Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Achievement First Photo Presidential cabinet members, we all know, serve at the pleasure of the president.  For some odd reason, the Attorney General’s office is supposed to stand as an exception to the rule, possibly because many Americans do not wish the institutions over which the Attorney General presides, such as the FBI, to be used to punish in a partisan manner the president’s political opponents. That is more often a consummation devoutly to be wished than a practical reality. There is little indication that President Barack Obama’s Attorney General from 2009 to 2015, Eric Holder, the first U.S. Attorney General in history to be held in both criminal and civil contempt by the US House, was at any time during the Obama administration other than a true and faithful servant of his liege lord. Other cabinet members, however, are expected to pull at the partisan oars, and this is as it should be. It seems reasonable to ask – what is the pleasure of the president-elect co...

Way late, lame duck Governor Dannel Malloy has discovered that the distribution of state funds to educational districts in Connecticut is " a hot mess . ”  In the Republican non- partisan budget that passed both Houses of the General Assembly recently, the method by which the state ferries education tax money to municipalities has not been changed. That method of tax redistribution is wholly a product of the Democratic Party, which has maintained control of the General Assembly – the law making body in the state – for nearly half a century.

If magnet and Open Choice schools were less successful in providing Hartford’s children, mostly minorities, with a quality education, or if public schools in the city were as successful as charter schools operating elsewhere in the state, Superior Court Judge Marshall Berger would not now be confronted with a Hobson’s Choice. Presently, the judge must decide whether a quality education for minority students or the enforcement of a court ordered integration model that is on its face absurd best furthers the public good, a decision generally made by legislatures rather than courts.

It’s been 228 years since Alexander Hamilton, seeking to allay fears that the national judiciary would swallow up the other two branches of government, wrote in The Federalist Number 78 that the Supreme Court, provided it observed what has come to be known as the separation of powers,  would under the Constitution be “the weakest of the three departments of power; that it can never attack with success either of the other two; and that all possible care is requisite to enable it to defend itself against their attacks. It equally proves, that though individual oppression may now and then proceed from the courts of justice, the general liberty of the people can never be endangered from that quarter; I mean so long as the judiciary remains truly distinct from both the legislature and the Executive.” The Supreme Court has long far exceeded Hamilton’s modest expectations, and appellate courts have followed suit. A headline in the Hartford Courant demonstrates how far courts hav...