Tag Archives: Malloy

Get the Rats Out of the Capitol

After the conclusion of the legislative session each year, I write about the madness of a system that passes 600 bills in the space of 147 days with the majority being voted on in the final 30 days of the session. The most troubling part is that the system is designed to work this way.

A legislator would have to make a superhuman effort to read every bill before casting their vote. In the absence of the time necessary just to read the bill, legislators do what anyone pressed into their position would do: they rely on partisanship and gut instinct as the crutches they need to do their job.

This is madness. In this week’s CT News Junkie column, I write that institutional reforms like four year terms for state senators, term limits, and shorter legislative sessions would change the way laws are made in the state. Check it out.

Orange Alert for Malloy

They say that no good plan survives first contact with reality and today brings the latest indicator that reality isn’t cooperating with Dan Malloy’s re-election plan. The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics ranked Connecticut’s 2014 gubernatorial contest as an Orange Alert in their outlook published this morning:

We’ll call this race LEANS DEMOCRATIC for now, owing to the power of incumbency and Connecticut’s Democratic leanings, but Malloy should have a real race.

None of this should be surprising: after two years of frontloaded pain in the form of tax hikes and making enemies of both the state employees’ and teachers’ unions, it is a bit surprising that Malloy isn’t in the Red Alert zone.

Malloy may be at a tipping point now. On one hand, his approval rating has never been higher. On the other though, the state can’t afford his good concept/bad plan schemes like the car tax cut or Next Generation Connecticut.

With the economy stuck in second gear and predictions for the future cloudy, it is hard to tell whether Malloy is rising or peaking.

In context, Orange Alert isn’t so bad. In some other states, he’d already be waiting for the moving truck to pull up in front of the mansion.

Digging Down, Not Out

The state is already deep in debt, but Gov. Dan Malloy isn’t letting that fact deter him from new spending.

Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy announced $1.5 billion in new borrowing today to improve UConn’s science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) programs over the next ten years.

In the pantheon of things state government could buy, “Next Generation Connecticut” is a relatively attractive option. Those who do not have the skills to compete in the information-technology economy are hardest hit by globalization’s labor arbitrage and innovation’s replacement of labor with capital. Spending money to gain those skills is both sensible and politically popular. At the Capitol, the latter alone is more than sufficient to justify any expense. The presence of the former is simply a perk.

Though economics teaches that the cost of workforce education is already capitalized into every iPhone, Facebook ad, and successful startup, Next Generation Connecticut is probably a done deal. Get the checkbook and a pen.

Approval from the Legislature and the Bonding Commission will not change the underlying fact that the state already has the highest per capita debt in the nation. Compared to other states, Connecticut’s taxes are not too low. In fact state tax collections per capita are the fourth-highest in the nation. The issue is that state spending is out of control and that lack of control crowds out the ability to do other things we might like to do, like spend $1.5 billion at UConn.

Use of the state credit card is allowing us to avoid making these hard choices now. How long can it last? Wait and see.

No Easy Answers on Death Penalty

My CT News Junkie op-ed for the week is on the repeal of Connecticut’s death penalty, which passed this week after a contentious vote in the General Assembly. There are no easy answers whatever your view on the subject.

From the piece:

Dr. William Petit, the lone survivor of the murderous attacks in Cheshire that killed his wife and two daughters, lobbied consistently against abolishing the death penalty — the sentence imposed on the two men convicted of killing his family. After a repeal bill passed the House in 2011, only Dr. Petit’s intervention prevented its passage in the Senate last year. This year, senators were kept away from him until after the votes were cast. 

Petit’s story remains hauntingly vivid in the public eye. The morning after the governor signed the repeal bill, a disc jockey at a Hartford-area rock radio station who rarely strays into anything remotely political commented, saying “they should have forced the governor to sit with Dr. Petit and look him in the eye while he signed it. That will make your hand shake.”

On the other hand, it is appropriate that Dr. Petit and other family members of victims are prominent in this debate because, as Colin McEnroe noted last year, “That’s what abolishing the death penalty means. It means that people we regard as monsters will not be executed.” It is true: people who were sentenced to the worst possible punishment for truly abhorrent crimes will not receive it.

Read the full piece at CT News Junkie.

Will Obama’s Sagging Popularity Impact CT Senate Race?

President Barack Obama’s polling numbers are down – not just nationally but in Connecticut, a state he won by 22 points in 2008. If he can’t recover by November 2012, what will the top-of-the-ticket weakness mean for the down ballot races in Connecticut?

Though it is way too early to tell, I explore whether this might be enough to catapult a Republican into the US Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Joe Lieberman for CT News Junkie. Read the entire piece at that fine site.

A highlight:

If these numbers discourage fellow Democrats, it could set the stage for a stark turnaround from 2008 when Obama’s presence on the ticket created an enormous wave of enthusiasm for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot. The Republican wave that swept the country in 2010 wasn’t enough to propel Linda McMahon into the U.S. Senate against the ever-popular Richard Blumenthal, but McMahon or Shays taking on the lesser-known Murphy, Bysiewicz or Tong with a weakened President on the top of the ticket may well be a different story.