A Connecticut moment we’ve seen before

Here’s your General Assembly on budget day.

It’s 11:30 in the morning and the historic House chamber is not quite buzzing. There doesn’t even appear to be an oh-so-simple majority among the historic, 151 tiered seats.

Well, there are several ultra-cons in unsteady Earth orbits, as if their bucket-sized, iceberg-laden sodas were a clever idea for a zinger toward Gov. Ned Lamont’s proposed centand-a-half-per-ounce tax on teeth-rotting, life-shortening sodas.

So, I guess they’re buzzed, possibly surfing the fructose wave’s tube on their way to diabetic comas.

But their diminished relevancy, with the return of whopping Democratic majorities, is more of the comic-relief variety for the next couple years, even as the defeated GOP elite from Big Bob on down, have hunkered into a guerrilla-style snipping Twitter war.

Lawmakers and staffers are drifting in and by noon the place is full, with standing-room-only along the walls.

The over-worked, underappreciated custodians (No, they’re not state employees, so don’t blame them for the pension tsunami set to inundate Connecticut in four years, if the legislature balks on re-amortizing.) have filled the area between the banks of House seats and the podium, with a few dozen chairs for the 36 senators.

It’s the governor’s big day, when he’ll slip on his ahshucks penny loafer homespun persona and offer a $21.2 billion bottom line. That’s really the only number you need to know, seething taxpayers. That and the $1.5 billion deficit that the General Assembly — with limited guidance from Lamont, the freshman governor — have to deal with in time for the June 5 adjournment, or the July 1 start of the next fiscal year.

Shortly after noon Lamont comes out to a decent ovation, but the lawmakers saw him in the same room six weeks ago, so it’s time to put up or shut up. They’ve already heard the major points: the smoothing out of the teachers’ pension program, turning a 12-year problem with a huge multibillion-dollar bulge of red ink into a 30-year guest at the table; the oh, I guess we’re going to have to toll all vehicles, and not just trucks.

Campaign promises? Please.

It’s a big leap from running for governor and having the govern. “I need you at the table,” the governor says. “Let’s try a different kind of politics.” Well yeah, who wants to be alone out there tackling this foreignsounding stuff. The word “deficit” was never uttered on the Greenwich Board of Selectman, back when Lamont was a lonely Democrat in the state’s richest town. Smoothing is something the plastic surgeons do for the ladies who park their sparkling Range Rovers down on Greenwich Avenue.

“I want an anti-Wisconsin moment,” Lamont says in response to the union busting that went on out there in the Midwest under a seething Republican governor. “I want a Connecticut moment.” Yes, someone got paid good money to come up with that line. But in fact, Lamont wants state unions back at the bargaining table to cough up some more health care benefits, because they seem to never give enough.

“Again, the numbers must add up at the end of the day,” he says, around the time that I thought the cheerleadings was kinda boring, halfway through his 35-minute speech.

When he touts The Travelers Companies and Stanley Black & Decker offering college loan forgiveness, resulting in a standing ovation among Democrats and even a few Republicans, I look up at House Minority Leader Themis Klarides of Derby and Senate Minority Leader Len Fasano of North Haven. They’re talking back and forth, apparently asking whether they should stand. I see Fasano mouth “no.”

Back to Fasano during the highway toll pitch. “Absolutely not,” he seems to say.

Sports betting and retail marijuana get the briefest of mentions at around the 27-minute mark, but the bills are winding their way through the legislature already.

“Let’s get this done,” Lamont says at 35 minutes, throwing the entire process, all the heavy lifting, into the laps of lawmakers and the non-partisan staff in the Office of Fiscal Analysis, the Legislative Commissioner’s Office and the Office of Legislative Research to come up with something that can pass the House and Senate and get signed into law.

By 12:40, when Lamont’s back in his second-floor office and the legislative leaders are playing spin sessions with reporters, the clock starts running. The race is on. Which will have the longer shelf life? The bananas on the counter back home, or the budget?

Hint: the fruit.

It’s the governor’s big day, when he’ll slip on his ah-shucks penny loafer homespun persona and offer a $21.2 billion bottom line.