There was much joy after we learned late Thursday that U.S. District Court Judge Stefan Underhill had struck down Connecticut’s  Citizen Election program as unconstitutional – thereby pulling the plug on the $60 million tax-payer financed Incumbency Protection Act. Even Attorney General Dick Blumenthal was speechless  until collecting himself and announcing he will vigorously appeal the decision and allow this colossal ripoff of the taxpayers to continue.

Another lawsuit which is before the Second District Court of Appeals centers on those who are prohibited from participating in the state’s political process – contractors, lobbyists and their immediate families. The Connecticut Republican Party has filed an amicus (friend of the court) brief seeking to have that anti-free speech law overturned.

Assuming Blumenthal is successful in removing the injunction and allowing the current law to be operational, the long legal battle to take our political process back will take  many more months to resolve.

Gov. M. Jodi Rell supports these legal acts in the believe it will provide for clean elections and remove the taint of special interest from elections.

The Underhill decision was based on how the law affects third parties from accessing public funds. The law does favor the Republican and Democratic parties and sets an unreasonable threshold for the smaller political organizations. Indeed the lead litigants are the Green and Libertarian Parties.

But the real issue here is this – why should any taxpayer have to pay for the political viability of a candidate they don’t agree with? Why should a candidate who chooses not to participate and relieve the taxpayers of that burden, punished by seeing his opponent’s coffers matched, dollar for dollar with public funds?  And why are  people, no matter what their profession, prohibited from contributed one cent or participating in political events?

The Citizen’s  Election Program was the classic case of what happens when you let liberals write a bill, thinking it will never become law, until political hysteria takes over. That is what happened  when this bill began to make its way through the process. Then, when it came up for a vote, Democrats didn’t think Gov. Rell would sign it, so they thought, “hey, here is freebie to make the good-government people happy,” and they voted. No Republicans in the House supported it. Gov. Rell surprised them and signed it. Then, state Elections Commission Executive Director Jeff Garfield, thinking he had won Powerball, began to staff up his office, making it the fastest growing bureaucracy in the country. Regulations were promulgated, forums were held and before you know it, it became a felony to screw up on a treasurer’s form.

And despite all this money, the iincumbency reelection rates stayed steadied. Indeed, incumbents love it. All they have to do is assign some paid staff, on personal time, to collect small dollar amounts and they have their $30,000 or $100,000 locked in. With free taxpayer financed staff, offices and mailings, an incumbent has to commit several crimes against humanity to lose. A challenger might win, and there were a couple of Republicans in 2008 who broke through – State Rep. Tony Hwang in Fairfield and  State Rep. Chris Cotu of Norwich.

But what about a candidate who turns down the public funds? What if that candidate goes out and raises private funds and shows real viability? Assuming the opponent is using public money, the fund match the public candidate dollar for dollar up to twice the total funding amount per office – $60,000 for the House and $200,000 for Senate. It rewards laziness – as most state programs do.

In any event, the only way to beat an incumbent is  to work more than twice as hard and raise twice as much.  State Sen. Len Fasano, R-East Haven, is an example. In 2002, Fasano, who had  never held elected office before, had a solid footprint in his community. He out-raised the incumbent, then State Sen. Brian McDermott,  D-Wallingford, and ran a text-book campaign. McDermott made many mistakes and didn’t get the help from Democratic leadership he had hoped. Fasano still won by a few hundred votes. If the current plan was in place, McDermott would have been made whole and probably survived.

Let us all hope the Second Circuit Court sees how the Constitution State has frittered away its  legacy.