Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The legal ball that state Senator-elect Joe Markley tossed into the Superior Court has been batted by Judge Henry Cohen back to the Department of Public Utilities Control (DPUC). Mr. Markley, striking a blow for Connecticut citizens and good government, filed a suit in October against the DPUC for having permitted a fee to appear on energy bills that anyone with half a brain would recognize as a disguised tax. In 2000, the state legislature initiated energy deregulation in Connecticut. Having made inquiries of the state’s two largest energy distributors concerning the cost of deregulation, legislators were told the bill would run about $1.7 billion. Rather than raise the money for deregulation though a forthright tax, it was decided to pay for deregulation through bonding. The bonds used to pay the cost were securitized by the imposition of a fee on electric bills amounting to about $15 per month. The Competitive Transition Assessment (CTA), which has been appearing on electric bi...

Rham Emanuel, President Barack Obama’s campaign guru now running for mayor of Chicago, famously cautioned, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” In the year following Mr. Obama’s accession to the presidency, the Obama administration was able to put into practice Mr. Emanuel’s admonition because Democrats had acquired enough seats in congress to snuff out Republican opposition. It is a considerable understatement to say that the Obama administration then proceeded to spend money like a drunken sailor, and it may be an insult to drunken sailors who, after all, stop spending money when they hit the floor. Here in Connecticut, owing to accommodating governors and a Democratic dominated legislature, the Obama paradigm has for at least two decades produced red ink by the barrel. On the Republican and Democratic side, people are beginning to think our crisis should not be permitted to go to waste. But solutions differ widely. The gubernatorial office in Connecticut has now fallen to Democrats...

The election of Joe Markley to the Connecticut’s General Assembly as a senator is, in the estimation of some Republican activists, on a par with dropping holy water into Hell. Mr. Markley has shed a few pounds since he first entered the Assembly a little more than a quarter of a century earlier during the Reagan ascendancy. He now looks like a svelte and convivial Mitch Miller, the hair on his head having over the years migrated to his chin. But looks, as they say, are deceptive. Mr. Markley can quote Shakespeare in polite company; he is more analytical than the usual latte lapping liberal, an adept stump speaker and dead serious about the pernicious effects increasing taxes have on a foundering economy. There is some indication that he’s familiar with Ludwig von Mises’ views on methodological individualism. Mr. Markley is a serious conservative, not at all a lightweight easily dismissed as a Tea Party insurrectionist motivated largely by undifferentiated anger, the usual critical ...