Don Pesci: In Conn., expenditure always rises to exceed income
Connecticut’s gubernatorial “debate” – Where are Lincoln and Douglas when you need them? -- between Ned Lamont and Bob Stefanowski appears to be stuck on a single “how” question: How will Stefanowski implement his campaign pledge to eliminate Connecticut’s income tax, once considered a final solution to the state’s debt problems, now a millstone around the neck of Connecticut.
The media coverage of the debates has been diverting, but most reports have been stuck in a single groove, playing over and over the same starkly abbreviated section of a larger unheard song, rather as if inconvenient questions launched in Lamont’s direction will upset the balanced apple cart that has been constructed over a period of three decades by the Democrat General Assembly hegemon in charge of state finances. Stefanowski has said his pledge to eliminate the income tax within the space of eight years is an aspirational goal that will become operational two years into his gubernatorial administration, which means, yes, Stefanowski will reduce taxes and – much more importantly – reduce spending.
Spending in Connecticut has increased threefold within the space of four governors: present Gov. Dannel Malloy, a progressive Democrat, two Republican governors, Jodi Rell and John Rowland, who, it will be recalled, pledged during his first run for governor to axe the tax – Rowland had second thoughts once he had been elected – and Lowell “instituting an income tax during a recession would be like pouring gas on a fire” Weicker, a nominal Republican who was in fact more Democrat than the Democrat pope of Connecticut at the time, then Sen. and now movie industry big shot Chris Dodd.
Stefanowski's idea is this: Taxing and spending are causally connected. If you increase taxes, spending increases will follow. In fact, that has been the rule in Connecticut’s economy ever since Weicker in 1991 poured gas on the fire. The Weicker tax saved state legislators the necessity of reducing spending, and the gals and guys in the state legislature – dominated for the last 30 years by progressive “we need more” Democrats – are very grateful indeed.
The good times now are gone. Businesses in the state have fled a government that cannot reverse its perilous race towards the yawning abyss; companies in Connecticut are looking towards a barren future under unappeasable tax-starved progressives, which further will reduce company profits – the surplus money that makes it possible for businesses to expand, hire more workers, increase wages and contribute a “fair share” in taxes to Connecticut’s dwindling state coffers. As a consequence of runaway spending, Connecticut’s economic growth is now the laughing stock of the nation.
So then, here are five “how” questions rarely, if ever, put to Lamont by Connecticut’s strangely incurious media:
1) How will Lamont curb spending, permanently and long term, in Connecticut? We have passed the point at which the state’s economy will respond positively to revocable tax credits, or to bribes given to homegrown companies to remain in the state, or to seed money given to outside companies to put down shallow roots in the state’s parched ground. A voting public that has come of age in the age of pointless political effusions made by politicians trolling for votes has, one hopes, developed an internal resistance to political posturing. Since spending is driven by ever increasing taxation – which is, in a nutshell, the whole history of Connecticut since 1991 – would Lamont favor legislation requiring a super-majority in the General Assembly to increase taxes? No effusions please. A “yes” or “no” will be sufficient.
2) Lamont has winkingly proposed a toll tax on heavy trucks in Connecticut to provide money for the transportation fund, which – big surprise – is out of cash – big surprise -- because a Democrat controlled General Assembly has raided dedicated funds across the state to satiate its largely political need to provide salaries and benefits to state workers in return for votes. Border toll installations, as Lamont well knows, cannot be re-erected without costing the state more money in penalties than his tolls on trucks would bring in. Therefore, any tolling in Connecticut must be congesting tolling, which means mucho tolling gantries throughout the state. Assuming the tolling infrastructure has been assembled, how long does Lamont think it would take before tolling is applied to grandma in her 1991 Chevy? One month? Two months?
3) Isn’t the precipitating cause of increased taxation in Connecticut the unhinged appetite among non-Stefanowski progressive legislators to move entrepreneurial capital from the private to the public sphere, the better to satisfy the insatiable appetite of state unions for salary and benefit increases? How will Lamont curb this appetite? Remember, largely owing to the pro-union efforts of Malloy in SEBAC agreements, salary increases are “fixed” until 2027, and Governor Lamont will not be able to use threatened layoffs as a bargaining chip in his negotiations with state unionized workers. Connecticut is one of the few states in the union that sets state worker salaries and benefits through negotiations between its governor and union honchos. Should the legislature present Lamont with a bill that sets salaries and benefits through legislation instead, will he sign it?
4) Over a period of three decades and more, “fixed costs” in the state – those costs over which the General Assembly has unconstitutionally abandoned all control – have steadily increased; so that, presently, the General Assembly has effective governance over only half of its expenditures, according to a Yankee Institute study. How will Lamont increase this figure to, say, 100 percent?
5) Finally, how do Lamont’s policy prescriptions differ from those of the departing governor Malloy, approval rating 21 percent, which is 21 points lower than that of President Trump at 42 percent?
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.
Don Pesci: In New England politics, 'moderate Republican'' is a term of art
An 1874 cartoon by Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly.
VERNON, CONN.
A historical repetition, Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard reminds us, is not possible, because it is not possible to recreate historically the precise conditions that occasioned the event we wish to replicate. Karl Marx, a poor economist but a passable social critic, put it this way: “History repeats itself; the first time as tragedy, and the second time as farce.”
The shadow of a not too amusing farce hovers over a recent Hartford Courant story.
The central premise of the report is this: Charlie Barker of Massachusetts is a successful Republican governor, his approval rating an astonishing 71 percent. Baker is the usual New England moderate Republican, one who is conservative on fiscal issues but liberal on social issues. If only Connecticut were able to field a Charlie Baker-like gubernatorial candidate in the upcoming 2018 race, the GOP might be able to sweep the boards and restore to the gubernatorial office – held for two terms by Dannel Malloy, a progressive governor with an appalling approval rating of 29 percent, the lowest in the nation -- a “moderate” governor such as John Rowland, Jodi Rell or Lowell Weicker.
Here is the paragraph upon which the proposition precariously rests: “In both style and substance, Baker evokes the New England moderate, a breed that traces its lineage from Leverett Saltonstall and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. to John Chafee and Lowell P. Weicker Jr. On the federal level, this type of politico has gone largely extinct in Connecticut following losses by former U.S. Reps. Nancy Johnson and Chris Shays. Since 2008, the state has only sent Democrats to Washington.”
Just to begin with, U.S. Sen. Lowell Weicker was by no means a moderate Republican. His eccentric political posture is signaled very clearly in the boastful title to his own autobiography, Maverick. Before Weicker had been dethroned by former state Atty. Gen. Joe Lieberman, his liberal Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) rating was higher than that of U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, who was neither a Republican nor a moderate. Indeed, during Weicker’s long reign as a U.S. senator, there were many Republicans in Connecticut who seriously doubted that Weicker was a Republican at all.
As governor, Weicker operated as a fiscal progressive, and he strained to the breaking point the compromised affections of fiscally moderate Republicans and Democrats by instituting an income tax. Governors Ella Grasso and Bill O’Neill, both moderate Democrats, were unalterably opposed to an income tax – for the soundest of reasons. They supposed, correctly as it happened, that an income tax would spare legislators in the General Assembly the ordeal of a) reducing spending, and b) disappointing unionized state workers, Connecticut’s fourth branch of government. Following the imposition of an income tax, state spending tripled within the space of three succeeding governors. One can easily imagine Grasso snarling in that portion of Heaven reserved for moderate Democrat Connecticut governors.
Other Republicans mentioned in the paragraph – Governors Rowland and Rell and U.S. House members Nancy Johnson, Rob Simmons and Chris Shays -- were, as advertised, fiscal conservatives and social moderates. But, as the story notes, a doom hung over them, and they were at last displaced by fiscally progressive, socially progressive Democrats.
So then, here is the lesson that ought to be learned by people in Connecticut, both Democrat and Republican, who do not wish to repeat the mistakes of recent history: 1) “moderate” is a term of art deployed by artful politicians who are, in truth, immoderate, and 2) the division between fiscal and social issues is largely imaginary.
Are the urban poor in Connecticut’s larger cities deprived because of economic or social disruption, and which, in this sad turn of events, is the chicken and which the egg? Isn’t it obvious that there are two economies in the state, one urban and one suburban? And there are two social models in the state as well, one urban and one suburban.
But the poor themselves are indivisible; there is not one part of a poor man that is economic and another part that is social. The traditional family in cities as we know it – dad, mom, two and a half children – has been entirely uprooted and destroyed, mostly owing to programs that finance the production and spread of poverty and social disruption. And the consequent pathologies associated with these policies – fatherless families, a high incident of crime, crippling economic dependence on government for the necessities of life, poor educational possibilities – are everywhere apparent for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.
The politician who claims to be fiscally conservative but socially liberal is a prisoner of a false dichotomy – a willing prisoner, a man or a woman who simply refuses to confront the truth that lies, as George Orwell says, right in front of his nose.
And that is why the fiscally conservative-socially liberal politician has been vanishing from our politics. He will be replaced by demagogues who can lie in such a way that even the stones will believe them.
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based essayist.
Don Pesci: The legacy of two autocratic governors
“He deserves a going-out a lot more glorious than the one that the Democrats handed him,” former Connecticut Gov. and Sen. Lowell Weicker said of Gov. Dannel Malloy, who had been disinvited to budget talks between legislative Democrats and Republicans. “The legislature dumped him,” Weicker added. “I don’t think that necessarily stands to the glory of the Democratic legislators.”
Birds of a feather flock together.
There is little difference in governing style between Weicker and departing lame-duck Governor Malloy. Both are autocratic and manipulative; both relied heavily on tax increases to fill budget deficit holes; and both claim not to be guided by popularity polls, lofty governors transcending the grubby hoi-polloi. Both were highly unpopular as governors, Weicker because he muscled an income tax through the General Assembly, and Malloy as the author of both the largest and the second largest tax increases in state history. The tax hike in the current budget – which, for the first time throughout the Malloy administration, bears Republican fingerprints -- is a, relatively speaking, modest $1 billion.
Following his sole term as governor, Weicker declined to run for re-election. After two terms in office, Malloy, disapproval rating 68 percent, has declined to allow over-taxed Nutmeggers to vote against him in a ratifying election. Democrats during upcoming campaigns will be measuring the distance between themselves and Malloy in miles rather than feet.
The absence of an income tax, a levy mightily resisted by such moderate Democrat governors as Ella Grasso, made Connecticut a haven for companies and wealthy residents like Weicker, an heir to the Squibb pharmaceutical fortune. After 1991, the year Weicker pushed an income tax through a dubious General Assembly, companies, perhaps anticipating massive tax and spending increases, sheltered their assets, reduced production, and battened down the hatches, awaiting a national rising tide that would lift all their boats. It never came. Republican Governors John Rowland and Jodi Rell offered ineffective resistance to a resurgent, progressive General Assembly. The recession malingered and recovery was pushed far into the future.
Economic advances during the as yet brief Trump administration – the stock market has increased by $5.2 trillion, about half the national debt that Barack Obama left the Trump administration – point backwards to an anemic progressive regime. Current unemployment is the lowest in 16 years, and President Trump, sometimes a prisoner of his own hyperbole, likely is not overpromising by much when he says “if Congress gives us the massive tax cuts and reform I am asking for, those numbers will grow by leaps and bounds.”
The income tax had been falsely sold to the legislature as a revenue stabilizer. Not true – the income tax is more volatile than relatively stable sales or consumption taxes. Since 1980, income-tax revenue in Connecticut has increased a whopping 28 percent, yet the state continues to suffer from repetitive deficits. That is because income taxes are more susceptible to wild swings during market cycles. In the income-tax period, state expenditures rose 138 percent, while income grew only 86 percent between 1980 and 2016.
This volatility has primed reckless spending. Income-tax revenue has decreased in Connecticut during cyclical downturns while spending has increased, creating repetitive deficits. The spending imperative and the disinclination to cut spending long-term and permanently leads to other dislocations: the sweeping of so-called lockboxes and dedicated funds; the cowardice of legislators who, heavily dependent on union support for re-election, continue to charge the future to pay for unsupportable union salaries and pensions; municipalities hooked on state patronage; and the flight of businesses to less rapacious states – only part of the economic evils let loose when the General Assembly opened the lid to Weicker’s income tax.
In the Greek myth, when Pandora, warned not to so, opened the jar given to her as a gift from the gods, all the imprisoned evils of the world flew out, hope alone remaining in its very bottom.
Hope springs eternal.
This year, the General Assembly produced a fusion product after a Republican budget had been adopted by astonished legislators. The latest budget iteration bears unmistakable Republican fingerprints but is, never-the-less, a Democrat product. Republicans hadn’t the numbers in the General Assembly to deny Democrats substantial tax increases. They did successfully insert a Constitutional spending cap provision that had been a sweetener in Weicker’s initial 1991 income tax proposal; the cap, state Atty. Gen. General George Jepsen ruled several months ago, was never operative because the legislature had failed to provide requisite definitions. The current budget provides the definitions, engaging the cap. Republicans were also successful in capping bonding. A provision that requires legislative assent for additional dollars provided to unions in negotiations with the governor restores minimal legislative authority over budgets. Republicans dropped a measure in their own approved budget, vetoed by Malloy, that would have, if adopted, changed from contract to statute the process by which unions, in collaboration with governors, establish salaries and benefits. Connecticut is among only four states that surrender legislative authority over budgets to union negotiations with compliant governors.
Budgets shape the future; so do political campaigns. Two questions will be decided in the upcoming 2018 campaign: 1) What will the future bring, more of the same or beneficial change, and 2) Do Republicans know how to campaign?
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based essayist.
Don Pesci: Connecticut awaits a Bismarck
Otto von Bismarck, who unified the German states in the 19th Century.
The usual gubernatorial campaign in Connecticut begins with brave platitudes and ends, once office has been achieve, with whimpering platitudes.
We recall a triumphant Gov. Lowell Weicker warning during his gubernatorial campaign that instituting an income tax in the midst of a recession would be like “pouring gas on a fire,” then, having achieved office, hiring as his Office of Policy Management Director Bill Cibes, who ran an honest but losing Democratic primary campaign by agitating for an income tax. Before you could say, “Let’s pour gas on the fire,” Connecticut had its income tax. State businesses have taken note of the ungovernable growth in spending and now have their eyes fixed on the exit signs.
Republican Gov. John Rowland was wafted into office on a pledge to repeal Weicker’s incendiary income tax; once in office, the pledge was quickly moved to Rowland’s back burner, where it expired from lack of air.
Gov. Jodi Rell, who replaced Rowland when he was sent to jail for the first time for corrupt activity, proved to be an imperfect “firewall” preventing progressive Democrats in the General Assembly from piling up debt through reckless spending. Having declined to run for a third term, Rell passed the gubernatorial reins to then Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy and retired to Florida, far from the hurly burly of tax increases and spending binges.
Enter Governor Malloy, who imposed on Connecticut the largest and second largest tax increases in state history, having hinted in his own campaign that the weight of debt in Connecticut would be more or less evenly distributed between state employee unions and taxpayers.
One political commentator in Connecticut, weary with all the folderol, has now declared war on platitudes and artfully misleading campaigns. Other journalists committed to telling it like it is may follow suit.
“There may be many differences between Republican and Democratic candidates,” Kevin Rennie tells us. “One unhappy trait, however, unites them. They all want to be governor and no one wants to say how they would solve the state's most pressing problems. With the state facing a $5 billion budget deficit this is the ideal moment to unveil detailed, serious solutions before an engaged public. Let a thousand ideas bloom. If they possess the talent to be a successful governor, tell us what you would do right now, in a forbidding hour for Connecticut.”
Prussian and then German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck put such misgivings more succinctly: “A statesman cannot create anything himself. He must wait and listen until he hears the steps of God sounding through events; then leap up and grasp the hem of His garment.”
In progressive Connecticut, belief in God waxes and wanes in proportion to the trust that one places in blind fate and cowardly politicians; today, public faith in Connecticut politicians is at its lowest ebb. We pray to politicians when times are good and to God when politicians are bad, which is often. Bismarck again: “People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.”
And Bismarck again: “Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.” Official denials are rarely convincing, such as: “Just as he said during the 2014 campaign ‘there is no deficit, there will be no deficit,’ the governor has no clothes,” said House Minority Leader Themis Klarides in October, 2016. The state’s present biennial deficit, as Rennie notes, is hovering around $5 billion.
The elections in 2018 promise to be somewhat different for a series of reasons: 1) progressivism – the notion that if government is good, bigger government is better – has been a conspicuous failure; 2) mindful of Napoleon’s advice – when your enemy is making mistakes, don’t interfere – leading Republicans in Connecticut are fully prepared to exploit in a general election the opposing party’s tactical and strategic errors on tax increases; 3) in the long run, Republicans are committed to substantial reform, including wresting political power from unions entrenched within a solicitous administrative state, while the Democratic Party has been for a half century defenders of the status quo; 4) it is true that there is no Bismarck in the Republican Party gubernatorial line-up for governor so far, but the Democratic Party's gubernatorial roster screams “more of the same,” and its program for the future promises to be chock full of Bismarckian “official denials” that many political watchers will regard as desperate, despicable and laughably untrue.
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist whose essays often appear in New England Diary.
Don Pesci: Weicker back with more incoherence; Hartford's dilemma and opportunity
Downtown Hartford, once famed as the "Insurance Capital of the World.''
-- Photo by Sage Ross
Former Connecticut Gov. Lowell Weicker surfaced recently and both condemned, unwittingly, and complimented lame duck Gov. Dannel Malloy.
Every so often, Mr. Weicker, intent on working the dents out of his legacy, pokes his head above the fox hole, scans enemy territory for a friendly face, and spills some political beans. Ken Dixon of the Connecticut Post asked Mr. Weicker to comment on Mr. Malloy’s decision to pack it in, and he obliged. What Weicker said was, as usual, confusing and contradictory.
Mr. Malloy’s decision to withdraw his name for re-nomination, Mr. Weicker said, “unties Malloy’s hands.” Really? Malloy’s hands have not been tied during his entire term in office. All the heights of power in Connecticut’s government – the governor’s office, the General Assembly, the state’s constitutional offices, Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation, important courts appointments made by Mr. Malloy – have been in Democrats' hands since Mr. Malloy had first been elected governor. Indeed, so untied were Mr. Malloy’s hands that he felt comfortable denying Republican leaders in the General Assembly any voice in union contract negotiations with SEBAC, the union conglomerate authorized to fashion contracts with the governor; and when budget deliberations began during Malloy’s first term and second terms, he shooed Republicans out of the negotiation room and slammed the door in their faces.
One thinks of Cromwell marching into the British Parliament and shouting, “Gentlemen, go home!” There is not a hint of “tied hands” in any of this?
Mr. Weicker then added that, were he governor, “I would to the best of my ability deny the spending spree in the legislature. We’ve got to stop spending. That’s our huge problem. Every legislator has their pet project. We’re probably in the worst financial condition of any state in the union, and we’re known for that, rather than being the wealthiest.” He rounded out his thoughts, such as they were, by commending Mr. Malloy, whose approval rating in Connecticut is among the lowest in the nation, at about 28 percent: “Dan’s had two terms, which is heavy-duty in Connecticut. I would say he still wants to leave a positive legacy. I admire the man. I like him. He’s a good governor.”
So let’s see: in 20 months, Mr. Malloy will have been in office for two terms; he is the author of both the largest and second largest tax increases in Connecticut history, outperforming even Weicker on this score; the Connecticut legislature, dominated by Democrats for a half century or more, has, even by Weicker’s reckoning, spent the state into a hole; state deficits are about what they were during Weicker’s first term in office – which, everyone will recall, necessitated the imposition of an income tax; Connecticut is “in the worst financial condition of any state in the union” Mr. Weicker pronounces, adding, implausibly, “I admire the man. I like him. He’s a good governor.” What work, if any, does the word “good” do in that sentence?
In Mr. Weicker's mind -- not that anyone need bother too much with Mr. Weicker's mind -- spending is not a function of taxation, and taxation is not a function of spending. That is why Mr. Weicker can say, both and at the same time: a) spending is a problem; if I were governor, I would put a stop to spending, and b) Malloy, who has not done this, is, nevertheless, an admirable governor. Malloy and Weicker have increased spending because they increased taxes. These two operations being detached in Weicker's mind, Malloy is a “good governor.”
Mr. Malloy is a good governor for much the same reason Mr. Weicker was a good governor: facing deficits, both raised taxes permanently – inflicting permanent damage upon the state, while satisfying progressive legislators and unions. Mr. Weicker likes Mr. Malloy because Mr. Malloy is like Mr. Weicker.
Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin -- who, as chief counsel to Mr. Malloy, learned his politics at the feet of the master --is cut from the same progressive cloth as Mr. Weicker and Mr. Malloy. In fact, Connecticut’s capital city, is a microcosm of the state. Whatever is wrong in Hartford is wrong in the state; whatever is right in Hartford is right in the state.
Hartford has been a one-party town for more than 50 years. The presence of the Republican Party in the city as a political force is a whisper in the wind. Mr. Bronin replaced Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra, who, before leaving office, gifted the incoming mayor with a financial mess and a new ballpark that will be losing millions of dollars two years out from opening day. The school system in Hartford, laboring under a court order that requires schools in the city to maintain an “equitable” ratio of 25 percent whites to 75 percent minorities, is in continuing crisis.
A charter school in Hartford that provides to African-Americans and Hispanics an education that does not require remedial courses for those of its students who graduate and go to college has been forced to turn away African-American and Hispanic students because it must preserve a 25-75 percent mixture of white and non-white students that a Connecticut court whimsically considers constitutional. No one in the city even blinks at this obvious example of court-ordered educational discrimination against minority mothers who want a better education for their children.
Hartford derives its revenue from property taxes, but there is a hitch: about fifty percent of the property in Hartford cannot be taxed. When the city wades into red ink, it makes an effort – only partly and temporarily successful much of the time – to reduce costs by reducing expenditures and begging state union workers for givebacks. In both the city and the state, union givebacks have been insufficient to balance budgets without additional revenue increases. Mr. Bronin’s present budget is running a deficit in part because savings from past “givebacks” have not been given back. The budget Mr. Bronin just presented relies on a generous gift from the state’s lame-duck governor than may not materialize. Both Hartford and state budgets are “balanced” by revenue projections that may never materialize.
Here is Mr. Bronin’s dilemma in a nutshell: He cannot increase taxes without incurring business flight and a consequent diminution of revenue, and he cannot – dare not – institute permanent cuts in spending by courageously confronting powerful unions. Yet spending continues to outpace revenue collections. For this reason, both he and Malloy find themselves in the same position as Mr. Micawber in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery."
Hartford has an insuperable advantage over the state. The city, as a default strategy, can and likely will declare bankruptcy, which will have the beneficial effect of forcing Mr. Bronin to do what he, Mr. Malloy and Mr. Weicker were loathed to do – cut spending by reducing contractual “fixed-cost” expenditures.
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based political writer.
Don Pesci: Abe Lincoln and the trials of John Rowland
By DON PESCI
VERNON, Conn.
Former Connecticut Gov. John Rowland, now a former radio talk show host, may have been “guilty,” in a metaphorical sense, of using his position to advance the political interest of one particular candidate over another. It has been said that Mr. Rowland had subjected poor Andrew Roraback, at the time a Republican Party candidate for the U.S. House in the 5th District, to a severe interrogation on his radio program, formerly called “Church And State.”
Since being appointed to Connecticut’s Superior Court by Gov. Dannel Malloy, Mr. Roraback has moved out of the political into the less contentious judicial arena. Apparently, Mr. Roraback had suffered no permanent harm, and losing a Hartford Courant endorsement to his Democratic opponent certainly cost the socially progressive Republican Party endorsed candidate more negative votes than Mr. Rowland’s barbed questions.
Mr. Rowland’s preferred candidate for the slot, it has been said, was Lisa Wilson Foley. At the time Mr. Rowland was hard grilling Mr. Roraback, the talk show host was employed as a consultant for Apple Rehab, a business owned by Mrs. Foley’s husband. Mr. Rowland implausibly claims he was assisting Mrs. Foley’s campaign on the side as an “unpaid consultant.”
Similar impostures – though news of them may shock the willfully ignorant – have been deployed in the news business from time immemorial. Abe Lincoln came very near to fighting a duel with one of his outraged political competitors when it was discovered that editorials in a Republican paper had been written on the sly by Mr. Lincoln; actually, one of two of the newspaper pieces had been written by his intended wife. Because it would have been ungentlemanly for Mr. Lincoln to involve his fiancée in the quarrel, he accepted responsibility for the satires but characteristically refused to issue an apology.
Eventually, the matter was settled outside the law courts, without either of the antagonists having used against each other the large military broadswords Mr. Lincoln had selected as his choice of weapon. Mr. Lincoln, who towered over his opponent, hacked off a tree branch with his sword while the two stood facing each other on Blood Island, and the display of superior reach led to an amicable resolution.
Charlie Morse, for many years the chief political writer of The Hartford Courant and an unabashed Lowell Weicker-liker, produced tons of columns favorable to then Sen. Lowell Weicker, one of the papers most pampered political pets. The Courant, during Mr. Weicker’s push for an income tax, was solidly in Mr. Weicker’s gubernatorial corner; and so was Mr. Morse, who left The Courant to work on Mr. Weicker’s campaign – even though he continued his column in the pro-Weicker Courant.
There are no laws criminalizing journalistic bad habits. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects partisan and non-partisan journalists alike. Even if the accusation against Mr. Lincoln had been correct, he easily could have won his case in court by draping across his chest the breastplate of The First Amendment – or at least that portion of it that guarantees freedom of political speech.
The freedom-of-religious-expression clause in the very same amendment is not as hotly defended by the media because modern journalism tends to be instinctively anti-clerical.
Some of us who understand why a watchful media should resist authoritarian displays of power cannot for the life of us understand why the same media should be so willing to bed down with gray-headed incumbents whose first term in office coincided with the arrival of Noah’s Arc on Mount Ararat. Surely in our day, incumbent politicians are much more powerful than the ministers and priests who now preside over the "Bare Ruined Choirs''.
Though Mr. Rowland’s defense attorneys have focused in a motion to dismiss on the charges brought against him, the First Amendment conceivably could be brought into play as a sleeper defense during the promised Rowland trial -- “promised” because it is always possible the trial may be ditched in favor of some plea agreement never made public between Mr. Rowland’s high priced Washington attorneys and prosecutors. Neither Mr. Rowland nor Mrs. Wilson-Foley were practicing politicians at the time Mr. Rowland, essentially a journalist, allegedly “favored” Mrs. Wilson-Foley, an aspiring politician, on his radio program. This means that no political favors either way could have been exchanged for allegedly “corrupt” money received by Mr. Rowland.
It is still very early in “the judicial process.” During Lincoln’s day, matters were adjudicated in courts of law, and instructive precedents were established. Nowadays, justice itself hangs from “process” nooses. Deals are made in private between Star Chamber prosecutors and defense lawyers, and precedence is a stranger at the hidden proceedings. Grand Juries, many political commentators understand, are Star Chamber proceedings, and Grand Jury findings released to the media are always highly prejudicial. They should be taken by a truly non-partisan critical media with tons of salt.
Don Pesci is a writer who lives in Vernon, Conn. He may be e-mailed atdonpesci@att.net.