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COMMENTARY: How Can They Vote That Way?!

Congressmen,

Vote as they choose;

Leaving us,

To sing the blues.

By Bill Collins

Connecticut's congressmen and senators are all very smart, very experienced,

very savvy people. You'd like to think we could simply trust them to use their

own judgment in Washington, without our supervision.

Guess again. The welfare of the republic may rank high on their priority list,

but it's usually still far below their own welfare. This "looking out for #1"

shows up in votes which cater to their benefactors. Those may be party

leaders, special interests, or big donors. But even one startling vote for

direct personal interest was cast by Nancy Johnson. She attempted to weaken

the definition of "Made in America." This would have been a big boon to the

Stanley Works, where she owns a lot of stock.

Other votes by our folks have been less personal than that, but do indeed

erode the public welfare. One of these recently faced the House. In it, banks,

insurance companies, and stock brokers all wanted to repeal an old

Depression-era reform. That law has prudently kept them from mucking in each

others' businesses since the '30s. But pressure from those big donors to once

again allow such risky financial mergers was immense. In Connecticut only Sam

Gejdenson and Rosa DeLauro stood up to it. They've done that before, and

probably qualify as our state's most heroic lawmakers. The bill passed,

needless to say, over their prostrate forms.

Of course voting that sensibly is much harder for Johnson and for Chris Shays.

They're Republicans, and their party is controlled by wing-nuts from parts of

the country with political values very different from ours. These values

include ignoring the First Amendment, and in deference to those nuts, Johnson

and Shays both voted to allow posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms.

True, they knew the bill would never make it into law, but what kind of

message were they sending about separation of church and state?

More serious, Shays and Johnson also voted for the Census bill which virtually

assures undercounting of citizens in central cities. Like their leaders, they

saw little need to track down elusive residents who might just be Democrats

anyway. This vote, which only passed 223-206, will surely mean less money for

those undercounted cities. Some of these are in Shays' and Johnson's own

districts, like New Britain, Bridgeport, and Norwalk.

By this time we may be asking ourselves why we need Republicans at all. But

then there's Jim Maloney, a Democrat. He joined Shays in voting for a bill to

require two-thirds of both houses to approve any tax increase. Had such a law

been in place for the last 50 years, surely the US would still not be a

superpower, and the gap between rich and poor would be truly Medieval. Even

Johnson couldn't stomach that one.

Maloney also joins Shays and Johnson in opposing repeal of the wildly unfair

civil forfeiture law. That monster allows police to seize property of suspects

who mostly never even get charged with a crime. Luckily our guys lost, 375-48.

For the record, our senators can't be trusted either. Though Democrats, they

both voted to expand the Defense Budget to buy more glitzy new unneeded

weapons. And Chris Dodd was absent from a vote making it easier for criminals

to get guns. It passed by a single vote.

In fairness, Shays does have a heroic side as well -- he's the champ of

campaign finance reform. But Johnson seems to lack any such redemptive value,

and by now Democrats must be wondering if Maloney was worth all that trouble

to elect him.

(Bill Collins, a former mayor of Norwalk, is a syndicated columnist.)