Chris Powell: Time to open intrinsically corrupt casino business to competitive bidding

The Mohegan Sun casino, in Uncasville, Conn.

— Photo by JJBers

Connecticut's two casino Indian tribes complained last week to a General Assembly committee that their rival MGM, operator of the new casino just over the Massachusetts line in Springfield, had unfairly induced the U.S. Interior Department not to approve the tribes' plan for an "interceptor" casino just south of Springfield in East Windsor.

It sure looks like MGM is a little too well-connected with the Trump administration. But the tribes are laughably hypocritical to complain about someone else's political influence. For the casino duopoly the tribes enjoy in Connecticut is itself the result of the worst sort of political corruption.

In 1993 and 1994 Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. awarded the duopoly to the tribes and in return one of the tribes donated $2 million to a charity the governor chaired and controlled, the Special Olympics. Then the Special Olympics hired several of Weicker's assistants, giving them comfortable places to land as their administration ended. Since that crooked deal everyone else has been locked out of the casino business in Connecticut.

Built on licensing and government grants of monopoly that are seldom put out to bid, the casino business is the most politically corrupt in the country. Of course this nurtures arrogance, since from their testimony last week the tribes seem to resent that they're not the only ones who can buy and twist politicians, that their monopoly doesn't extend that far.

It's another reason to enact the bill proposed by Bridgeport legislators to open Connecticut's casino business to competitive bidding.

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CAN AIRPORT BE RENAMED?: Bradley International Airport, in Windsor Locks, has been improving because of the creation of the Connecticut Airport Authority to operate it independently of the state Transportation Department and because state government has put a lot more money into the airport, recognizing its potential for economic development.

Now the airport authority is thinking of changing the name of the airport to convey better its growing reach with more long-distance flights -- maybe something like "Southern New England International Airport" or, more candidly, "Avoid the New York and Boston Crush International Airport."

But the airport authority should note that an attempt to change Bradley's name back in 1981 was a disaster.

Gov. Ella T. Grasso, a Windsor Locks's native daughter, had just died, and her town's state representative, Cornelius P. O'Leary, suggested renaming the airport in her honor. Military veterans groups quickly objected, noting that the airport had been named for an Army Air Force fighter pilot, Lt. Eugene M. Bradley, who had been killed in a plane crash near the airport when it was an air base in 1941.

Windsor Locks's local newspaper, the Journal Inquirer, demolished the renaming idea when it located Bradley's widow in Texas and she visited Connecticut to assist the veterans. They greeted her triumphantly at the airport named for her late husband, and O'Leary, realizing he was beaten, graciously withdrew his proposal.

All Grasso got named after her in her hometown was a street and a conference room.

O'Leary moved up in politics anyway, becoming state senator and a state college dean, perhaps in part because he was politic enough to restrict to friends his brilliantly ironic insight about the airport affair: that, in remarrying, Lieutenant Bradley's widow had changed her name too.


Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: Supreme Court is now almost entirely political

The contention over Supreme Court nominations like President Trump's of Judge Neil Gorsuch and President Obama's of Judge Merrick Garland has become so bitter because decades ago political liberals began using the court as a super-legislature and political conservatives could not resist the urge to follow suit. Maybe now the country can acknowledge at last that the Supreme Court is no longer a court at all -- that, as newspaper columnist Finley Peter Dunne's fictional Irish bartender, Martin J. Dooley, opined more than a century ago, "The Supreme Court follows the election returns."

If liberals are in power, the court somehow discovers that the Constitution requires enactment of every liberal nostrum, and if conservatives are in power, the court requires every important legal question to be answered favorably to conservatives. Connecticut's two U.S. senators, Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, both liberal Democrats, confirmed as much this week upon Gorsuch's nomination, both expressing skepticism if not quite outright opposition, though not one question yet had been put to the nominee. It is enough that Gorsuch is considered a conservative.

"I want a mainstream judge, not an ideological partisan," Murphy said, and Blumenthal echoed him, as if they too aren’t ideological partisans and wouldn’t settle for a nominee who was a flaming liberal like themselves. Similarly, of course, when President Obama, a liberal Democrat, nominated liberal judges, conservative Republicans bleated about wanting "mainstream" nominees even as they would have been delighted with flaming conservative nominees.

Democratic senators are incensed about Gorsuch's nomination because they feel that the Republican majority in the Senate stole the current vacancy on the court from President Obama, refusing to consider Garland and maintaining the vacancy for most of a year until the presidential election changed control of the White House.

This was indeed crude politics, but appointments to high federal office are actually the Senate's own; the president's power is limited to nomination. Besides, Democratic senators this week played their own crude politics, refusing to attend committee meetings so they could stall some of the president’s Cabinet nominees. As for the legal and political issue believed to underlie the struggle over Gorsuch's nomination -- abortion -- it was the political left that wanted to constitutionalize it with the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade, in 1973, rather than leave the issue as a legislative prerogative of the states.

Since the country remains divided on abortion, no one should be surprised if the political reversal in Washington prompts attempts to de-constitutionalize the issue, especially since even some legal scholars who favor abortion rights acknowledge that the Roe decision was bad law.

But in the ideological hatefulness that dominates politics today, anyone who tries to make fair distinctions risks getting lynched by one side or the other.

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Not everything in Connecticut is crumbling. Bradley International Airport, in Windsor Locks, is steadily improving, and the other day Gov Dan. Malloy and the Connecticut Airport Authority announced that another airline will join Bradley's stable. The airline, Spirit, a no-frills carrier, will fly from Bradley to Orlando, Fla., once a day starting in April, and, starting in June, once a day to Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Spirit also will offer spring and summer flights from Bradley to Myrtle Beach, S.C., four days a week starting in April. The airport authority will extend $400,000 to the airline in promotional expenses and fee waivers, not a big bribe. Now all state government has to do is figure out how to get Spirit's Connecticut passengers to come back from down south.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.