Weicker Revisited, and the End of Two-Party Governance in Connecticut

Facts always arrive at our doorsteps with tattoos attached.? It is important to get the facts straight so that, as Mark Twain somewhere says, you may them misinterpret them as you will. The tattoos are conventional interpretations.

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Most reporters do not neglect to mention the fact that former U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker was, until he was relieved of his congressional responsibilities by then Connecticut Attorney General Joe Lieberman, a Republican. Weicker called himself a Jacob Javits Republican.

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Republicans in Connecticut, many of whom heeded the call by Bill Buckley to cast their votes in the 1988 US Senatorial election for Lieberman rather than Weicker, had some doubts concerning Weicker’s true affiliation. During his last year as a U.S. Senator, Weicker was awarded high marks by the left leaning Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). The senator’s voting record in Congress during his last year in office was 20 points higher than that of Democrat U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, with whom he was fast friends.

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Some political writers pointed out at the time that Weicker’s tortuous political journey from right wing Republican – he once proposed arresting antic left wing political protestors opposed to the Vietnam War – to moderate and virtuous Jacob Javits Republican, to anti-conservative Maverick Republican, the title of his ghostwritten biography, began fairly earlier in his political career.

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Weicker did not keep under his hat his disdain for Connecticut’s Republican Party. He was quoted in a Hartford paper as having told his political majordomo, Tom D’Amore, also a Republican of sorts, “Why doesn’t someone take over the Republican party? It’s so small.” D’Amore later was duly sworn in as the chairman of the small and insignificant party. During his administration as party chairman, D’Amore would propose that the small and insignificant party should open its primaries to groups not bound by party loyalty. Weicker, Republicans knew, had always leaned heavily on support from Democrats, and they weren’t buying the Weicker gambit. D’Amore’s tenure as party chairman was mercifully short.

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In 1988 Weicker lost his four-term seat to then Connecticut Attorney General Joe Lieberman. The state Republican Party clearly was not impressed with Weicker’s flacid devotion to it, and state Republicans thought the man was much too big for his party breeches.

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Having lost his senate seat to Lieberman, Weicker ran for governor of Connecticut in a three-way race and, to no one’s surprise, won office, leaving the governorship after a single term during which he was able to muscle through a Democrat dominated General Assembly a successful state income tax proposal that passed in the General Assembly by one vote. Weicker’s revenge, one deep pocket Republican called it.

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Within Connecticut’s media, there are reporters and editors even today who are convinced that the State Republican Party might prosper if only it were possible to return to the golden years of the Weicker ascendancy: this, even though they must admit, always reluctantly, that all the Republican members of? the state’s U.S. Congressional delegation who had presented themselves as fiscal conservatives but social liberals had been turned out of office by neo-progressive Democrats such as U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, U.S. Senator Jim Himes and U.S Representative Jahanna Hayes.

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In the intervening years, the number of neo-progressive Democrats in Connecticut’s General Assembly also has increased. These superior numbers apparently have convinced members of a once adversarial media that there really is such a thing as a “free lunch,” that neo-progressives will be able by bluster and political force to tax and spend their way out of debt, and that a one-party state is a blessing in disguise.

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Tyrants from Julius Caesar onward to Hitler and Stalin have always thought the efficiency of the one-party state was superior to a messy republicanism, and Caesar thought Cicero, assassinated by Mark Antony in 43 BC, was a subverter and an existential danger to the Roman imperium.

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The two party system is a hedge against tyranny, a danger to politicians and one-party rule, the true enemies of anti-republican tyrants, as are constitutions that vest political power in the people, and tripartite governance in the United States -- that is to say, governance divided between federal, state and municipal powers, each fully functioning, dominant within their own spheres, and unchallenged by what we should call Caesarism.

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Cicero was the best journalist of his day, as was Samuel Adams at the beginning of the American Republic, known in his own time as “the Father of the American Revolution.”

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Small “r” republicans find that Cicero and Adams are closer to them – indeed, more alive to them – than a whole universe of modern politicians. “It does not take a majority to prevail,” said Adams to a tepid future generation, “but an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”

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Connecticut, now a one-party state, could use a few “brushfires of freedom” if republican virtues in the state are to remain at a boil.? Weicker was not a Ciceronian republican.