Don Pesci: 2019 Speech Applies Word For Word in 2022

Republicans have just been through a bruising election. I’d like to touch very gently on a few sore topics, but we don’t want to end up at a funeral here. 

Mark Twain, asked if he had attended the funeral of a man he intensely dis-liked, replied “No, I didn’t. But I sent along a message to the grief stricken that I heartily approved of the ceremony.”Before we leap forward, I’d like to take a step back and review the nature of the political parties in Connecticutbefore the Democrat Party came down with a severe – and, I think, fatal —  case of progressivism, which is a close relative of socialism.

As you all know, there are two political party money making events in Connecticut. The Republican event is the Prescott Bush Dinner, named  after Prescott Bush, President George H. W. Bush’s father and President  George W. Bush’s grandfather. Prescott Bush was a Wall Street executive  investment banker who represented Connecticut in the United States  Senate from 1952 to 1963, not a bad run.  At that time, there were few Democrat progressives who had the chutzpah to suppose that all rich people supped on the blood and bones of poor people.

And there was, during the post World War II era a rightly understood connection between wealth, as in Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” and the general prosperity of what we have since come to call the “middle class.” It was Democrat president John Kennedy who reminded us that “a rising tide,” that is, an increase in the real wealth of a nation, “lifts all the boats,” poor and rich alike. In those golden days of yore, nearly everyone in Connecticut understood reflexively former Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher’s notion that the trouble with socialism is that “sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money.”

Socialism and its variants, such as progressivism, are distributive not wealth-producing economic vehicles. Unlike Lowell Weicker, a putative “Republican” U.S. Senator from Connecticut, and former Democrat Governor Dannel Malloy, Prescott Bush did little during his time in office to destroy his state.

Republicans do not have the same problem that confronted Connecticut Democrats when, amusingly, they were forced to rename their annual money grab. The gathering of the Democrat faithful had been called “The Jefferson-Jackson-Bailey Dinner.” Andy Jackson, the architect of the modern Democrat Party and its first populist president, was responsible for moving Indians off their ancestral lands, among them, so it has been intimated, a distant relative of Massachusetts U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, she of the high cheekbones. Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence and a font of libertarianism, owned slaves, as did the combative and irascible Jackson; so, these two unsavory Presidents were unceremoniously booted off the Democrat State Party money grab.

Almost immediately, the Hartford Courant issued a commendatory editorial. “Good for state Democrats for changing name of the Jefferson-Jackson-Bailey Dinner,” the editorial rhapsodized. “Give the Connecticut Democratic Party high marks for coming to terms with history in removing the names of two slave-owning presidents from the title of their annual fundraising dinner. The Democrats have struck a blow for inclusion and sensitivity with the name change. They have also signaled that theirs is a very different party from the pro-slavery, limited-government party of the 1800s that those two [the ejected Jefferson and Jackson] had a hand in shaping.” Nice how the Courant editorialists managed to get “pro-slavery” to do a waltz with “limited government” in the same sentence there, isn’t it?

As to “limited Government,” no one today could reasonably argue that the current Connecticut Democrat Party has even the slightest aversion to government growth; indeed, unchecked by serious resistance in the General Assembly, the party of Jefferson, Jackson and Bailey has become the party of government growth and union interests. Malloy famously and brashly marched in union strike lines. However heartfelt Prescott Bush’s connection may have been to Planned Parenthood, one cannot imagine him marching in a government employee strike line.

On the question of the unionization of federal and state workers, Prescott’s position likely mirrored that of former President Franklin Roosevelt, the chief presidential autocrat in the Democrat pantheon.

Asked whether he favored the unionization of federal workers, Roosevelt wrote in a letter to National Federation of Federal Employees President Luther Stewart in 1937:  “All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.”

Roosevelt went on to remind Stewart, none too gently, that a public strike of federal employees was not in his cards: “Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare requires orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that ‘under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government.’”

Read more at: https://donpesci.blogspot.com/2019/03/enfield-republican-town-committee.html