How to beat (and cheat) a deadline

Here’s your General Assembly in its mercifully dying hours.

The second hand of the clock behind Speaker of the House Joe Aresimowicz shows it’s 11:50 p.m., 10 minutes before the statutory riot gate slams shut on this gold-domed bodega called the 2018 session of the legislature.

Five minutes earlier, upstairs, the Senate, adjourned sine die (SIN-ey DEE-ey, meaning “without a date” a coincidental reference to my life before marriage).

So, I am slightly amused as Rep. Mitch Bolinsky, R-Newtown, prattles away about a bill that would allow minors to donate blood. First, it’s a rare occasion when a non-leader is allowed to introduce legislation on the floor.

Second, it’s an empty exercise because there is no way the bill can make it up to the Senate. They’ve already adjourned until January.

I figure Aresimowicz wants to do Bolinsky a solid, since a few days earlier, he attempted what so many others in the 151-member chamber have wanted to do over the last few years: have a shouting confrontation with ultra-con Rep.

Rob Sampson, R-Wolcott, whose starboard leanings finally boiled up into an ugly face-to-face with one of his own.

The issue, coincidentally, was Bolinsky’s bill on rear-facing child seats.

This confrontation was not to be confused with the other great moment during those waning days of the session, when a sourpuss named Sam Belsito, the Tuxedo King of Tolland, who is the most likely to vote against any given piece of legislation, stood on the floor of the House, hot mic in his hand and called veteran Deputy Speaker Bob Godfrey, D-Danbury, an “a—hole.”

While Tuxedo Sam apologized, it still sent me running to the rather thick pages of legislative rules, to check to see whether there was a new allowance for poet/lawmakers to declare body-part similes for their colleagues.

The Senate spent most of the last day dislocating their arms, patting themselves on the back, and paying gushing homage to departing members, including the universally liked Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman and Republican Sen. Tony Guglielmo, a son of Stamford who has represented his Stafford-centric district of northeastern Connecticut since 1993.

And yet, in the final flush of opaque business — and the reason why the Senate generally sucks – Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff read off a “consent calendar” of exactly 50 House bills that had been negotiated behind-the-scenes by the Democratic and Republican Senate caucuses for approval with no absolutely discussion.

In the span it took to read off, say, House Bill 5555 and 50 other vague pieces of legislation, the Senate epitomized its lack of transparency. But they finished at 11:45 p.m. Wednesday, a full 15 minutes before the statutory end.

That left the sincere few minutes that Bolinsky had on the House floor. No one seemed to have the heart to tell him it was all over upstairs.

Just a few minutes earlier, between 10:25 and 11:25, the only reason for this 23-week sprint to May —adjustments to the two-year, $40.1-billion budget — were discussed in a lightning 15-minute round in the Senate, followed by a proportionately quick debate in the House.

This election-year fix, thanks to a billion bucks in long anticipated tax revenue, was the result of last year’s nuclear summer, in which Democrats and Republicans finally came together for a bipartisan deal, mostly to give Gov. Dan Malloy the finger.

During the final hours of negotiations, Democrats dropped their politically

This election-year fix, thanks to a billion bucks in long anticipated tax revenue, was the result of last year’s nuclear summer, in which Democrats and Republicans finally came together for a bipartisan deal, mostly to give Gov. Dan Malloy the finger.

unadvisable highway-toll aspirations and Republicans surrendered their attack on state-worker unions.

At about 5 p.m., leaders from both sides of the aisle gathered outside the House chamber to announce a deal in the vaguest of election details: maintaining town aid; depositing minimal amounts into the teachers retirement program; shifting $721 million from the emergency reserves to pay off the current $382 million deficit, with the rest going to hospitals because the governor has been holding hostage hundreds of millions of dollars in the money from the state provider tax.

Still, the adjustments included some furry, special-interest goodies everyone calls “rats: “a firehouse in Sen. Heather Somers’ Groton-centric district; a sweet $400,000 for the Connecticut Open Tennis Tournament in New Haven.

The tennis item is of interest because apparently the tourney, which started back when Gov. Lowell P. Whicker Jr. stalked the Capitol grounds, is broke and the United States Tennis Association is calling in a loan.

Sweet.

Still, it’s another year gone into the books in the arc of Connecticut history. Malloy and Wyman will be immortalized in the State Register & Manual.

He didn’t claim credit for the quote, but Guglielmo summed it up beautifully on the Senate floor.

“Don’t be sad it’s over,” he said. “Be glad it happened.”