Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Next year, Speaker of the state House Jim Amann, will hand the Speaker’s baton to Rep. Christopher Donovan, a Democrat from Meriden who works part time as a union organizer for the Congress of Connecticut Community Colleges and is presumed to be much further left on the political spectrum than his predecessor. Should he become Speaker, Donovan has suggested he will sever his ties with the CCCC. The business community, perhaps reasoning that while you can take Donovan out of the union, you cannot take the union out of Dovovan, is said to be wary of the presumed new Speaker .

Well, it’s crying time again, you’re gonna leave me. I can see that far away look in your eyes … Ray Charles The old saw has it that neither a man’s property not his wallet is safe so long as the legislature is in session. Connecticut may now breathe a collective sigh of relief. The legislative session has officially ended. The bad new is that the duffers may be called into a special session. The legislative plate this year had been pretty full, before the governor and the legislature threw the carefully prepared meal on the floor and stomped out of the room. The boys and girls were supposed to tackle ethics reform, provide relief to hard-pressed taxpayers slogging through a recession, prevent murderers and rapist from murdering and raping us a third time and, of course, give more money to UConn, a reflex action of the last zillion legislatures. As it happened, the surplus, eaten by recession mice, dwindled to nothing; at which point, the legislature and Governor Jodi Rell decided to...

Jim Amann, the Speaker of Connecticut’s House of Representatives, has announced that he is surrendering his position, very likely to Majority Leader Chris Donovan, though others are vying for the position. Before he was elected to his leadership position, Donovan served as House Chair of the Labor and Public Employees Committee. A key sponsor of health care reform, he has worked strenuously to create a system of universal health care in Connecticut. The insurance pool bill – which ought to be named after Bill Curry who as state Comptroller suggested the measure in 1991 – glided through the House on a party line vote shortly after Amann threw in the towel. Gathering votes for its passage was Donovan, who said “What's not to like about it? Its time has come.” According to his legislative biography, Donovan “is a labor representative with the Congress of Connecticut Community Colleges and teaches part-time at the University of Hartford. Rep. Donovan formerly worked for the Connecticut...

Richard Armey, co-chairman of FreedomWorks in Washington (DC) and a former Republican U.S. House Majority Leader, has stuck his toe into Connecticut politics. So far, his reception has been chilly. Armey issued a mass e-mailing and press release critical of Gov. Jodi Rell, the titular head of the state’s Republican Party, that took aim at her promised income tax hike. "With a current budget surplus,” Armey wrote, “the idea of a new multi-billion-dollar tax hike is even more outrageous. If enacted, this tax hike will drive businesses and residents out of the state to seek more tax-friendly havens. As a result, Connecticut's economy will be left in ruins, and Gov. Rell's bloated education budget will do little for the residents of Connecticut." These are strange times in Connecticut politics. During her rather uneventful gubernatorial campaign, Rell emerge from the ordeal as a tax and spend Republican; who’da thunk it? Recent polls indicate that most voters and taxpayer...

We’ve been here – multiple times. Gov. Jodi Rell’s budget plan increases to 50% the funds given to municipalities by the state, largely for education. It is, in a word, warmed over DeStefano , the Democrat candidate who ran against Rell for governor. Rell prevailed in that contest because most voters thought she would be a less high maintenance governor than her Democrat counterpart. It is doubtful whether there is one legislator at the capitol, with the possible exception of Edith Prague, who sincerely believes there is a direct correlation between money spent on education, most of which is consumed in salaries, and the quality of education. If there were such a correlation, urban students in Hartford would be outpacing students in the suburbs, and the performance of students from the Amistad Academy , an “Achievement First” college preparatory school in New Haven, would not exceed that of public schools that draw from the same pool of students. By every measure of academic excellenc...

Speaker of the state House of Representatives James Amann has introduced a cautionary note into the discussion of universal health care. "If you think we're going to conquer the world next year and get everybody covered,” Amann said, “it would be a miracle. I'm sure the governor would love to sign that bill. I think if we concentrate on the kids with a program we have called HUSKY, which is one of the best in the nation, improving that and creating more access and more prevention, we can at least conquer that [this] year." State financed “universal health care” always presents problems involving unintended consequences. A federal universal health care program would drive insurance companies from the field; unable to compete with a compelled tax supported system, they would simply go out of business. This would present problems also, possibly for Connecticut since the insurance industry is still fairly strong here. For instance, how would we recover the taxes lost by t...

Gov. Jodi Rell said she planned to pick her battles carefully with the Democrat leadership this year. "I have great plans, but I also understand the people of Connecticut have elected me to be the voice of reason.” The governor indicated she is willing to bargain with Democrats concerning her plan to eliminate the local property tax on motor vehicles. "I very much have every intention of doing it. But if they're going to stand there and give me one of these folded arms and just say, 'Go ahead, we're not even going to entertain it,'" Rell said. "I need to pick my fights and I need to pick the ones that are going to make the biggest difference for the taxpayers." Re-elected by a huge margin, the governor said she would use her political clout in negotiations with the Democrat dominated legislature. "If it's something I believe is detrimental to the people of Connecticut, I won't have any hesitation of standing up and telling the publi...

The Sandinistas are back in power in Nicaragua, and Democrats here in the United States are back in power in the House of Representatives. Daniel Ortega, much chastened since his days as a Nicaragua’s communist dictator, won the presidency of the country, causing old Contra hands to mutter under their breath, “There goes the neighborhood.” Sen. Chris Dodd and ex-president Jimmy Carter no doubt will be dispatched to Nicaragua to quell the flames of revolution. Governor Jodi Rell swamped her Democrat challenger, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, but her victory is likely to be a Pyrrhic one, because Democrats now have a veto-proof majority in the legislature; which is to say, they may safely ignore Rell and the Republicans. Connecticut is now officially a one party town. The day after the Rell Tsunami, the Hartford Courant strewed some palms at the governor’s feet. Rell “…won that office on her own by politely ignoring her Democratic challenger's attacks,” the paper enthused. And, the ...

At the very last moment, campaign finance reform made it through the legislative sausage grinder at the state capitol, sending Andy Sauer, executive director of Connecticut Common Cause, dancing up and down the aisles shocked with surprise and joy. The two parties once again had compromised. That word, “compromise,” very well may be the most misused word in political discourse. In any case, Democrats and Republicans had – what’s the word? – conspired to satisfy Andy Sauer and other pro-campaign finance reform enthusiasts. The power often wielded by the malefactors of great wealth to corrupt innocent incumbent politicians by stuffing their campaigns with cash had suffered a serious blow. But just as the sun of campaign finance reform was pushing aside the night of corrupting political influence, dark clouds were gathering on the horizon. A report on slush funds by Keith Phaneuf tells us in embarrassing detail how legislative leaders and governors sock away what used to be called in the...

"It's a great budget. Nobody can say we're throwing the money away wastefully” -- Sen. Edith Prague. "This budget leaves no dollar left unspent. Tax relief is nowhere to be found - no car tax cut, no estate tax cut, no energy tax cut for consumers - while bloated spending proposals are to be found throughout" – Governor Jodi Rell The 2006 budget offered by Democrats makes sense only as a campaign document. In every other sense – as a serious budget, for instance – it is an irresponsible horror. It folds the entire current surplus into their spending plan and is particularly generous to supportive Democrat interest groups. Details of the Democrat spending program were released at the same time Mass Mutual Insurance Company announced that it was packing its bags, kicking the dust of Connecticut from its feet, and returning to Massachusetts, as state nutmeggers used to refer to derisively as “Taxachussetts.” If Democrats who control the legislature cannot put a c...

“Be bold, be bold, but not too bold, lest the marrow of your bones run cold” – Mr. Fox, from A Book of English Fairy Tales “Rell Calls For Boldness,” the headline screamed. As if anticipating the governor’s bold measures, an exuberant Jim Amann , the Democrat Speaker of the House, pre-announced a Democrat spending plan – That is what a budget is – that was, well … bold as bold can be. Amann put his finger on what he considers to be the solution to one of the problems mentioned in several reports that had analyzed Connecticut’s anemic economy -- traffic problems. The Speaker proposed to spend an immodest $6.2 billion to fund road, rail, bus and highway improvements, especially along that nettlesome stretch of road – I 94, better known as the Fairfield County clot -- that runs from Bridgeport through the state’s “Gold Coast” and into New York. In days of yore, Former Gov. William O’Neill rammed through the legislature a $6.5 billion plan following the collapse of the Mianus River Bridge...

In a speech given before the Middlesex Chamber of Commerce in Cromwell, CEO of United Technologies George David, ever polite, said that he had “hard words” for his audience. He recalled a phone conversation he once had with then Governor Lowell Weicker, who was attempting to persuade David to amend a note receivable held by UTC that would facilitate the sale of the Hartford Whalers hockey team. Weicker had mentioned that both David and he were “big boys,” major employers in Connecticut. But for the first time that year, Weicker said, he was a little bit bigger than David: The number of state employees had grown larger than UTC workers. “I put the phone down,” David told his audience, “and recalled asking myself whether this was the right theory.” Much water has flown under the bridge since that conversation. Connecticut’s payroll has increased 24 percent since 1992, although its population, David noted pointedly, has grown during the same period “by only 2 percent, with outward migrati...

Who put the fox in James Amann’s bosom? There was the Speaker of the House holding up a written reprimand from Governor Jodi Rell at a news conference and voicing his displeasure: “Let her veto it. Let her get carpal tunnel,” said Amann, engorged with theatrical rage. “I don't care." In her reprimand, Rell had promised to veto a Democrat budget proposal that increased spending by 13 percent over the next two years. No way, said the governor. The Democrat proposal also included an attempt to shoot the kneecaps off the state’s spending cap. Democrats have never been comfortable with the cap, a constitutional restraint on spending they were forced to accept in a deal that imposed on Connecticut a new income tax. The restraint on spending was intended to make the tax tolerable to conservative Democrats and wavering liberal Republicans, sometimes called “moderates,” without whose votes the income tax never would have become law. Rell this year compromised the constitutional provisi...

“The rich are very different from you and me,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, to which Ernest Hemingway is said to have replied, “Yes, they have more money." House Speaker James Amann, D-Milford, the leader of the Democratic caucus, gets half of it. Amann understands, as do most Democrats, that the rich have more money than you and I. For this reason, and because he and the Democrats have finely honed senses of justice, Amann and his cohorts plan to relieve the rich in Connecticut of some of their assets to help pay for an ever expanding budget. Once again the state has come up short in its budget. Amazingly, there are Democrats in the state’s legislature who think they have been cutting taxes rather than spending money like the proverbial drunken sailor, though unimpeachable proof of their wild spending spree may be deduced by examining the steadily increasing bottom line of successive state budgets. The last non-income tax budget was approximately half the bottom line total of t...