David Collins: The Connecticut Republican Party just deflated
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May 5—I will say right up front that I don't much like the way Gov. Ned Lamont has presided over Connecticut.
He was born rich and entitled, and that alone might not be something to hold against him, except that it explains a lot about the princelike way he has governed, contemptuous of laws meant to ensure open and transparent government.
I don't believe he is dishonest. He doesn't even need to take a salary. But, because of his arrogant management style, he has presided blindly over what appears to be a government of monumental corruption, with senior administration managers, who didn't heed warnings about no-bid contracts, jumping ship as federal authorities probe literally hundreds of millions of dollars in state spending.
And yet, given the news this week from the Supreme Court, I'll probably vote for him again.
Indeed, the dishonest Supreme Court justices, who swore under oath that Roe v. Wade is settled law, have, with their leaked decision on abortion, shaken the world and turned much of settled U.S. politics on its head, especially here in Connecticut.
The justices, if they proceed to strike down Roe, will almost certainly push fence-sitting Democrats who dislike Lamont into voting for him, even as we hold our noses.
It's one more thing in life that will be handed to him.
I doubt I am alone among Democrats or independents who may have flirted with voting for a Republican, who will now recoil from anyone or anything the Connecticut GOP puts forward.
In striking down Roe, the Supreme Court will become a nightmare come to life for Republicans who have created such an incongruous voter base, mixing tax- and regulation-cutting business leaders with evangelicals, Trumpists, white supremacists, even insurrectionists.
It's pretty clear that the extremist religious high court they've created, once it has toppled Roe, will use the same flimsy legal foundation for eliminating a range of modern rights Americans have come to take for granted, from the use of birth control to gay marriage.
More important, the court is pushing decisions down to the states, which means Republicans in blue states like Connecticut can no longer argue that their party's stand on social issues are national in nature, not local.
I need to know now more than ever that the people I vote for in all offices in Connecticut are going to do all they can to protect us from the religion-driven edicts of a high court engineered by Republicans, who are successfully using gerrymandered votes to impose the social will of the minority on the majority.
Until now, many Americans could feel safe voting for Republicans who paid abortion-challenging lip service to the evangelicals in their base, assured that Roe v. Wade would continue to guarantee abortion rights.
But as Heather Cox Richardson — the estimable American historian whose daily Letters from an American put news events in historical perspective — wisely noted this week about the leaked Roe decision: "The dog has caught the car."
Republicans will have to live with the unpopular fallout of the court they've created.
And the rest of us, I believe, should be sure not to give them an inch more.
In this new world in which we can no longer count on the most basic rights of privacy over our love lives and health care, I won't give anyone from the party that has created this social crisis an inch of credibility.
I think of Ned Lamont, at heart, as more of a business-oriented Republican, happier subsidizing rich corporate interests like utility behemoth Eversource than helping poor constituents that struggle in the heart of Connecticut's ailing cities.
His political generosity is cynical, like giving bonuses to state workers before they retire, to make sure they remember him at the polls.
But he's a Democrat, and at the end of the day he is going to have to go to the mat and fight for the values held by those in his base, not pander to the gun-toting, abortion-protesting, white supremacist haters that the Republicans have brought into their tent.
The political earth moved this week in Connecticut, and I would venture to suggest that a lot of the state's Republican Party slipped into the great new divide.
This is the opinion of David Collins.
