Some Democrats in the state House of Representatives seem to want to be considered stupid, since stupidity is the only innocent explanation for their voting unanimously the other day against a Republican resolution to require the House to vote on state employee union contracts negotiated by the governor.

These House Democrats insist that they voted against the resolution because they did not know enough about it and particularly about the consequences of rejecting a contract.

Since the House has lawyers, any legislator in doubt about the consequences could have asked them. But no legislator should have needed a lawyer to realize that rejection of a contract would leave it open to renegotiation and leave the union’s members free to continue working under the terms of the expiring contract or not to work at all, though strikes by state government employees remain illegal.

It’s far more likely that if any House Democrats were uncertain about the consequences of rejecting a contract, they were uncertain about the political consequences.

That is, since the government employee unions are the core of Connecticut’s Democratic Party, any Democratic legislator who refuses to be a union tool risks being challenged for renomination in a primary by just such a tool and, if he survives the primary, challenged again in the election by a candidate of the Working Families Party, the ultimate mechanism by which the unions keep Democratic legislators in line, cross-endorsing agreeable Democrats, running against Democrats who don’t bow to the unions, thereby splitting the Democratic vote.

There will be a lot more of this if Connecticut’s Republicans ever realize that they can never outbid the Democrats for union support and that the only reason for anyone in Connecticut to consider voting Republican is to experiment with a government that isn’t subservient to the unions.

Hartford's awful role

Being only 37, Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin may not realize that the pitch he has been making to the suburbs for more financial support is only the tired old cant that has been used since before he was born. That is, Bronin is telling the suburbs that they can’t survive without a successful city and can’t be “a suburb of nowhere.”

The problem is that from a political standpoint, Hartford, impoverished and afflicted as it is, is actually a great success. For the city concentrates and perpetuates poverty and its pathologies, sustaining them as a lucrative business for politicians, government bureaucracy, and social-service agencies while keeping them out of sight of the middle class in the suburbs, the taxpayers who pay for the business.

Thus the political system is never held accountable for the failure of poverty policy, the poverty business remains lucrative, and the public remains indifferent to it.

As for being “a suburb of nowhere,” since he is so young, Bronin may not have noticed, but downtown Hartford moved to West Hartford via the Westfarms shopping mall and Blue Back Square entertainment district long before he was elected. That’s because while Hartford still has a large population, West Hartford and its suburbs house far more of a middle class and thus provide far more support for commerce, culture, and entertainment.

Of course these are not ideal arrangements; they are not even terribly ethical. They concede the oppression of generation after generation of fatherless children, products of the welfare system, depriving them of education, damaging their physical and mental health, pushing them into crime and drugs, and sending them into the world unhappy and unprepared.

But as long as policy in Connecticut is content to operate Hartford as a poverty factory and Hartford is content to remain one, the current circumstances will be all the success the region has a right to.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.