FAMILY first for DeLauro

Forget secret sauce! Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s secret Sunday gravy is the ability to translate sometimes-wonky policy measures into easy-to-digest nuggets via compelling personal stories.

In rolling out of the Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act (yeah, the FAMILY Act) for the fourth time, DeLauro harkened back to 1986, when she was chief of staff for then Sen. Chris Dodd and was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

“Rosa, just go get well,” Dodd responded when told the news. “Your job is still here.”

I’ve heard that story a few times, but I don’t think I ever heard Part II: Two years ago, DeLauro’s 103year-old mother lingered six weeks before death.

“I was able to spend every single day, whether in the hospital or hospice, with her till she passed,” DeLauro said, glasses off, tapping the podium with each word for emphasis. The point, as she said, is that paid family leave “should not just be the purview of those of us who serve in the United States Congress.”

The act would set up a trust fund within the Social Security Administration into which employers and employees would pay small amounts for use when taking leave for childbirth, caring for a sick relative or some other emergency.

The business community has cost concerns. But DeLauro said she’s talked to another family leave advocate, Ivanka Trump. Major hurdles exist, but it’s not beyond the limits of imagination to think paid family leave could pass the Democratic-controlled House.

How it fares in the GOPcontrolled Senate is another story. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who is running for the Democratic nomination for president, is the chief sponsor there.

Baby steps

Sen. Richard Blumenthal isn’t exactly Don Rickles or, heck, Jimmy Kimmel, but he still manages to inject his occasionally dry pontificating with dollops of sly humor. Such was the case when I asked him a question during the rollout of a bill he and Sen. Chris Murphy are co-sponsoring: a ban on gun ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds.

What was the rationale for breaking this measure off from the laundry list of other items on the gunviolence-prevention agenda, like expanded background checks preventing suspected terrorists on the “no-fly list” from buying guns.

Blumenthal gave a workmanlike answer: Banning large-capacity magazines is a “discrete, unchallengeable, unquestionable” way to save lives.

But then one of the invited guests, Manuel Oliver, jumped to the microphone, full of apologies.

Oliver compared the necessary gradualism of the legislative process to feeding a baby. Small bites, see if the baby likes it and, if so, another spoonful.

“You’ve got to go in baby steps,” he said before apologizing to Blumenthal and sitting down.

No problem, Blumenthal graciously said, “except for calling us babies!”

Meeting the president

I was privileged to be part of the Regional Reporters Association delegation that got into the Oval Office last week for an interview with President Donald Trump. He even made a bit of news, saying in answer to my question that he’d be “open to talking about” revisions in the Republican 2017 tax law that placed a $10,000 cap on deductions for state and local taxes — SALT.

That’s a bread-and-butter issue to Connecticut homeowners and taxpayers, many of whom are suffering a rude awakening over higher taxes as they prepare to file.

Some of the White House press office’s on-the-record, off-the-record ground rules were a little difficult to get over. But I guess that’s to be expected when the boss has a tendency to veer off script and say things that are, well, unpolitic.

The president of the United States was in a jovial mood, asking for a show of hands on who had been in the Oval Office previously, talking about its long history and taking questions from all 11 of us.

He smiled, he shook hands, he asked questions of us not to put us on the spot but because he was genuinely curious. All in all, it didn’t seem like the man who carries on about “fake news,” or depicts immigrants as criminals and worse, or the myriad other infractions of truth, commonsense and everyday decency.

And let’s not forget these are not things the media invents or that Robert Mueller might (or might not) be investigating. This is all him, all the time.

But that day, or at least for the time he was with us, what we saw was a guy who seemed genuinely surprised that middle-class families in upstate New York, Connecticut and elsewhere have a problem with the SALT cap, not just the rich. Jekyll and Hyde, or just good acting? Hey, we report, you decide.