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The Blumenthals, father Dick and son Matt, were there in the picture featured on the front page, top of the fold, in the Hartford Courant story, “With tone of defiance and new laws, Connecticut leaders push back hard against Trump and ICE.”

Both were smiling broadly as Governor Ned Lamont signed Bill 397 which, the Courant reminds us, “allows citizens to sue federal immigration agents if they believe that their civil rights have been violated. In addition, the bill prevents all law enforcement officers, including from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE [Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement], from wearing masks, except in limited situations.”

Laws restraining police are old hat in Connecticut. Police “reform laws” affecting the personal partial immunity of individual police officers reduce the inclination of recruits to join police forces.

Some Connecticut politicians excluded from the photo-op were not smiling.

House Republican leader Vincent Candelora characterized the bill as “an election-year stunt.”

“Today’s rally,” Candelora said, “made clear where the governor and General Assembly Democrats’ priorities lie — political theater in an election year. They rushed in front of cameras to promote a flawed bill that invites litigation, exposes federal and even local law enforcement to legal liability, and even bars veterans from applying military training toward a law enforcement career. Meanwhile, Connecticut residents are still waiting for direct relief from the affordability crisis these same Democrats created. Their priorities are badly out of whack.”

Senator Dick Blumenthal, for 20 years Connecticut’s white-hatted crusading attorney general, thought while in office that one of his principal duties, nowhere mentioned in the statute creating the office, was to swell the state treasury with fines levied against his targets. He was faithful in performing this self-perceived duty. State treasurers, governors and members of Connecticut’s media were pleased with his performance. Why look a gift horse in the mouth? When Blumenthal left the AG’s office and ascended to the US Senate, his successor, George Jepsen, under pressure from Republican candidate for attorney General Martha Dean and others, dismissed more than 200 of Blumenthal’s pending cases.

Blumenthal has carried with him into the Senate his bullying prosecutorial methods. Here is an embarrassing instance of Blumenthal’s ideological rigidity: Blumenthal questioned a number of prospective federal judges -- “Who won the 2020 presidential election?”

The correct answer to Blumenthal’s question is: ”Whoever won the electoral vote in the US Congress and was thereafter certified by Congress won the election.”

The congressman is a US Senator and one expects him to be familiar with the constitutional provision governing the election of presidents. But no -- Blumenthal characterized a literal repetition of the constitutional provision as judicially inappropriate. “You were instructed to give this answer, right?,” he berated one of the judicial prospects. “I am amazed, just amazed, by the insult to this committee of witness after witness seeking to be a federal judge subverting our constitution and showing how you have no independence, which is essential to a federal judge…” The judges questioned seemed more astonished than Blumenthal that the senator had characterized a literal citation of a constitutional provision as a “subversion of our constitution.”

The shameless peddling of false presumptions, a towering arrogance, an irresistible inclination to present to the voting public an unctuous moralistic face in danger zones – it has been said that there is no more dangerous spot in Connecticut than that between Blumenthal and a television camera – are all unfortunate characteristics that stem from a lack of modesty and due proportion. Governance requires both modesty and prudence, without which it is simply a destructive force before which honesty must withdraw in fear and trembling.

Moving from the AG’s office to the US Congress, Blumenthal took with him his most self-damaging characteristics and left the best behind. He cannot stop prosecuting and primping before the cameras.

Striding in his father’s footsteps, Matt Blumenthal characterized Connecticut’s newest attempt to drive ICE devils from Connecticut’s political temples this way: “We’re not going to allow federal agents or ICE to be intimidating people close to polling places. Given what has happened in Minnesota and the violence and chaos we’ve seen them conduct in Minneapolis, people in Connecticut have a very well-founded fear of these activities, and so we don’t want them anywhere near the polls.”

It would take a Connecticut George Orwell to do satirical justice to the state’s politically convenient non-compliance with federal officials. Orwell started his political life serving with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, then a part of Britain’s vast colonial empire. The future author of 1984, often referred to as Nineteen Eighty-Four, hated the assignment. He hated colonialism and throughout his life protested against the use of political force that – and this should not astonish a sometimes virtuous Dick Blumenthal -- is the very opposite of small “d” democracy.

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