Advance Action on the CEP Supplementals

by: mattw

Sun Jul 25, 2010 at 00:05:00 AM EDT

"Ultimately, it's crucial that we see some legislative action here and we see it fairly quickly," said Beth Rotman, with the Election Enforcement Commission. "We may survive the primary operating the program as we have been. It's not going to continue into the general election."

It means that if Fedele wins the primary and faces millionaire Democrat Ned Lamont in the final election, Fedele won't get any extra public funds to be competitive.

If Democrat Dan Malloy wins their primary and faces millionaire Tom Foley in the final election, Malloy won't get any extra public funds to be competitive.

In all of the discussion and reading of the Green Party v Garfield and Foley v SEEC cases, I couldn't really get a good grasp on what the most recent ruling (Judge Underhill, on Foley's request for a temporary restraining order) meant for the long-term survivability of the supplemental grants. He ruled against Foley on extremely narrow grounds (basically, "you should have filed a week or two earlier"), but since the defendants in these cases have been uniformly upbeat in public about the program's odds of making it, Beth Rotman's quote above indicates that the supplemental grants really won't be there after the primary. If anything, I think she understates the importance of the legislative action being quick: the uncertainty of the August 10th outcome is the only thing which makes a fix to the program pass-able.

If either of the two scenarios described in the WTNH article were to come about, the legislature would be voting to give cash directly to a specific candidate, which would be a political powder-keg. I can't think of anyone in the CT General Assembly who would try to make that kind of bare-knuckled move in the 10 weeks before the November election. And while I have no love for Dan Malloy, it's not worth sacrificing the Governor's race for a brief flash of self-righteous pride in the insufficiently-large public finance grants.

So, what this post is about: call these people, and ask them to call the special session to fix the Citizen's Election Program before the August 10th Primary.

1. Your State Rep and State Senator. Make sure to contact both the "In Hartford" and "In the District" phone numbers, as the legislative staff is apparently restricted in their ability to transmit information back to the legislators after 7/1 in election years.
2. House Speaker Chris Donovan - (860) 240-8500
3. Senate President Pro-Tem Don Williams - 860-240-8600

Forewarned is forearmed: call your legislators and the caucuses tomorrow, and tell them that the window to repair the public financing program before any action becomes politically impossible is rapidly closing.