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"If you've been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else's expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves."
– Thomas Sowell
How should we account for the steady gains made by Connecticut Democrats in the recent municipal elections?
There are people in Connecticut whose daily lives are negatively affected by high taxes, extravagant spending and consequent inflation, which reduces the purchasing power of money. And there are people whose lives are not materially affected by any of these political plagues.
Voting patterns suggest that those unaffected belong to the upper middle classes who live in such places as Greenwich and West Hartford, towns once reliably red, now purple verging on blue. High taxes and extravagant spending by federal and state governments are viewed in such places as survivable nuisances.
Democrat governors are used to bailing out heavily indebted cities, and the cities happily elect Democrats, even in places that appear to be politically corrupt such as Bridgeport.
Large cities in Connecticut have lain captive in Democrat hands, some of them, for the past half century. Republicans have very nearly written off the state’s larger urban areas.
Connecticut’s media, chiefly for business reasons, support the all-Democrat members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation because, just as you cannot get water from a stone, so you cannot get news from out of office Republicans. Moving tax money – and political power – from municipalities to state coffers and beggarly urban footstools work well for Democrat big-spenders who routinely pass off their debts to ever dwindling future generations.
Culturally, Connecticut, like most New England states, has been trending far left for quite some time, and it is culture that is the moving hand in politics.
In Connecticut, a state that codified Roe v. Wade in its statutes in 1990, more than three decades ago, Democrats continue to use the abortion issue as a pry-bar to separate an undifferentiated pro-abortion electorate from a dwindling pro-life electorate, and never mind that abortions in Connecticut have been for decades, in the words of former President Bill Clinton, “safe, legal” and by no means “rare.”
For all practical purposes, Connecticut easily might be regarded as the abortion state. One would never know it by attending to the political programs of Democrat cultural proponents. Clearly, abortion as a political issue should have been “off the table” when Connecticut more than three decades ago codified Roe v. Wade in its statutes.
Abortion as a political issue has been kept alive by the all-Democrat members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation, which wrongly fears that state’s abortion statute may at any moment be repealed by a Supreme Court that most recently, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, shifted decision making in the matter of abortion from courts to state legislatures. Connecticut’s General Assembly, the state’s legislature, is overwhelmingly Democrat.
The worry among pro-abortion Democrats in Connecticut that the state’s pro-abortion statute has been put in jeopardy by Dobbs is a false flag.
Immediately after the Dobbs decision was rendered, Nina Totenberg and Sarah McCammon of National Public Radio reported: “Writing for the majority, he [Chief Justice Samuel Alito] said forthrightly that abortion is a matter to be decided by states and the voters in the states. ‘We hold,’ he wrote, that ‘the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.’ As to what standard the courts should apply in the event that a state regulation is challenged, Alito said any state regulation of abortion [pro or contra abortion] is presumptively valid and ‘must be sustained if there is a rational basis on which the legislature could have thought’ it was serving ‘legitimate state interests, including ‘respect for and preservation of prenatal life at all stages of development.’”
The Democrat majority in Connecticut’s legislature has rarely fretted that a “respect for and preservation of prenatal life at all stages of development” would overthrow its guiding legislative statute. Connecticut’s General Assembly, the state’s legislature, is overwhelmingly Democrat and pro-abortion. Its Senior U.S. Senator, Dick Blumenthal, has aggressively opposed every legislative interference with the nation’s chief abortion factory, Planned Parenthood, and Blumenthal, also a proponent of euthanasia, certainly is not in danger of losing office owing to his extreme positions on abortion.
Then too, abortion is not the only political issue worth the attention of Connecticut’s governors and state legislatures.
As elsewhere in the nation, the question of debt and inflation -- a devaluation of currency that boosts the costs of products and services -- remains foremost in people’s minds. There are two solutions to improvident debt, one of them politically unlikely in the minds of most neo-progressives in Connecticut’s General Assembly. You either reduce future spending, so that the children and grandchildren of present taxpayers will be relieved of the ever-growing cost of government, or you boost taxation and rigorously apply the tax increases to debt payment. The recent history of getting and spending in Connecticut strongly suggest that neo-progressive state legislators are averse to both solutions.
The cowardice of state legislators is boundless. In office political campaigners, mostly Democrats, have discovered that fake problems are much easier to resolve than real problems.
