Don Pesci: Can Lamont govern after COVID-19?
Ned Lamont
VERNON, Conn.
“But I have promises to keep’’ – Robert Frost, in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’’
In a recent CTMirror story, “In third year, still an uncertain relationship for Lamont and legislators”, reporter Mark Pazniokas harvests the following quote from Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont:
“Gov. Ned Lamont has had two very different years in office. During the first, he had to contend with the Connecticut General Assembly, but not COVID-19. During the second, he faced COVID, but not lawmakers.
“Any guess which he found easier?
“’Obviously, this last year has been very different. I mean, the legislature went home. That was amazing. We got a lot done,’ Lamont said recently. Then laughing, he added, ‘You know, I kind of liked it.’
“A joke, perhaps.”
The joke, perhaps, may have been intended to raise a chuckle among Connecticut’s legacy media but, if the present Coronavirus trajectory holds true, Lamont will soon find that he must negotiate with a reinvigorated General Assembly, a body controlled by progressives on the hunt for new taxes. That the General Assembly is controlled by progressives is, some commentators in the state are beginning to relize, no joke.
The state legislature, we all know, has not assembled for about a year, and recently the General Assembly, one of the oldest political bodies in the nation, has voted, virtually of course, to extend Lamont’s ill defined “emergency powers” another three or four months. The Democratic- dominated General Assembly voted, in other words, to continue to make itself irrelevant for a few additional months. The open-ended extension benefits two political bodies – the state’s Democratic governor and the long recessed Democratic-dominated General Assembly that has easily escaped voter accountability for the last year.
The autocratic powers currently wielded by Lamont simply dispense with what we here in the “Constitution State” used to call representative democracy. Lamont has for more than a year been given the opportunity to play Caesar with Connecticut’s budget and its once free economic marketplace. Even Caesar, Rome’s first important imperator, left Rome’s burgeoning marketplace relatively free of autocratic control.
Caesarism has always been a less troublesome mode of governing for chief executives than constitutional republicanism, which tends to be rather raucous, transparent and messy, involving as it does the consent of the governed by means of proportional representation. But even during the Rome of Julius Caesar, republicanism was always churning under the surface, and it’s doubtful that the republican afflatus, operative in Connecticut ever since revolutionary republicans of 1776 threw off the British monarchy, has been effectively extinguished during the plague year.
As herd-immunity increases and Coronavirus disappears, republican government in all its pristine glory once again looms like a giant over the horizon. There are some political leaders in Connecticut, as well as some thoughtless and timid members of Connecticut’s legacy media, captives of incumbency, who suspect that Lamont will not be up to the job of negotiating successfully with a legislature dominated by progressives, whose chief ambition just now is to increase state revenue, again, by dunning millionaires, instituting new road based taxes and extending, once again, the borders of state spending. The more they get, the more they want. The more they want, the better they feel. So, eat millionaires at every meal.
Historically, most progressive taxes – the federal income tax began as a 1 percent tax on wealth accumulation to pay off Civil War debt – trickle down to the broad middle class. A quick glance at pay stubs will convince even accomplished masters of progressive propaganda that a progressive tax, once levied, becomes less progressive as it descends more broadly to the middle class, thus temporarily satiating the ravenous appetite of special interests dear to progressives and relieving legislators facing mounting debts of the necessity to cut spending.
As the Coronavirus plague recedes at some point in the near future, everyone in the state who regards face masks, however useful, as a sign of subordination to an unrepresentative and overreaching chief executive and a useless legislature may be inspired to create on the state Capitol lawn an auto-de-fé in which their masks may be publicly burned – oh happy day! -- much in the way bras were burned in the 1960s by feminists liberating themselves from oppressive social norms.
None of us in The Constitution State should emerge from Hell with empty hands. Constitutions are the indispensable foundations of republican, representative government. And the further unmoored politicians become from their foundations, the more piratical they will be.
In this the winter of our discontent…
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Frost’s promises that must be kept, he makes clear in other of his poems, are the hitching posts of the American Republic.
Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.
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