The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Klarides, Ritter eye bigger posts as they steer House
It wasn’t exactly two sides of the same coin, but the Thursday special session of the state House of Representatives gave a pair of political veterans a rare chance, in this age of the coronavirus, to showcase their leadership skills for public consumption in an election year.
And with it, a glimpse at Connectcut’s likely political scene over the next few years.
House Minority Leader Themis Klarides of Derby used protracted debates on a pair of bills as a platform to show off her philosophy, and her availability for the 2022 race for governor.
Now, two years after Republicans chose a political neophyte, millionaire Bob Stafanowski, Klarides is exiting the General Assembly and doing nothing to dispel widespread speculation she’s running for the top job.
House Majority Leader Matt Ritter of Hartford, whose post by tradition gives him the last word during debates, used his time refuting Klarides to reinforce for fellow Democrats why he’s the easy choice to become the next speaker of the House, following the retirement of Speaker Joe Aresimowicz of Berlin.
Klarides, who answers
reporters’ questions about her future by saying she’s not finished with public service, delivered broad ideas on where Connecticut should be heading as she managed two contentious bills: an expansion of mail-in balloting for the Nov. 3 presidential election, and police reforms amid the Black Lives Matter movement.
Toward the end of the eight-hour debate on police accountability, a rare tie vote killed a GOP amendment that would have stripped civil immunity from some police officers who brutalize people. Klarides tried to offer a bipartisan vision for the legislature, and the state.
“We unfortunately lost people we loved,” she said of the coronavirus at about 9 a.m. Friday, 22 hours after the House convened, with most rank-and-file lawmakers sequestered in their private offices in the Capitol complex. “We saw people get sick. We saw people lose their jobs. We
saw people who lost businesses, their livelihoods,” she said in halting, tearyeyed emotion.
Then her voice broke. “On top of this pandemic, we came face-to-face with our evil past,” Klarides said. “A past that many people in this state and this chamber live every day, and I’m sorry for that. Like many of you I was shaken by what happened in Minnesota. I was because I’m as sure as all of you, I am proud to be an American. I am proud to live in the best country in the world, where we are allowed to say what we want and feel what we want and support who we want, and love what we want. To see things like that happen, makes me ashamed. I don’t know what it’s like to be Black in America. I don’t. That’s just a reality. But I want to listen and I want to learn.”
She used her hand to wipe tears pooling on her upper lip, then state Rep. Toni Walker, D-New Haven, the co-chairman of the powerful Appropirations Committee, handed Klarides a box of tissues.
“Thank you,” she said, in response to the across-theaisle gesture, then blotted her face.
“We cannot fix problems in this state of this magnitude, without doing it together,” she said shortly before the 86-58 final vote in favor of police reforms.
Union raises vs. absentee ballots
During the House discussion on universal absentee ballots for the presidential election in November, Klarides, 54, made what could be interpreted as the opening salvo of the 2022 Republican primary campaign for governor — which could include Stefanowski, as the Madison Republican has maintained a high profile since his respectable 2018 loss to Gov. Ned Lamont.
“These bills were chosen, but why wasn’t other bills chosen that also could have helped 3.5 million people in this state?”
She criticized the recent contractual raise of $300 million for unionized state employees. “We have a financial crisis in this state now,” she said, pointing at
Lamont and the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. “If the governor was not willing to do it, this legislature should have been willing to do it.”
This set off Ritter, who had spent hours battling Republican attempts to water down the expansion of mail-in balloting for the Nov. 3 election — and seemed eager to paint that issue broadly.
“I don’t know of anything that surpasses in my mind how important it is to be allowed to vote in this country,” Ritter declared. “Generally speaking, all the things we talk about that you could have added to the special session, flow from having elections and sending people up here. So the 151 people who sit here can’t vote on any bill if they aren’t elected. Having fair, safe elections, to me, is the cornerstone of our democracy.”
He said next year Democrats will focus on approving a constitutional amendment for universal mail-in balloting, echoing the executive order by Lamont for the Aug. 11 primaries, and the bill the House passed for Election Day this year, which now goes to the Senate on Tuesday.
‘Let democracy exist’
By 10:30 p.m. Thursday, Ritter — whose father Thomas D. Ritter, a Hartford lawyer, was a threeterm speaker of the House in the 1990s — and Aresimowicz knocked on the door of Klarides’ Capitol office to say they would soon, finally, introduce the entire police accountability bill, which the legislative Black and Puerto Rican Caucus insisted be debated intact.
Cornered by reporters a few minutes later outside his Capitol office, the majority leader admitted he didn’t know how the vote would go. That’s a rarity for bills that reach the floor. Ritter said he expected “powerful stories” from members of his caucus.
“I can’t sit here and tell you if we vote at 2 o’clock in the morning exactly where it lands and we’re okay with that,” Ritter said, stressing that the overall bill would pass but it wasn’t clear that the immunity section would survive.
As a Hartford Democrat, he has a safe seat for reelection, but his goal to become the next speaker depends on a vote of the entire caucus on January 6, 2021, the opening day of the next legislature. In the race to become the next majority leader, Rep. Robyn Porter of New Haven and Jason Rojas of East Hartford are drumming up support.
“I will tell you that the longer I’ve been here, sometimes you’ve got to let democracy exist out on that floor, and there are just some issues that a governor, a speaker, a majority leader, can’t always resolve,” Ritter said, bowing to the fractured Democratic caucus. “That’s not a sign of weakness of leadership. It’s the sign of the difficulty of the issue. And so sometimes, and maybe in the future, that needs to happen more. Politics always comes and plays a role.”