New players, but same old Capitol games

OK, we’re down to the last month of this doeverything-for-everybody session of the General Assembly.

What’s going to live? What’s going to die of neglect? What baby is going to get thrown out with the bong water, so to speak? For whom will the freaking tolls toll?

Well, isn’t that why we play the game? To stagger out of the Capitol in the predawn of June 6, with the final score, as the members of the House and Senate exchange their carriages for pumpkins; their business-casual for the sackcloth they so richly deserve after squandering another session.

There will be many games of musical bills over this last chapter of the annual Connecticut Legislature. Since the average number of new laws is about 250 a year (Yes, there are shockingly too many) and we have 900 bills alive at this moment, with each day, the muscle of the Republican minorities in the House and Senate gets a little stronger, their debates on the wispiest of bipartisan laws become more elongated and stentorian.

Sure, the House will meet Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. There are about 500 bills on their calendar, and nearly everything must be approved by both the House and Senate. So, in a sense, the session is already over.

The main focus of the so-called long, five-month session is to create a budget. But with so many know-it-all first-term lawmakers submitting their personal pet bills, leadership almost has to find itself concentrating on clearing their calendars of the stuff that may otherwise die at midnight June 5. They can come back all summer, like 2017, to talk budget turkey with the new guy in the governor’s office.

Sooner or later, Gov. Ned Lamont is going to come out and play. Lamont can and should show flashes of anger. There’s hope. Maybe his Bridgewater guy, Chief of Staff Ryan Drajewicz, has been briefed enough by political veterans Jonathan Harris, Paul Mounds and Chris Soto to now know how a bill becomes a law.

Then I read the email that must have made the chiefs of staff of the Democratic caucuses bust out in laughter, when Drajewicz — you call him Draz, I know the Polish pronunciation — announced that Harris, a former state senator, Democratic state chairman and commissioner of the Department of Consumer Protection who ran all-too briefly for governor last year, will “formally augment the design” of Lamont’s legislative team. “The design adjustment is effective immediately,” Drajewicz droned soullessly.

Man, couldn’t Drajewicz have left that algorithmic Word software back in Bridgewater’s secretive, soundproof Westport compound, where it can continue to make billions of bucks without actually creating anything?

Now, I have this vision of Ned Lamont’s augmented reality. I see him sitting behind the desk in the Capitol. He’s wearing a pair of virtual reality goggles, giving himself a view of a legislature that wouldn’t go after his neighbors’ capital gains, that wouldn’t beat back his proposal to tax attorney services and haircuts.

You want to be a state representative, trying to get a haircut from your local barber? She’s holding sharp objects — scissors and razors — complaining about the added hours it would take counting up sales taxes. Again: sharp objects!

I particularly loved the gaslighting that the leaders of the Appropriations Committee apparently gave Lamont the other day, when their loose-leaf notebook of a spending plan was printed. There, at the top of Page 245, was the

Sure, the House will meet Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. There are about 500 bills on their calendar, and nearly everything must be approved by both the House and Senate. So, in a sense, the session is already over.

thorough refutation of Lamont’s proposal to finally shift some of the cost of teacher pensions to the towns and cities.

I loved it when Gov. Dan Malloy tried the same thing: making the towns such as Greenwich, Darien, Fairfield, Milford, with their robust Grand Lists and higher-than-average public-school teacher salaries, actually pay into the Teachers’ Retirement Plan. Of course, the House and Senate members from those towns led the revolt against Malloy and what had been a guerrilla war boiled over.

Malloy lost, so it wasn’t a surprise that the printed Appropriations budget rejected Lamont’s threeyear phase-in to get towns to cough up 25 percent of the employer’s pension share, to the tune of $70 million a year. Ah, but did they reject it? Or was it a message to Lamont, conveniently leaked out the night before to a select reporter or two?

There were the cochairmen, the elusive Rep. Toni Harp, D-New Haven, and the no-fools-you-suffer Sen. Cathy Osten, straightfaced, standing up, telling reporters that the printed rejection was “a miscommunication” with the Office of Fiscal Analysis. Indeed, they said, there will be some kind of local contribution for teacher pensions in the ultimate budget.

This will be a good month to pay attention to the fun and games in the State Capitol.