Please Follow us on Gab, Minds, Telegram, Rumble, Gettr, Truth Social, Twitter
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, we are told by Hartford Courant political reporter Chris Keating and Tong himself, is on a mission.
He has been putting in the hours, “working seven days a week as he battles executive orders and federal spending freezes by President Donald J. Trump in cases both locally and nationally.”
Tong is mandated by his position as Attorney General of Connecticut, he believes, to serve as a “check and balance” against President Donald Trump and efforts within his administration to oversee the spending of tax dollars. “The lawsuits we [Tong and other attorneys general] have filed, particularly against Elon Musk and DOGE, are really important as a check on these guys,” Tong has said. “If there is no one checking these guys, there are no checks and balances, then they are unrestricted with unchecked, unrestricted power, and they can do whatever they want to hurt the people they don’t like who are their political, and I should say, business adversaries.”
Actually, the expression “check and balance” is one that in the past has been used to refer to the shared balance of power within the federal government that is constitutionally divided between three branches of government so as to prevent the accumulation of political power under a single executive. Tong here is appropriating the expression purely for political purposes. The Attorney General of Connecticut is by no means authorized by statute to frustrate necessary economies within the federal executive branch of government. The mandate of the office has not changed since the colonial period when the present day attorney general was called “the king’s lawyer.”
The modern Office of Attorney General was created by legislative statute in 1897, and the statute does invest Tong with the power to serve as a “check and balance” on the federal executive. Tong’s powers are narrowly circumscribed in the statute under the subtitle:
Duties of Attorney General; deputy; assistants; associate attorneys general. The Attorney General shall have general supervision over all legal matters in which the state is an interested party, except those legal matters over which prosecuting officers have direction. He shall appear for the state, the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, the Secretary, the Treasurer and the Comptroller, and for all heads of departments and state boards, commissioners, agents, inspectors, committees, auditors, chemists, directors, harbor masters, and institutions and for the State Librarian and the Connecticut Pilot Commission in all suits and other civil proceedings, except upon criminal recognizances and bail bonds, in which the state is a party or is interested, or in which the official acts and doings of said officers are called in question, and for all members of the state House of Representatives and the state Senate in all suits and other civil proceedings brought against them involving their official acts and doings in the discharge of their duties as legislators, in any court or other tribunal, as the duties of his office require; and all such suits shall be conducted by him or under his direction. When any measure affecting the State Treasury is pending before any committee of the General Assembly, such committee shall give him reasonable notice of the pendency of such measure, and he shall appear and take such action as he deems to be for the best interests of the state … All legal services required by such officers and boards in matters relating to their official duties shall be performed by the Attorney General or under his direction. All writs, summonses or other processes served upon such officers and legislators shall, forthwith, be transmitted by them to the Attorney General. All suits or other proceedings by such officers shall be brought by the Attorney General or under his direction. He shall, when required by either house of the General Assembly or when requested by the president pro tempore of the Senate, the speaker of the House of Representatives, or the majority leader or the minority leader of the Senate or House of Representatives, give his opinion upon questions of law submitted to him by either of said houses or any of said leaders...
24/7?
Tong claims to be working 24/7 on suits that would circumscribe the power of the President of the United States to make economies in his office by eliminating the president’s oversight of how tax money is spent in the executive office. “It’s 24-7 right now,” Tong told the Hartford Courant. “The way I think about it is the president is flooding the zone, and we’re flooding it back. I spend a lot of time talking to my fellow attorneys general. My staff spends a lot of time talking to their counterparts in other states.”
Some Republicans think the over-reaching Tong might better make use of his time.
“The attorney general’s job is to be the lawyer for the state of Connecticut,” state Republican chairman Ben Proto told The Hartford Courant in an interview. “He is not the lawyer in D.C. He was not elected to fight the presidential administration. He was elected to take care of the problems in the state of Connecticut. … We have a massive energy problem, yet William Tong is worried about whether or not the president is funding or not funding certain programs, which is wholly within his prerogative as the president of the United States.”
Tong has acknowledged that “So far, it doesn’t seem” that Trump’s attempts to reign in the unchecked metastatic growth of his own executive department are “like, specifically directed at Connecticut per se in the way that he directed [unflattering comments at Maine Governor Janet Mills]. But of course, all of these actions impact Connecticut people and families directly. When that happens, it’s my job to stand up and fight for Connecticut. Am I passionate about it? Of course I am. Am I aggressive? Yes. That’s what the people of the state have come to expect from me, and I believe that’s what they want. They want me to be tough. They want me to be strong, and they want me to be aggressive.”
Proto is right about Tong’s mandate and his political ambitions: Tong “was not elected to fight the presidential administration. He was elected to take care of the problems in the state of Connecticut.” And “This is all political, and William is trying to figure out how to move to the next step or actually leap-frog a couple of steps on the political ladder. … William Tong has to decide what he wants to do in 2026. Is he going to run for attorney general again? Is he running for governor? Is he running for his life? I don’t know what he’s doing.” Given the office’s confining statutory guardrails, Tong should not be able to toss a Connecticut wrench into the federal executive office’s delicate operational machinery. What Connecticut needs, much more than a partisan activist attorney General, is an Inspector General commissioned to examine destructive state spending.
Proto’s question is a live one. Is Tong now running for governor or, more probably, U.S. Senator when Dick Blumenthal retires from office? If so, he will find the field fairly crowded. In a one-party state such as Connecticut, we should remember that the struggle for political power occurs only within the dominant Democrat Party.
Two Democrat Connecticut U.S. Senators, Joe Lieberman and Dick Blumenthal, have used their positions as Attorneys General as springboards to the U.S. Congress. Blumenthal is getting on in years and his son, Matt Blumenthal, a State Representative from the 147th district in Fairfield County, has a lean and hungry look about him.
What or who will serve as a “check and balance” on the overweening political ambition of Tong?
