Shall we have voting rights or shall we have hot air?

The session is either winding down or winding up, depending on your perspective.  Public hearings are slowing down and bills are advancing out of committee, meaning we’re moving to the dirty work of grinding out lawsuit-proof ready versions of priority legislation for possible floor votes.  What have those priorities been for the past few weeks? 

Well, for Democrats there’s a plethora of substantive things they’ve been considering.  Both Governor Lamont and Senate Dems are pushing for a “Connecticut Option”, which is not exactly a public option but captures additional folks under CT’s Husky Medicaid program (at somewhere between 400 and 600 percent about the federal poverty level). A step in the right direction but doesn’t get the entire job done (which may be a good slogan for Ned Lamont’s tenure).   As the federal well on Medicaid funding dries up to loosen up funds for old-school colonialist wars, I’m personally glad to see a step that ensures that a Connecticut resident doesn’t need to dress up as a Tomahawk cruise missile for them to get the support they may need.   

On the voting front, Dems tried to take a look at no-excuse absentee voting and voter intimidation.  No-excuse absentee voting actually passed via constitutional amendment in a 2024 ballot measure by CT Voters.  It just needs to actually be implemented.  Addressing voter intimidation by I.C.E. agents is a new, and hopefully, temporary phenomenon as perhaps the midterms can lead to some “regime change” of our own. Ranked Choice voting also cleared a committee, not for the first time, but hopefully for the last.   Poor Oz Griebel, now dead almost 6 years, is still waiting on it from somewhere beyond, with his independent party lending an endorsement to Lamont during his last election on the condition of Ranked Choice support. 

There were also bill addressing food and benefit insecurity for veterans and other vulnerable groups, banning “convertible” handguns,  limits on license plate readers, and demasking/other accountability measures for rogue federal agents.  All relatively important stuff! Let’s hope we see some movement.

Republicans, on the other hand, spent most of their time rankled.  Rankled about vaccines and homeschool regulations (hey look it’s our State Senator).   Rankled about the aforementioned bill about weapons that transform Optimus Prime style from a basic handgun into semi-automatic killing machines. Rankeled about leaf blower bans that were never going to happen. Rankled about helium balloons, I guess.  Sure why not?

But at least one Republican Senator had the courage to stand up to the federal government and demand to know why we are not getting answers…about UFOs.   Nothing else could be more important in this moment, could it?