On a party-line vote, Democrats opposed, Republicans in favor, the House defeated a rule to require it to vote on state employee union contracts negotiated and submitted by the governor.

The contracts, which take effect automatically if they are not rejected by either house of the General Assembly, are mechanisms by which Democratic legislators signify their subservience to the unions, the biggest part of their party, and the legislators don’t want to create any record of that subservience.

Democratic leaders said they might take up the Republican resolution again before any contracts are submitted. But the issue won’t change, and political cowardice was the only reason for the House not to settle the process at the outset of the new legislative session.

If, despite state government’s worsening insolvency, Democratic legislators can’t bring themselves even to vote on union contracts, which are expensive, it’s hard to imagine their finding the courage to pursue the public interest in any respect.

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SCHOOL AID FORMULA ISN’T AT FAULT: The governor said he will propose reducing state financial aid to municipalities and will offer a new formula for allocating aid to municipal schools.

“Connecticut needs a new way to calculate educational aid,” the governor said, “one that guarantees equal access to a quality education regardless of ZIP code. Our state constitution guarantees it, and our moral compass demands it.”

But the new formula probably will be only political camouflage for the general reduction in municipal aid and the transfer of aid from the majority of towns to the cities most burdened by poverty and social disintegration. There are two problems with this.

First is that while the school aid formula always has been subject to brazenly political adjustments in the legislature, state government already reimburses half the overall budgets of the most distressed cities. The cities have not lacked money from the state.

The second problem is that state government has been tinkering with its school aid formula almost every year since the first state Supreme Court school financing case, Horton v. Meskill in 1977. The state increasingly has shifted money to the cities, and while this may have been fairer to property taxpayers, it has accomplished nothing for the education of the poor, which is still miserable and keeps prompting school financing lawsuits.

That is, education in the cities fails not because of any school aid formula but because welfare policy has deprived so many children of their primary educators, parents. Nothing will change until state government escapes its obsession with school aid formulas.

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LEGAL OR ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION?: Some observers are noting with disdain that Republican legislators did not respond enthusiastically, as Democratic legislators did, to Governor Malloy’s remark in his State of the State speech about Connecticut’s welcoming nature.

“Regardless of whether your family settled in Connecticut 300 years ago or three days ago, you are welcome here,” Malloy said.

Was the Republicans’ lack of enthusiasm for this remark really, as those observers suggest, a demonstration of contemptible nativism? Or did the Republicans just recognize that the governor was obscuring the serious issue about immigration in Connecticut, state government’s nullification of federal immigration law under the Malloy administration with driver’s licenses and college tuition discounts for undocumented immigrants?

The ability and courage to make distinctions are what separate decent people from demagogues.
