It has been a busy week for Connecticut politicians, what with the governor laying off the first of many hundreds of state workers and the big ax going to state spending.

Here in eastern Connecticut, the two Republicans who represent Groton in the state House of Representatives manned battle stations, calling a news conference to decry a proposed $4.56 million cut in state education funding for their town.

The Republican first selectman in Stonington, Rob Simmons, fired off an email to editors of The Day, noting the percentage cut to his town's education funding, 50 percent, for a total of more than $1 million, is greater than even Groton's.

Alas, though, Stonington's representative in the House, Democrat Diana Urban of North Stonington, was hosting Animal Therapy Day at the Capitol on Tuesday.

I'm not making this up.

This is the same lawmaker whose sponsored legislation this year is primarily aimed at helping animals, like a bill that would allow for court-appointed advocates for animals in the judicial system and another that would prohibit the sale and trade of ivory and rhinoceros horn.

Those proposed laws, apparently pet peeves of the representative, would do nothing to help schools attended by the children of Stonington.

Urban's dilettante style of representation would not be such a crime if her constituents also had a voice in the Senate.

But of course Senate Democrats blocked any efforts to allow state Sen. Andrew Maynard a dignified retirement to recover from his brain injury, and have kept him in Hartford to do their bidding.

"Well, it is simple but sad. In his current mental state Maynard can no longer defend the interests of his towns. And his Democrat colleagues are more than ready to push him over the cliff," wrote Simmons, who represented Stonington in the General Assembly before going on to the U.S. Congress. "As they gleefully 'beggar' his district they care nothing for the future of our children as the schools of the 18th district are ravaged ... Shame on the Senate Democrats."

It does appear that only the dogs and other animals in Stonington and North Stonington have representation these days in Hartford.

I might have predicted this back on the opening day of this session of the General Assembly, when lawmakers seemed clueless to warnings of Gov. Dannel Malloy, who said a new fiscal reality had dawned in Connecticut and that state budgets would never be the same.

Indeed, I noticed that day Urban had a hard time rising with her party colleagues to applaud the governor, because she was eating at her desk in the Hall of the House and her hands and mouth were full of food.

Maynard, who was in the Capitol that day, left early and skipped the governor's speech altogether.

Urban boasts that the Democratic leadership does not respect her because she has challenged them in the past.

Maybe the deep cuts proposed to Stonington education funding this week is good evidence of that.

(Urban said after this column was posted online Tuesday night that she had been working behind the scenes to restore the proposed cuts.)

At least the residents of Groton have some Republican legislators who try to raise an alarm anyway, when the party in power tries to deliver to its constituents some of most onerous cuts to education funding in the state.

This is the opinion of David Collins.

d.collins@theday.com