More Anti-Union Democrats
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Being anti-union as a Democrat is as unacceptable as being anti-abortion or anti-gay marriage. There need to be some fundamental definitions on what is an is not an acceptable set of ideas. That doesn’t mean going super small tent. It does mean some basic values though. And like Jared Polis in Colorado, Ned Lamont in Connecticut does not hold those values and now faces a likely primary challenge.
Gov. Ned Lamont has turned to repairing relationships frayed by his vetoes of an omnibus housing bill and a measure that would have provided jobless benefits for strikers, both priorities of various elements of the Democratic coalition and its party’s legislative leaders.
Lamont’s veto of the housing bill came without a courtesy call to House Majority Leader Jason Rojas, D-East Hartford, one of the bill’s key sponsors and a man with whom the governor’s administration now must negotiate to save portions of the most significant housing bill to reach the governor’s desk.
A call to Rojas was one of the first Lamont made after the veto Monday. Another went to Ed Hawthorne, the president of the Connecticut AFL-CIO, the labor federation that worked successfully with the Democratic governor on a significant list of first-term labor victories.
The challenge now facing Lamont became clear in two very different conversations: one with a legislative leader who sees and is ready to grasp the building blocks of a housing deal; the other with a union man who sees Lamont unfeeling about workers and immovable on an issue that has come to the fore for labor.
“I was very frank with him,” Hawthorne said in an interview Tuesday. “The state elected Democrats, and Democrats put two bills on his desk that would have made a difference to working people. And he sided with Republicans.”
Lamont cast himself as a labor ally, a Democrat horrified at the Trump administration’s efforts to cripple the influence of public sector unions in the federal workforce and its removal of labor-friendly members of the National Labor Relations Board.
And he is a liar. Primary him. This isn’t some purple state. This is Connecticut. It’s unacceptable.