A Looney Bill

“No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session” -- Gideon J. Tucker

For very good reasons, the above quote has been misattributed to political scourge Mark Twain. Connecticut’s legislative session will close June 4. Until that time, Connecticut taxpayers would be wise to guard their life liberty and property from greedy neo-progressives in the General Assembly.

It was Twain who reminded us, “Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.”

Mark Pazniokas of CTMirror tells us, “The Senate Democratic majority passed a bill Wednesday that would provide jobless benefits to strikers in Connecticut, defying Gov. Ned Lamont’s expected veto should the measure pass the House and reach his desk…The bill would provide unemployment insurance to strikers after two weeks out of work, similar to the policies of the only two states with jobless benefits for strikers, New York and New Jersey.”

In the past, “The land of steady habits” has copied neo-progressive programs originating in both states – and California, Governor Gavin Newsom’s home turf. As mayor of San Francisco and later governor of California, Newsom long has been regarded as the tip of the nation’s neo-progressive spear. As a prospective Democrat presidential candidate – Newsom’s gubernatorial term is term-limited – the governor has mellowed somewhat.

Pazniokas notes, “Last year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a potential Democratic candidate for president, vetoed a bill similar to the one passed Wednesday by the [Connecticut] state Senate.”

The pro-union Connecticut Senate Bill 8, Pazniokas reminds us, “is a priority of Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven, a student of the American labor movement who argues that labor laws favor employers, even more so since Donald J. Trump’s return to the White House.”

“This is not putting a thumb on the scale to over-balance the scale for workers,” Looney tells us. “This is to at least reduce the tipping of the scale in the other direction, by at least a bit. That’s really how I see it.”

Connecticut state employee union leaders no doubt agree. Union administrators in the state for decades were tipping election scales in Looney’s favor through direct and indirect campaign contributions and the steady supply of unionized foot soldiers during campaigns to assure that the election scales are slanted in favor of Looney. The Looney bill, some taxpayers and wide-awake political reporters in Connecticut are sure to notice, is a love letter to unions, despite the state Senate Pro Tem’s implausible assertion.

Looney’s real business as a state senate legislative gatekeeper is to maintain order in the Democrat dominated Senate and to assure that unwanted and upsetting Republican Party amendments to bills die aborning, an easy matter in a General Assembly autocratically dominated by Looney in the state Senate and Speaker of the state House Matt Ritter.

Looney’s, pay-union-workers-to-strike bill, Pazniokas tells us, “passed on a 24-11 party-line vote, with Sen. Norm Needleman, D-Essex, not voting. At Looney’s insistence, the Senate narrowly passed a similar bill as a test in 2022, knowing it would not come to a vote in the House.”

But that was then. “House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, said Wednesday that SB 8 would get a vote in the House this year in the final seven days before the legislature reaches its constitutional deadline of midnight on June 4.”

Some notable spend-conscious leaders in the Republican Party – among them the inimitable state Senator Rob Sampson, Senate Minority Leader Steve Harding, and House Republican Leader Vincent Candelora – have long chaffed under one party rule.

Candelora blasted the pro-union Looney bill, Chris Keating of the Hartford Courant tells us. The Looney bill was “written purposely to help unions,” Candelora said: “I think it’s sending the wrong message to the state of Connecticut… we do labor bills every other day in this chamber, but we don’t have conversations about how to grow Connecticut’s economy. So we continue to see bills that are choking out our businesses in the state 0f Connecticut for a very small population of union workers. We have abused our unemployment system in Connecticut.”

And cool-headed Courant reporter Keating notes that Democrats “have been under extreme pressure on the [Looney] bill from union members, who have helped Democrats win elections for decades and can also find candidates to force primaries against incumbent Democrats.”

Looney’s sinecure, one may be certain, is hardened against Connecticut employee union attack.

If politics were a science, one of its indisputable natural laws would be: You always get more of what you finance. If the state of Connecticut finances strikes, the state will reap what it has financed – more strikes, diminished economic activity, and even louder and more insistent calls among neo-progressive Democrats to come to the aid of striking workers.

This is a win-win for Looney, not so much for hard pressed state taxpayers.