Chris Powell: Union secrecy; neither banned nor read; U.S. should pay its own way

“The Secret,’’ by Moritz Stifter (1857-1905), German and Austrian painter

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Congratulations to Connecticut state Rep. Holly Cheeseman for exploding a spectacular hypocrisy of state government arising from its long subservience to the government employee unions.

Last week the state House of Representatives was debating legislation that would conceal from the public the home addresses of nearly every state and municipal government employee. This would have impaired accountability in government, but then that was the point. Cheeseman, a Republican from East Lyme, noted that two years ago the General Assembly and Gov. Ned Lamont enacted legislation to allow unions to obtain the same information in pursuit of enrolling and mobilizing government employees against the public interest.

Another Republican state representative, Craig Fishbein, of Wallingford, noted that the address-concealing bill as it was introduced originally would have concealed addresses for employees in only two state agencies, the state attorney general's office and the Department of Aging and Disability Services.

Other legislators complained that the expansion of the bill had never gotten a public hearing, though of course any such hearing would have been dominated by the unions. As they were about to be given another inch, the unions strove to grab another mile with the help of their tools in the legislature.

With debate making the legislation seem less sensible and starting to consume too much time in the General Assembly's always frantic hours just prior to mandatory adjournment, the House Democratic majority leader, Jason Rojas of East Hartford, took the bill off the agenda. But it will return sooner or later, maybe with a provision to make it illegal to know anything unflattering about a government employee.

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Now that Newtown's Board of Education has decided against removing from the local high school library two books that some townspeople considered too sexually explicit, people are celebrating the defeat of what news organizations like to call book banning.

But the placement of books in a public school library is always fairly a matter of judgment about age-appropriateness, just as the placement of any  book in a public library is always a matter of judgment on several levels. Anyone has a right to challenge these judgments, and democratic government is entitled to make them. There is no book banning here. The challenged books remain available outside the libraries to anyone who wants them. Indeed, challenges to books may increase their readership.

But that does not seem to have been the case with the two sexually explicit books at Newtown High School. As the school board voted to leave them in the library, the superintendent said one of the books had been checked out only once and the other not at all. The books may not exactly be great literature, and their sexual explicitness may not compare to the pornography to which high school students easily can gain access on the internet.

The lack of student interest in the challenged books invites another challenge to school officials. If there is so little interest in the books, why do they remain in the library? After all, every book that is stocked crowds out a book that isn't stocked. What isn't that considered book banning too?

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While three of Connecticut's five U.S. representatives -- John Larson, Rosa DeLauro, and Jahana Hayes, all Democrats -- voted against the deal by President Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to raise the federal debt ceiling, they almost certainly did so by arrangement with the Democratic House leadership and the White House.

That is, the legislation had enough votes so that the three from Connecticut could be spared, allowing the three House members to strike the usual poses in favor of the needy, whose assistance might be slightly reduced by the legislation.

A compelling question remains unanswered. If this assistance is so crucial, why is essentially infinite debt needed to finance it, transferring the cost to future taxpayers and countries that foolishly buy U.S. government bonds?

Why can't the United States pay its own way in the present and the usual way -- with taxes and economizing elsewhere in the government budget?

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut politics and government for many years. (cpowell@cox.net)