On rat patrol as clock ticks to midnight
They’re furry. They scurry. They work with the clock and the torrent of legislation during the waning hours of the General Assembly in the hopes that reporters won’t notice them.
Because if we don’t see the rats, gentle taxpayers, it’s unlikely that you will, until it’s too late.
Sure, “rats” isn’t a politically correct term, but it’s the only four-letter word I feel like using in print to describe extra-specialinterest legislation. Yeah, I was on rat patrol. As the clock wound speedily to 12:01 a.m. Thursday, while the last night of the legislative session became the first morning of the rest of our lives, bills were approved, abandoned, stripped of meaning, rewritten or tossed into the briny deep.
Most of the time from 7 p.m. until just after midnight, I sat in the Capitol Press Room in front of two TVs. On the left was the state House of Representatives. On the right was the Senate.
I’d toggle the volume up and down, honing in on the thin veneer of what was actually going on amid the rivalries and revelries of the last night of the 2019 session.
It’s the only way to be in two places at once to cover lawmakers who are not anywhere at all, to garble an old Firesign Theater comedy routine.
Amid the hubbub, you get a true sense of urgency. Lawmakers are desperate to pull their initiatives out of the fire. Lobbyists mostly want to keep legislation in flames.
Republican minorities have true strength because they can honestly, sincerely talk about anything — don’t call them filibusters! — until the cows come home, get milked, drop calves, and head for your local fastfood establishment.
In typical Senate fashion, they started at around noon, debated a few bills, then recessed at about 3:50, with the verbal expectation of Majority Leader Bob Duff that they would gather again at around 4:30. Wrong. Senate Democrats had a few hours to do some horse trading with Republicans and House Democrats.
As Democrats say in the House, Republicans are the opposition, but the Senate is the enemy.
The Senate got back to work at about 7:30. In a few minutes, yet another bill on the crumbling foundations of eastern Connecticut came up for debate. “I’m not comfortable at this time to embark on a third effort,” said veteran Sen. John Kissel, one of the eight who voted against it, to 33 in favor. The bill heads to the governor.
A few minutes later, Sen. Carlo Leone, D-Stamford, co-chairman of the Transportation Committee, offered up the DOT’s annual omnibus bill of mostly technical changes — but with the naming of roads and bridges after dead people — referring to it appropriately as the “aircraft carrier.”
Conservative Sen. Rob Sampson of Wolcott wanted to make sure there was no provision in there requiring headgear on motorcycles, to which Leone replied that was in another bill, which died.
Downstairs in the House, there were a couple of judicious periods of “standing at ease” holding up final action on Senate bills until assurances from the third floor filtered down.
By 8:15, Rep. Chris Rosario of Bridgeport was speaking about a bill that would have provided for free phone calls for prison inmates. He has an incarcerated brother.
“People shouldn’t be penalized twice, if someone made a mistake in life, in order to connect with a loved one,” Rosario said in one of those brief ceremonial debates that was going to precede the death of a bill, when House Majority Leader Matt Ritter pulled it from debate. “This is an unconscionable scam,” Ritter agreed, then terminated the bill.
When Secretary of the State Denise Merrill visited the Press Room to complain about the maneuver, the truth of the matter was: if you depend on legislation to pass on the last day of the session, you have already lost.
The state gets $1.2 million a year in a deal with the phone provider, which makes $5.2 million. By now it was 9:45 and Rep. Rosa Rebimbas, R-Naugatuck, ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, was near apoplexy, for being bypassed in the debate.
So she offered a fourminute diatribe on criminals, victims’ rights and the revenue gouged from inmates’ families that would have earned her some street cred with the conservative, Koch brothers-fueled American Legislative Exchange Council.
“How about the family of the victim that didn’t have a chance to say goodbye?” said Rebimbas, a lawyer.
At this point in the evening, House members were trying to get the Senate to include legislation on the inevitable, huge consent calendar of 45 bills that Duff would read off like an old-fashioned tobacco auctioneer just before midnight with virtually no transparency on what they were beyond identification numbers.
But first, Republicans quietly killed a bill that would have automatically registered people to vote. When Secretary of the State Denise Merrill visited the Press Room to complain about the maneuver, the truth of the matter was: if you depend on legislation to pass on the last day of the session, you have already lost.
Up on the raised dais in the ornate House of Representatives, veteran Rep. Bob Godfrey was standing, running the show, when a lawmaker asked to introduce a political science student from their district for a traditional round of applause.
“You may be studying political science.” He quipped, “but here is where political science is an art.”