turf-covered hut, I have invariably cherished with most affectionate remembrance the place of my birth, the old village meeting house, without steeple or bell, where in its square family pew I sweltered in summer and shivered through my Sunday-school lessons in winter, and the old schoolhouse where the ferule, the birchen rod and rattan did active duty, and which deserved and received a liberal share.”

Mr. Barnum is a much underrated character. He first discovered then exploited and entertained the Middle Class. Mayor of Bridgeport and a legislator, Mr. Barnum was an able politician and as humorous and fetching a storyteller as Mark Twain:

"When I was but ten years old, newspapers came only once a week. The man who brought us the week's papers came up from Norwalk, and drove through this section with newspapers for subscribers and pins and needles for customers. He was called Uncle Silliman. I can remember well his weekly visit through Bethel, and his queer cry. On coming to a house or village he would shout, 'News! News! The Lord reigns!' One time he passed our schoolhouse when a snowstorm was prevailing. He shouted: 'News! News! The Lord reigns - and snows a little.'”

The crowd that listened on that day to the 71 year-old Barnum would have appreciated the subtle humor: The same “Uncle Silliman” who delivered the news supplied his customers with “pins and needles.” Newspapers during Barnum’s day were somewhat prickley, and the birched Bethelites who heard him were much less schooled and more educated than their modern counterparts in some of the underperforming urban schools Mr. Malloy is attempting to reform, apparently without the consent of unions.

Whether it was because the Lord reigned in Bethel or because the teachers of Mr. Barnum’s day made liberal use of birch rods, pretty much everyone who attended school in his home town could read the rare newspapers Mr. Silliman distributed. Mr. Barnum later exploited their literacy by drawing crowds of people into his Circus through ads; in addition to inventing the Middle Class, Mr. Barnum is also the father of modern advertising. It may shock newsreaders who have bought into the so-called “objective reporting” of journalists to learn that some the news stories covering Mr. Barnum’s educational lyceums were written by Mr. Barnum. It was not uncommon in those days for newspaper editors to accept for publication “stories” written by the subjects covered in the stories, their authorship disguised by false by-lines.

It is not at all surprising that Mr. Malloy has not been able to sell his reforms to unionized teachers. The reforms proposed by Mr. Malloy will, after all, change their world. And Mr. Malloy, somewhat like an overbearing teacher, is insisting that a no-excuse pedagogy should not fall back on the usual palliatives: We must eliminate poverty before we can educate urban students; the fault lies with broken families, drug addiction, gangs, disruptive students and other social pathologies, certainly not with dedicated teachers; give us smaller classes; we need longer school years; end standardized testing; give us more money -- pass around the birch rods.

Mr. Barnum, whose unique talents perfectly fitted him for a modern world full of politics and showmanship, had much the easier time of it.

When Is A Spending Cap Not A Cap?

"'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'

"'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

"'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master— that's all.' – Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

A spending cap is a measure that prevents legislatures from appropriating money after a certain level of acquisition has been reached. The Connecticut spending cap is pegged to increases in the average growth rate of Connecticut’s personal income (PI) or the annual rate of inflation measured by the growth of the Consumer Price Index (CPI).

Connecticut’s spending cap was added to the Constitution State’s Constitution as a surety to the public that legislators would live within their means at a time when the General Assembly was poised to vote in favor of an income tax proposed by former Governor And Spendthrift Lowell Weicker who, when last heard from on the alarming growth of spending in Connecticut, was rubbing his noggin and muttering, “Where did it [the surpluses brought in over the years by the Weicker income tax] all go?”

They spent it, you poor naive ninny. They spent it. What did you think they were going to do with the windfall riches you showered upon them?

Over the years, the two Republican governors who followed Mr. Weicker into office and the Democratic dominated General Assembly surreptitiously raised spending levels by loftily ignoring the cap, always a paper ball and chain. A signal that something was wrong with the Constitutional spending cap was obvious from the first; the legislature pointedly did not initiate a bill to implement the cap after the Weicker income tax was instituted. The purpose of the cap was never to bind a spendthrift legislature. It was meant as a head-fake to convince wavering legislators that, should they pass into law Mr. Weicker’s income tax, the General Assembly – which, in our constitutional form of government, is in charge of spending and appropriations – would not allow spending to rise beyond a prescribed level.

This was the era of confusion, doubt and duplicity. Then, along came Governor Dannel Malloy The Just, who promised in a campaign heard round the world to blow away all the smoke and smash all the mirrors utilized by his dishonest, two-faced predecessors.

There would be no sleight of hand in the Malloy administration. The days of Republican and faux Republican governors were OVER. Mr. Malloy, the first Democratic governor in more than 20 years, said several times during his campaign that he was not – NO, NOT – considering tax increases. Before radio talk show host Dan Lovallo was given the boot by The Talk of Connecticut, Mr. Lovallo used Mr. Malloy’s several campaign disclaimers as a lead into his show, followed by a notice that the speaker had initiated the largest tax increases in the history of Connecticut, leaving even Weicker the Bold eating Mr. Malloy’s dust.

There are numerous ways – some honest, others dishonest – to raise the ceiling on Connecticut’s spending cap. A governor might persuade the public that raising the cap would be in the public’s interest. But since the cap is a Constitutional provision, boosting it would entail convening a convention to change the Constitution, which in turn would leave the door open to measures decidedly unappealing to the Democratic dominated legislature. Constitutional conventions are Pandora boxes in reverse. Open Pandora’s Box and evils fly out; open a constitutional convention and “evils,” remembering always that “evil” is in the mind of the beholder, fly in. At a constitutional convention, it might be possible to propose ballot and initiative measures, operative in many states but frowned upon in Connecticut, the land of steady habits, by the state’s habitual power brokers.

In essence, the Constitutional spending cap is itself an unusually effective head-fake. Since implementing legislation was not passed at the time the cap was woven into the Constitution, the state is not operating under the Constitutional cap. Spending levels in the state are determined by a statute that was operative BEFORE the cap was included as a Constitutional provision. The current Connecticut state spending rule uses the larger of the rate of inflation or the growth in personal income as the basis on which, fiscal year after fiscal year, most state spending can grow. The statutory cap is easily circumvented whenever the governor and the General Assembly find such circumventions politically expedient. The governor has merely to sign a declaration of fiscal "exigency," after which the legislature can expend dollars in excess of the cap upon a 60 percent vote of approval in both chambers.

The inventive Malloy administration has found yet another way to “honor” the inoperative Constitutional cap while relieving any possible pressure to restrain spending -- by removing costly items from the list governed by the statute that purportedly “controls” spending.

So then, we have in Connecticut an inoperative constitutional cap on spending combined with sleight of hand political accounting that will considerably lessen spending restraint by moving costly items such as state pensions from the ancient statute that has never efficiently controlled spending.

But there are no smoke and mirrors in Mr. Malloy’s government, NO SMOKE, NO MIRRORS in this rare, Alice in Wonderland environment in which a word – “cap,” for instance -- means, as Humpty Dumpty used to say, “just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”

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”

Dannel Rell

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, that thou may’st shake the superflux to them, and show the heavens more just – Lear, from Shakespeare’s “King Lear.”

After Governor Dannel Malloy is put through the political grinder by status quo opposition forces that tend to resist his educational reform, he just might begin to feel, perhaps for the first time in his political life, what some Republican governors before him may have felt when faced with an intractable opposition.

Mr. Malloy’s’ educational reforms spring from reasonable premises: Some schools are better than other schools; the surest means of improving deficient schools is to note the important pedagogical differences between the two, discover what works in the better schools and replicate it in the poorer schools. Among things that don’t work as well as they should, particularly in failing urban schools, are some deficient teachers. They should be identified and counseled; if remediation does not improve them, they should be discharged, and administrators should not have to jump the moon to insure their replacement. The surest means of singling out poor teachers is to tie their teaching performance to teaching outcomes.

As promised, Mr. Malloy has taken his premises on the road. On March 5, he displayed his reforms to a Chamber of Commerce gathering in Waterbury and was cordially received by a sizable group. Following his brief presentation, Mr. Malloy asked for questions from the floor: “What? No one wants to yell at me?” Half a dozen questions were asked of the governor, after which he departed, skin intact.

The next day, Mr. Malloy – perhaps the most peripatetic chief executive the state has seen in living memory – traveled to a high-performing school district in West Hartford, there to confront teachers chiefly concerned with those provisions of Mr. Malloy’s reform package that touch upon how educators are evaluated and paid. The 370 seats in the school auditorium Mr. Malloy visited were occupied by teachers from the region. Another 45 heard the proceedings from an overflow room, and more than 100 other teachers had been turned away, according to local officials.

Here was Dannel in the lion’s den; here was Lear on the heath, raked by a fierce storm.

Mr. Malloy did not quote the passage from Shakespeare above, but he did say, more prosaically, “You think about how hard this might be for you to make the changes required here. Think about how hard it would be to live raising a child in a city with a school district that is not meeting that child's needs."

His education package, Mr. Malloy told the teachers, contained reasonable and necessary proposals to reform teacher evaluations and tenure. Tenure is the lock on the closed shop of teacher unions in Connecticut. And here was the governor, surrounded by more than 400 teachers, shamelessly picking at the lock.

Outside the room, teachers were organizing the opposition. And inside the room, Democratic politicians in the audience – including the influential co-chairman of the General Assembly’s Education Committee, Representative Andrew Fleishmann – were nervously fidgeting. Mr. Fleischmann, according to one news report, will lay himself over troubled water and attempt to “bridge a politically uncomfortable gap Malloy has opened with unionized teachers.”

While teacher unions have agreed to accept Mr. Malloy’s “framework” for education reform, no one has yet agreed to link the agreed upon framework to certification, tenure and salary, many union affiliated teachers now say. The framework, the governor and others not afflicted with reformophobia insist, is inoperable without the linkage. There is no point to an educational reform that does not link desired outcomes with certification, tenure and salary. Unless sticks and carrots are associated with desired outcomes, there is no incentive for achieving ANY desirable purpose. In the real world outside of education – and even in classrooms in which good student performance is rewarded with high grades, the pedagogical equivalent of a salary increase – the delinking of rewards and sanctions to measurable performance leads ineluctably to poor performance which, in Connecticut’s dystopian educational environment, occasionally serves as its own reward.

After Mr. Malloy had left the building, Mr. Fleischmann huddled with a couple of hundred teachers in a closed door meeting during which he heard objections to Mr. Malloy’s reforms, a subject of continuing negotiations with Democratic legislators who control the General Assembly, teachers and the Malloy administration.

Mr. Fleischmann pointed out the state legislature is a co-equal branch of government that is expected to refine gubernatorial proposals, a responsibility Democrats in the legislature shucked off on the governor when Mr. Malloy entered into contractual negotiations with unions that refined his first budget. At that time, legislators such as Fleischmann pre-approved a budget that was by no means a final product, choosing instead to let the gubernatorial lamb lay down with union lions and iron out their differences.

This time around, Mr. Fleischmann is more than anxious to exercise his constitutional responsibilities – which may or may not refine out of a final educational reform package such Malloy reforms as do not sit well with status quo pedagogues.

Tammany McDonald

When bright-eyed reformists of the early 1900’s were making a stab at political reform, George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall gave an interview with news reporter William Riordan and, making what he thought was a necessary distinction between “honest graft” and the usual garden variety, spilled the beans, as they say in the now smokeless filled rooms where political friends still scratch each other’s backs.

“Everybody is talkin' these days about Tammany men growin' rich on graft, but nobody thinks of drawin' the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft. There's all the difference in the world between the two. Yes, many of our men have grown rich in politics. I have myself. I've made a big fortune out of the game, and I'm gettin' richer every day, but I've not gone in for dishonest graft--blackmailin' gamblers, saloon‑keepers, disorderly people, etc.--and neither has any of the men who have made big fortunes in politics.

“There's an honest graft, and I'm an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by sayin': 'I seen my opportunities and I took 'em.'  Just let me explain by examples. My party's in power in the city, and it's goin' to undertake a lot of public improvements. Well, I'm tipped off, say, that they're going to lay out a new park at a certain place.

“I see my opportunity and I take it. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood. Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared particular for before. Ain't it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of course, it is. Well, that's honest graft."

And here is Mr. Plunkitt on the value of political friendships:

"I've told you how I got rich by honest graft. Now, let me tell you that most politicians who are accused of robbin' the city get rich the same way. They didn't steal a dollar from the city treasury. They just seen their opportunities and took them. That is why, when a reform administration comes in and spends a half million dollars in tryin' to find the public robberies they talked about in the campaign, they don't find them.

"The books are always all right. The money in the city treasury is all right. Everything is all right. All they can show is that the Tammany heads of departments looked after their friends, within the law, and gave them what opportunities they could to make honest graft. Now, let me tell you that's never goin' to hurt Tammany with the people. Every good man looks after his friends, and any man who doesn't isn't likely to be popular. If I have a good thing to hand out in private life, I give it to a friend. Why shouldn't I do the same in public life?”

Someone in Connecticut – likely NOT in the Malloy administration – should give Dave Altimari of the Hartford Courant this year’s William Riordan award for honesty in Tammany Hall reporting.

Here is Mr. Altimari’s opener for a story on the “honest grafters” in the Malloy administration:

“As Pullman & Comley attorney John Stafstrom walked into a room to pitch his law firm's proposal to win a lucrative contract with the Connecticut Airport Authority, it was unlikely he worried about receiving an unfriendly reception.

“Sitting across from his six-member team at the Jan. 31 interview was authority member Charles R. Gray, a longtime friend who attended Stafstrom's wedding in June 2010.

“Gray attended with his spouse, Andrew J. McDonald, who at the time was a partner at the Bridgeport law firm and is now Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's general counsel. McDonald, in his capacity as a justice of the peace, married Stafstrom and Dennis Murphy, who went on to become the deputy commissioner of labor in the Malloy administration.”

Soon after Mr. McDonald was safely ensconced as Mr. Malloy’s general council, the lawyers at his former law firm, Pullman & Comley, saw their opportunities and took’em.

In vain will other lawyers and political watchers scout out illegalities in an insider arrangement that speeds cash from the state coffers to Pullman & Comley, the loamy and fertile political nursery bed from which Mr. McDonald sprang: “The money in the city treasury is all right. Everything is all right. All they can show is that the Tammany heads of departments looked after their friends, within the law, and gave them what opportunities they could to make honest graft.”

The books will be in order.

Huey Donovan

"We can tax the millionaires in Washington and we can make Connecticut a better place for working families” – 5th District Democratic U.S. House candidate Chris Donovan

"Don't tax you, don't tax me. Tax the guy behind the tree"—Russell Long

Even the most progressive politician of his day, Russell’s father Huey Long, knew the scheme wouldn’t work; but it was a winner as a populist campaign pitch. Within the Democratic Party of his day, Russell was acknowledged as an authority on tax law. As such, he became an ardent advocate of tax breaks for business. “I have become convinced,” said Russell, most certainly not a chip off his father’s progressive block, “you're going to have to have capital if you're going to have capitalism."

One suspects that progressive leader of the state House of Representatives Chris Donovan knows this. However, the deathless scheme, endemic in the Democratic Party, to convince the tax paying public that someone may be found – perhaps hiding behind a tree in Washington – to pay debts incurred by reckless politicians marches on and on and on.

Even Governor Dannel Malloy, who styles himself a progressive, focused in his first budget on broadening the tax base. A revenue stream that depends chiefly on the ups and downs of Wall Street fed millionaires, a great number of whom in Connecticut are hedge fund managers, is doomed to fail. There are, in Connecticut and the nation, too few millionaires chasing too many debts.

Mr. Donovan is one of three Democrats vying for the seat in the U.S. House of Representatives soon to be left vacant by U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy, who has set his sights on U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman’s soon to be vacant seat. Former state representative Elizabeth Esty, whose husband Daniel was appointed Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) by Mr. Malloy last and Daniel Roberti are also announced candidates. On the Republican side of the barricades, Justin Bernier, a member of former Governor Jodi Rell's cabinet who ran for the seat in 2010, Mike Clark, chairman of the Farmington Town Council and a former FBI agent, businesswoman Lisa Wilson-Foley, businessman Mark Greenberg, who also ran in 2010, and state senator Andrew Roraback are campaigning for the seat.

Most Republicans running for office who have some personal experience with business are familiar with the principle underlying business flight, which may be stated as follows: Whatever you tax tends to disappear. If you tax millionaire hedge fund operators who live in Fairfield’s Gold Coast, both hedge fund businesses and its employees will leech out of the state in search of more favorable profit margins elsewhere. Mr. Malloy has been known to worry in public that Connecticut’s neighboring states would benefit from exorbitant taxes on hedge fund millionaires, however popular and politically beneficial the prospect of taxing millionaires might be to progressive politicians. Like water, businesses flow from high cost to low coast states, and taxes are one of the controllable components of the cost of doing business.

Mr. Donovan favors taxing millionaires to pay for a budget that has increased threefold since the last Democratic governor in Connecticut, William O’Neil, held office. And it is quite simply an exercise in futility to point out to him that the state is not suffering from a revenue problem. The threefold increase in state spending within a little more than two decades is undeniable proof that the state is suffering from a spending problem the present Speaker of the State House of Representative has no interest in addressing.

The same principle of disappearing opportunities applies to politically inspired increases in the minimum wage, a populist measure supported by Mr. Donovan, whose ambition it is to propel Connecticut into first place among states that impose the highest minimum wage. Beyond a certain level, the minimum wage forces companies that cannot afford it to cut back on employment or go out of business. Costly boosts in the minimum wage affects only those employers whose profit margins are slight. Capital rich mega-companies will be able to absorb Mr. Donovan’s impositions, but these are not companies that hire workers who have in the past been paid the kind of wages Mr. Donovan hopes to boost through his minimum wage legislation.

People with little or no working history are those most likely to be adversely impacted by Mr. Donovan’s bill. Low income workers and teenagers in blighted urban areas who hope to place their feet on the bottom rung of the ladder of success will find that the rungs have been hacked off by legislators in a Democratic dominated General Assembly who for reasons of political expedience had yielded to Mr. Donovan’s anti-business ideology.

A business that might hire a child of the city making his way valiantly and honorably through circumstances Mr. Donovan little understands needs capital to pay his workers’ wages. Mr. Donovan has yet to be convinced that you cannot have capitalism without capital. If he succeeds in making his way to the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, home of the magic money tree, it is possible he may never learn what children of the city already know: When the profit margins of businessmen who are likely to hire them is reduced, the prospect of their being hired is proportionally reduced.

Malloy And The Supremes

Taking his education reform show on the road, Governor Dannel Malloy on Thursday crashed into former Bridgeport Board of Education member Maria Pereira, one of the plaintiffs in a successful suit that overturned the dismantling of a Bridgeport Board of Education.

"On Tuesday, the Supreme Court overturned your administration's illegal takeover of the Bridgeport Board of Education," Mrs. Pereira told Mr. Malloy in a packed room at the Village South Center for Community Life in Hartford, "and I want to know if your plans to reform our schools are all about disenfranchising parents in schools all over the state like you're attempting to do in Bridgeport?"

Mr. Malloy attempted to deflect the question by asking Ms. Pereira, “How happy are you with the Bridgeport schools?"

Ms. Pereira acknowledged that the school system could use improvement. “No, the Bridgeport Board of Education hasn’t done a good job in the last 20 years,” she responded. “It’s been controlled by Democrats, that’s why. This is a democracy, not tyranny.” Ms. Pereira quickly turned the conversation back to its original track: “For you to say that we don't have the intelligence to have Bridgeport voters do the right thing …this is democracy, not tyranny."

“When Pereira was done speaking,” according to a report in CTNewsJunkie, “Malloy began to respond. When Pereira tried to interject, the governor told her she was done speaking at that point and went on to explain his position regarding the Bridgeport Public Schools.”

“Tyranny,” Mr. Malloy responded, “is sending the children to a school, year after year after year, knowing that it is performing at a rate that will not allow the vast majority of children … to compete." The governor aimed a well-deserved kick in the pants to the board of education that had been illegally supplanted with his approval. The governor said he didn’t want the state to take over failing school districts, but "Your school board basically threw up their hands and ran away."

The Supreme Court days earlier had ruled that the Malloy administration violated state law when it took over the board’s operations, purging the board without having first initiated the required retraining of the members it replaced before the takeover. Justice Peter Zarella, who authored the majority opinion, wrote that the State Board of Education “does not have the authority to authorize reconstitution until it first requires the local board to undergo and complete training.”

The court’s decision, the governor said, was “undoubtedly right," after which Mr. Malloy, almost reflexively, hustled any responsibility for illegal actions out the back door: “The prior education commissioner should have made sure that should have been done.” The present Commissioner of Education, Stefan Pryor, began his term on October 1 2011, six months before the Malloy administration disbanded the Bridgeport Board of Education, time enough, one would suppose, to allow Mr. Pryor to consult with Mr. Malloy's General Counsel, Andrew J. McDonald, who having served in the state Senate from 2003 to 2011 is no stranger to proper legislative processes.

Following the Supreme Court’s nearly unanimous decision, Mayor of Bridgeport Bill Finch urged the governor and others to circumvent the court’s ruling through a bill that “fixed” the court’s objection by means of a questionable legislative maneuver. If the law could be changed retroactively so as to apply to board members already discharged, the governor need not be put to the trouble of complying with the court decision by a) re-installing the original dismissed board, b) retraining defective members of the board, and c) reconstituting the board as necessary after the legal proprieties have been observed.

The difficulty with the shortcut being tossed around by the governor and legislators is that Supreme Court justices, as a rule, do not appreciate questionable legislative circumventions of their most recent “undoubtedly right” rulings. The court did not rule substantively on the underlying constitutional question that lawyer Norm Pattis is likely to press if the decision of the court is effectively circumvented by political legerdemain: May a constitutionally authorized democratic process of election be subverted by the governor of the state?

The court’s recent ruling presages serious difficulties with the Malloy administration educational reform package. The Malloy reform package, which seems to promise a speedy resolution to the problem of incompetent teachers, also holds out to replaceable teachers a process that would require retraining and reevaluation before discharge. If teacher tenure may be regarded as the shut door in a unionized closed shop, the retraining of incompetent teachers is the lock on that door. The provision in Mr. Malloy’s reform package that would require retaining before dismissal would, like teacher tenure itself, inhibit for long periods of time a necessary corrective to the “tyranny” the governor inveighed against in his remarks to Ms. Pereira.