When it comes to the budget crisis, it seems like once again Gov. Rowland-Rell has been caught MISLEADING the public AND not doing her job.
Why am I not surprised?
On Sept. 1, when legislative Democrats approved a new state budget that Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell called excessive, the governor held a press conference at 5:15 p.m. - in time to get on the TV news at 6 - and said that she wouldn't give her "stamp of approval" by signing the budget bill.
Instead, she said, she would end a yearlong budget stalemate by letting the budget become law without her signature and then would cut $8.3 million in "pork" spending by imposing line-item vetoes.
That changed a week later, after state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal advised her that she lacked the constitutional authority for any line-item veto unless she first signed the bill. "I respectfully disagree," Rell responded on Sept. 8. But, to avoid a "costly and protracted court fight," she said that she would forgo the vetoes and let the unsigned budget bill become law.
Blumenthal's legal finding, and Rell's abrupt reversal in response to it, caught citizens and even some political insiders by surprise - and it made big news.
Now this is the part when Ashton Kutcher comes out and tells everyone that Jodi has PUNK'D us...
But now, based on internal Rell-administration e-mails obtained by The Courant, it turns out that it was not a surprise at all to the governor's office.
In fact, on Sept. 1, three hours before the press conference in which Rell resolutely said that she wouldn't sign the bill and would cut the budget with line-item vetoes, her own chief gubernatorial legal counsel had issued the same advice that Blumenthal would give days later: If you don't sign the budget, you can't veto line items in it.
"Based on a reading of the CT constitution and case law, the Governor's exercise of the line item veto would require her approval and signature of the remainder of the bill," gubernatorial legal counsel Anna Ficeto wrote in an e-mail to Rell's powerful chief of staff, M. Lisa Moody, at 2:13 p.m. on Sept. 1.
Moody forwarded the e-mail three minutes later to Rell's budget director, Robert Genuario, who responded at 2:45 p.m.: "Our two lawyers agree. Isn't that amazing?" Genuario was referring to one of his key budget deputies, lawyer Jeffrey Beckham.
So what we basically have here is a governor who, instead of adhering to her legal counsel's advice, opted to grandstand in front of the cameras, babble on and on about so-called "pork spending" (spending could have addressed IF she'd LISTEN to her legal counsel and signed the budget in the first place) in an feeble attempt to score political points.
Is this the type of governance the residents of Connecticut deserve?
If the new Q-Poll is any indication, hopefully the public is catching onto the Rowland-Rell administration's gross incompetence. |
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