The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Boston accused Trump of a “flagrantly unlawful attempt to strip hundreds of thousands American-born children of their citizenship based on their parentage.”

In the 150 years since the adoption of the 14th Amendment, courts have accepted its plain-language meaning: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

One of the executive orders Trump signed Tuesday night asserts a novel interpretation of the jurisdiction clause, which long had been accepted as narrowly applying to children of foreign diplomats born in the U.S.

Trump says the clause allows him to deny birthright citizenship to the children of non-citizens in certain circumstances: A baby born to a mother who is in the U.S., lawfully or not, without permanent resident status would be denied unless the father was a citizen or permanent resident.

The order was titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.”

The lawsuit filed by the 18 state attorneys general, as well as cities of San Francisco and Washington, D.C., was one of three filed in opposition to the order. They are the first shots in what is expected to be a war of litigation.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other advocates sued on behalf of several immigrant groups in U.S. District Court in New Hampshire. The attorney general of Washington state filed another action in his state.

The multistate suit seeks an injunction barring the enforcement of Trump’s prospective order, which applies only to babies born after Feb. 17 — 30 days after the signing.

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Connecticut’s attorney general, William Tong, said the birthright order was an irresistible target for obvious reasons: Trump’s order flies in the face of the plain meaning of the 14th Amendment and a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1898 affirming that babies born on American soil are American, regardless of the citizenship status of their parents.

“There’s no doubt. There’s no ambiguity. Black and white, the language is clear,” Tong said Tuesday. “This is not a matter of statutory interpretation.”

Absent from Trump’s order is a legal rationale some conservative lawyers have offered for a way around the 14th Amendment: an assertion that America is under invasion from immigrants, even if some are coming ashore with visas.

One of Trump’s judicial nominees, James C. Ho, who was a year ahead of Tong at the University of Chicago Law School, defended birthright citizenship as constitutionally protected in a 2006 article.

Ho, a Texas conservative appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in 2018, offered a more sympathetic take on Trump’s invasion theory in an interview a week after Trump’s election in 2024.

“Everyone agrees that birthright citizenship doesn’t apply to the children of lawful combatants. And it’s hard to see anyone arguing that unlawful combatants should be treated more favorably than lawful combatants,” Ho said.

Tong said Ho and Trump are pushing against more than a century of precedent.

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Tong, a Chinese-American born in Hartford to parents in the U.S. with green cards making them permanent residents, said the practical harms of Trump’s order rival the constitutional ones.

“So if the baby gets sick, are you going to go to the emergency room and risk exposing your family?” Tong said. “Will anybody care for your child because the child has no status? Will you call the police? Will you call 911 if there’s an emergency at your house?”

The constitutional implications are broader than the single order in citizenship, Tong said. Trump is trying change a constitutional right by a unilateral order and a flourish of his black sharpie pen, Tong said.

“This is a fundamental right enshrined in our Constitution for more than 150 years, and it would be akin to saying on other fundamental rights, ‘People may have them, it may be ensconced in the Constitution, but they don’t apply to you.’ Can you imagine?” he said.

Tong quoted Ronald Reagan, the Republican president who personified the modern GOP before the rise of Donald Trump, in arguing that birthright citizenship, while not unique to the U.S., is inherent to what it means to be an American.

In 1989, Reagan noted that citizenship and identity in Germany and Japan are denied to the children of recent arrivals, unlike the longstanding practice in America.

“And he said, ‘This, I believe is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness.’ And that is as true today as it was in 1989,” Tong said.

Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat who attended Trump’s inauguration, said he thought birthright citizenship was resolved in 1868 with the adoption of the 14th Amendment. He fears other conflicts with Trump over immigration.

“I have a ton of concerns,” Lamont said Tuesday.

Prime among them, he said, is the Trump administration moving to deport the “Dreamers,” the immigrants brought to America without legal status as young children and now are young adults who have known no other home.

They were not addressed in the first round of executive orders.

Waiting will be Attorney General William Tong, the U.S.-born son of immigrants and one of 23 state Democratic attorneys general who have been strategizing in a multi-state working group over how, where and when Trump will act on his team’s promise to “shock and awe” America upon returning to power at noon today.

“It’s formal, it’s coordinated, it’s detailed, and we’re going to jump on it as soon as he puts his hand on the Bible,” Tong said.

But jump on what? Will Trump attempt to mobilize the Connecticut National Guard for a promised roundup of immigrants who lack legal status? Will he issue orders conflicting with Connecticut laws on gay rights, gender identification or ballot access? Will he really try to redefine who is a citizen?

“I don’t know how they’re going to approach it, where they’re going to hit us,” Tong said. “I don’t think that the incoming administration is going to walk out and say, ‘Here’s the list of the first 100 things that we’re going to do.’ ”

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Inauguration Day coincides with the Connecticut state holiday of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but Tong and members of his staff will be working, as will other Democratic attorneys general across the country. Tong said they will be looking for orders that conflict with state laws or violate the Constitution.

“I’m building my day around being here so that at noon, when he puts his hand on the Bible, we’ll be ready,” Tong said, sitting in his office across from the state Capitol in Hartford. “And as soon as any of us picks up any kind of activity on any of these issues, we’re all going to pick up the phone and get on a Zoom or a call and figure it out.”

Tong, 51, the son of immigrants from China and Taiwan, has established himself as an eager and quotable combatant willing to debate Trump’s darkly cynical view of birthright citizenship — the longstanding and court-sanctioned principle that babies born in the U.S. are citizens, regardless of their parents’ immigration status.

“This policy is a reward for breaking the laws of the United States, and is obviously a magnet helping draw the flood of illegals across our borders,” Trump said in a scripted campaign video last year. “They come by the millions and millions and millions. They come from mental institutions.

“I’m an anchor baby,” Tong said, perhaps being more figurative than literal. “My father was nearly deported before I was born. So there’s no daylight between me and the people who have a target on their backs.”

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“Anchor baby” typically is a pejorative term referring to a child born to non-citizens, often with the intent of obtaining legal status. That was not the case with Tong, whose parents were non-citizens, but had legal status when they started a family of five, beginning with William.

He said his parents, Ady and Nancy Tong, had green cards when he was born in Hartford in 1973. His mother, Nancy, came as a dependent of her father, who emigrated from Taiwan for a job as a ballistic engineer at Colt’s firearms. How his father, Ady, obtained a green card is a matter of family lore.

“My point, of course, is that there is no effective difference between me and my family and other immigrant families who either have no status, mixed status or complicated status, and they have a child here. And my life could have been very, very different if I was not a citizen at my birth,” Tong said.

Ady Tong came to the U.S. from China, via Hong Kong and Canada, and opened a restaurant in Hartford while on a visa. As the visa was about to expire, an INS agent warned that he would have to leave or face deportation. Tong said his parents suspect that a restaurant competitor had flagged his father’s status to the INS.

Ady wrote a six-page, hand-written letter to President Richard Nixon pleading for help, a story Tong has frequently told. Its impact was unclear, but the INS agent returned with a letter saying there would be no deportation, whether through a visa extension or other means. Ady soon obtained a green card, and both parents became citizens.

Ady and Nancy opened a bigger, successful restaurant in Wethersfield that paid for an American dream, a house in West Hartford and top-flight private schools: For their oldest, that meant Renbrook, Phillips Andover, Brown and the University of Chicago Law School. All of it was managed, Tong said, by “selling a lot of egg rolls.”

Trump’s intention, at least as detailed in the video last year, would be to limit birthright citizenship to babies with at least one parent who was “a citizen or a legal resident.” He also vows mass deportations of those in the U.S. without legal status, hinting at using the National Guard to help.

Tong said the president is casually flirting with harming immigrant families — most of whom he says have a mix of those with and without legal status — and the U.S. economy.

“As I’ve said a few times now, America runs on two things: Dunkin’ and immigrant workers, including undocumented workers,” Tong said. “You know this shit is going to get real when people stop showing up for work, right?”

There is a uniquely Chinese aspect to the history of birthright citizenship, as established by the 14th Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

The amendment was adopted in 1868 to assert the U.S. citizenship and rights of recently freed slaves and overturn the notorious finding in the Dred Scott case a decade earlier: Enslaved people were not citizens, and the courts could offer no protection, even in territories where slavery was banned.

But the full reach of the 14th Amendment was not affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court until 1898, a period of deep anti-Chinese sentiment. Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco, was denied reentry to the U.S. after a trip to China under the Chinese Exclusion Act. The government refused to recognize his citizenship.

By a 6-2 vote, the court concluded language in the Fourteenth Amendment encompassed the circumstances of his birth and could not be limited by an act of Congress. Trump does not find the 126-year-old precedent persuasive.

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“On day one of my new term in office, I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic US citizenship,” Trump said.

“I would be the first to sue,” Tong flatly told NBC last month, evincing a certain bravado refined over six years of legal combat with a line that won him an invite for an interview with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC on Jan. 8. In interviews with the Connecticut Mirror since then, Tong was more circumspect about calling the shot on a suit.

“I have a unique and important story to tell on birthright citizenship,” Tong said. “That doesn’t mean that we’ll do it exactly the way I want to do it, right? We’re going to figure out what’s best for that issue and then make a judgment as to strategically how to pursue it.”

He was elected attorney general in 2018 and took office on Jan. 9, 2019 at the mid point of Trump’s first term. By July 4 of that year, Tong had confronted Trump in one way or another an average of more than three times a month, often by the simple act of signing onto a comment letter in an administrative proceeding; other times, by joining multi-state suits as a plaintiff or intervenor.

His predecessor, George Jepsen, said Trump’s first win was a surprise, and Democratic attorneys general had none of the war plans now in place, though they quickly engaged.

“In terms of lessons learned, I think it’s important that Democrats not look like they are simply opposing everything the new administration does,” Jepsen said. “It’s more important to pick more strategic fights, as opposed to a rush to the courtroom at every turn.”

Perhaps surprisingly, given his activism during Trump 1.0 and his own ambitions for higher office, Tong said he shares that sentiment, especially since his election as the president-elect of the bipartisan National Association of Attorneys General.

“It’s going to be a balance. I’m going to be aggressive in in protecting Connecticut and Connecticut’s interests, and I’m never going to shy away from that,” Tong said. “But I’m not going to pick a fight and be needlessly partisan, because I think I have a broader responsibility.”

But the fights inevitably will come, as might domestic political complications.

Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat and ally, will reveal by this summer if he is seeking a third term in 2026.

“If the governor decides to run again, I will be the first to endorse, and I made a commitment to the governor that I wouldn’t get ahead of him,” Tong said. “He’s the leader of our party. He’s the governor. He gets to decide what he’s doing before anybody else gets to decide what they would like to do.”

And if he doesn’t run?

“I think we’ve got to focus on a couple of things. You know, number one, who’s ready to stand up for Connecticut and fight for Connecticut, especially against an adverse federal government?” Tong said. “Who has experience doing that?”

Tong has someone in mind.

Mark Pazniokas  is a reporter for The Connecticut Mirror (https://ctmirror.org/ ). Copyright 2025 © The Connecticut Mirror.

There are no ready legislative solutions to either cost factor, but that didn’t dissuade Senate Democrats Thursday from proposing a “Ratepayers First Act” that is less a solution than a process by which they hope to find one.

The legislation, Senate Bill 4, is a statement of purpose, the legislative equivalent of an IOU. Its text is 20 words: “That the general statutes be amended to provide for improved service and reduced costs for electricity ratepayers in the state.”

In other words, stay tuned, details to come. The Democrats made no attempt to say otherwise. They are looking for ideas, sifting through the barrage of energy bills filed since the 2025 session opened a week ago.

“This bill is an open book. There are no specific things that we’re going to talk about at this moment,” said Sen. Norm Needleman, D-Essex, co-chair of the Energy and Technology Committee. “We’re going to listen to all the bills that are coming in, and they’re coming in at a rate much higher and faster than the energy committee has ever seen.”

Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney of New Haven and Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff of Norwalk joined Needleman at a press conference Thursday acknowledging Connecticut’s consistent ranking near the top in electric rates — and the importance of signaling they understand what that means to ratepayers.

“We have obviously heard many, many complaints about about rates and about the volatility of rates,” Looney said. “And we are, of course, very sensitive to that.”

In tone, the Democrats echoed President George H.W. Bush’s effort to convince voters rocked by a weak economy in 1992 that he heard them, even if he had no quick remedies. Bush said, “Message: I care. We’re trying.”

Gov. Ned Lamont and lawmakers of both parties all say they’re trying, but the options are limited.

“One of our original sins is deregulation,” Needleman said. “It created a whole different marketplace. I think it was sold to the state as a panacea and something that was going to make it better and cheaper and more available.”

The deregulation law passed in 1998 forced the states’ two publicly regulated electric utilities, the dominant company that would become Eversource and the smaller United Illuminating, to get out of the business of generating electricity and focus on the distribution of power to homes and businesses.

Kimberly Harriman, the head of government affairs for United Illuminating and its parent, Avangrid, noted after the Democratic news conference that distribution costs regulated by the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority are only 30% of a typical electric bill.

“Is that inconsequential? No, but for too many years, we’ve been jumping over $10 bills to get to the pennies on the bill. We have not been focused on supply costs,” Harriman said.

The supply of electricity comes from a largely deregulated market, where the prices Eversource and United Illuminating pay primarily are set by competitive markets — but still influenced by public policies, most notably one that requires them to buy power from Millstone Power Station in Waterford at a higher rate.

About 60% of electricity in Connecticut comes from burning natural gas, and 33% is produced by the two active nuclear reactors at Millstone. They are the region’s largest source of carbon-free electricity.

In 2017, when Dominion Energy complained that its Millstone plant could not stay economically viable while competing with cheap natural gas, the General Assembly passed a law dictating that Eversource and UI, together, purchase at least half of Millstone’s output at a higher price negotiated by the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.

That negotiated price is contracted though 2029, and it is reflected in the “combined public benefit” portion of every consumer’s electric bill. Last summer, when rates skyrocketed, the Millstone charge represented 77% of the public benefit charge.

Sen. Ryan Fazio of Greenwich, the ranking Senate Republican on energy, said he was happy to see Democrats engage on costs.

“I think we saw concepts of a plan, so I appreciate that Senate Democrats would like to come to the table and discuss potential legislation on energy affordability. I think Connecticut residents have been asking us as a state legislature to lead and tackle questions of energy affordability for two years now,” Fazio said.

Some of the bills filed in the last week, including several by Republicans, would eliminate the public benefit charge without explaining exactly how that could be done.

Lesser expenses in the charge are things that lawmakers say could be either eliminated or moved from ratepayers to taxpayers, including relief for those who cannot afford their bills and the cost of building out an EV charging system.

They could mean savings, but at the margins, legislators say. The bigger costs of generating power are intertwined related to federal policies and the management of the New England grid.

“I look at my job here and the job of of the leadership of our committee to be ‘fix what you can fix.’ Some parts of energy policy are very difficult,” Needleman said. “When we deregulated, we became part of a regional grid operator, and a lot of the decisions around supply of energy were taken out of our hands.”

The legislature has largely focused on the performance of the regulated utilities and the ability of regulators to punish them over performance issues. On Thursday, the utilities said they welcome a shift to supply issues.

“I appreciate Sen. Needleman’s recognition that deregulation hasn’t generally provided all that we thought it would,” Harriman said. “And I appreciate the fact that he talked about we’ve got to look at supply. We’ve been asking them to look for supply for many, many years. So let’s work together on a solution about how do we grow supply.”

Eversource concurred.

“Sen. Needleman is absolutely right, that the restructuring of energy markets decades ago has presented significant challenges for customers and they are seeing those consequences in their energy bills,” said Tricia T. Modifica, an Eversource spokesperson.

“We support efforts to bring down supply costs and have a record of supporting the expansion of new supply sources including significant efforts to bring hydropower into New England. We strongly encourage these discussions and would love to have a seat at the table to provide the expertise on what will be necessary in distribution investments to deliver that power in the most cost effective way possible.”

It was Lamont’s strongest defense of the spending cap, though he was not as definitive on another guardrail: a mechanism called the volatility cap that diverts certain revenues to budget reserves and paying down debt and pension liabilities.

The governor’s comments to the annual economic summit of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association in Hartford came as Democratic legislative leaders and social services advocates are pressing for greater flexibility, especially in the volatility cap.

The spending cap pegs what the state can spend to growth in personal income or inflation, metrics that Lamont says imposes a welcome and reasonable degree of discipline on government.

“I think it’s sacrosanct. I think it’s really important,” Lamont said. “As I said before, it’s not a straitjacket. It goes up with income to allow us to spend more as we earn more. And I don’t want to play any games with that.”

On the volatility cap, however, the governor seemed resigned to a coming negotiation in connection with the budget he will propose on Feb. 5, though he did not invite one. Rather than rule out any change, he articulated a broader standard: the volatility cap must remain sufficiently stringent to mitigate risk in an economic downturn.

Lamont said the state must avoid the yo-yo effect of past decades: Spending increases in good times; tax increases and spending cuts in bad times.

“The way I’m looking at it is, ‘What do I need to make sure this state is not going to be forced to cut the heck out of education spending or raise your taxes if we have a recession?’” Lamont said.

The concept behind the volatility cap, adopted in 2017 as part of a bipartisan budget deal, was that certain revenue sources vary wildly from year to year and should not be relied upon as a gauge of what the state can afford to spend.

It singles out quarterly income and business tax receipts that historically fluctuate and requires that revenue from these categories above $3.15 billion — the amount generated in the previous fiscal year — would be too unstable to spend and should instead be used to pay down debt or set aside in reserves.

The volatile revenue, however, has turned out to be no so volatile. The volatility cap has captured $1 billion every year since the law was passed, except for $530 million in the COVID year of 2020. The state now has $4 billion in budget reserves, a hedge against recession.

“We’re in good shape, and we have a little bit of room for flexibility,” Lamont said. “If you say I want to make sure that if we have a bust like we had with the dot-com bubble in ’01-’02, I want to make sure that we have in place the guardrails that mean we’re going to be able to weather that.”

Lamont called the 2008 recession “a knee-knocker,” one that required a massive federal government response to stave off widespread bank failures.

“I’m not sure you can save for the very worst recessions, just like you can’t build bridges for the 200-year storm, but you can do what you can reasonably,” Lamont said. “So that’s sort of where I am on the thought process of where we’re going to be going forward.”

Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven, offered no comment on whether he saw the spending cap as sacrosanct, but focused on the glimmer of flexibility on the volatility cap.

“I think it’s certainly an indicator of progress,” Looney said. “The governor is always looking to build a consensus, and the fact that he has now sort of created a separate position on one as opposed to the other, that we find encouraging.”

Serious budget talks have yet to begin.

“We’re at the beginning of this entire process, and we are, of course, looking at the volatility cap, at the level that that is set. We think in some ways, we have been counting volatile revenue that is actually pretty reliable,” Looney said.

Looney addressed Lamont’s comments after a news conference called to underscore the Senate Democratic majority’s support for a labor bill opposed by the governor: Opening jobless benefits to strikers after two weeks on the picket line.

Last year, Lamont vetoed a vaguely written bill that was intended to provide up to $3 million in state aid to striking workers without explicitly saying so. It would have drawn on a state fund and not rely on unemployment.

The governor said Wednesday he remains opposed to either approach, but Looney was not deterred. Democrats would press their case to the governor, noting that jobless benefits are available to strikers in New York and New Jersey.

“We’re going to appeal to his sense of justice and fairness and negotiate as we go along to make this law,” Looney said. “There’s no reason why Connecticut should be in a different position than New York and New Jersey, other progressive states with Democratic governors and majorities in their legislatures.”

By a vote of 9-4 on Tuesday, the Labor and Public Employees Committee voted to draft Senate Bill 8, which would provide jobless benefits for strikers and also regulate the use of quotas and biometric surveillance to speed warehouse workers.

The second portion, which is directed at Amazon, was drawn from a bill that did not get far last year. The bill would do what organized labor would like to accomplish through organizing.

“If a union were in place, these practices would not be allowed to go on. And we hope at some point soon, unions will be in place,” Looney said.

Senate Bill 8 has 19 co-sponsors, one more than necessary for passage in the 36-seat Senate. But a half-dozen Democratic senators, nearly one quarter of the 25-member caucus, did not sign on.

Republicans were unenthusiastic about either portion of the bill

“If these items are legislative Democrats’ top priorities, then their priorities are completely out of whack and out of touch,” said Rep. Steve Weir, R-Hebron, ranking member of the Labor Committee. “To reward unionized striking workers for going on strike automatically takes the side of Union labor instead of remaining neutral.  Additionally, feigning concern over worker safety is just a ruse to hide the true intentions of my Senate Democrat colleagues which would be to force large companies like Amazon to unionize.”

Irene Tung, a labor researcher, told the committee at a public hearing last year that Amazon’s self-reported data to OSHA showed that its warehouse workers in Connecticut were injured at a rate of 6.3 injuries for every 100 workers.

Neither Amazon nor its Connecticut lobbyists offered testimony.

Lamont has no position on the warehouse portion of the bill.

He was applauded Wednesday at the CBIA economic summit as sensitive to the state’s economic climate, but he has sided with labor on key issues, including a higher minimum wage, minimal requirements for paid sick days and a ban on so-called captive audience meetings some employees use to thwart organizing.

Mark Pazniokas is a reporter for the Connecticut Mirror. Copyright 2025 @ CT Mirror (ctmirror.org).

“Nuclear power already provides most of our carbon-free power. That’s why we’re working with the federal government to find ways to expand nuclear capacity here in Connecticut,” he said, then added, “Before you rule out natural gas … that’s where most of our power comes from and will for the foreseeable future, especially without more nuclear power.”

So, is Lamont about to press for an expansion of pipeline capacity to the relatively cheap natural gas produced in the Marcellus Shale fields of western New York and Pennsylvania? Is there an energy company open to bringing in the next generation of nuclear technology — SMRS, or small modular reactors.

Not exactly. In an interview, the governor said his primary intent Wednesday was to discourage lawmakers from taking away any of the few policy options to expand the supply of electricity or bring down its cost, which generally ranks among the most expensive in the U.S.

That places him between the competing camps of clean and cost: Environmentalists who say carbon-free energy must be priority one, and opponents of procuring power from renewable sources that are more expensive than electricity generated by burning natural gas, including large-scale solar and off-shore wind.

Lamont recently rejected one offshore wind project on the basis of cost, a decision applauded by Sen. Ryan Fazio of Greenwich, the ranking Republican on the Energy and Technology Committee. But Republicans also propose statutory cost limits on future projects, essentially tethering them to market prices pegged to gas.

That is a step too far for Lamont, who says no sources of power should be off limits as the state faces a continuing struggle to balance reliability, affordability and climate impact in procuring electricity. When it comes to power, his administration’s motto is “all of the above.”

“I don’t want them to say, ‘You’re never allowed to pay more than two or three times the price of natural gas,’ ” Lamont said. Especially if “it’s the only way I can add generating capacity right now, because I can’t bring in more natural gas.”

Rep. Jonathan Steinberg, D-Westport, the co-chair of an Energy and Technology Committee that typically strives for a bipartisan approach to energy policy, said affordability is a shared goal, but the governor can expect support in defeating any arbitrary limits on the cost and sources of future procurements.

“I agree with him,” Steinberg said. “But I don’t necessarily like the moniker of ‘all of the above.’ ”

Fazio said, overall, he sees Lamont as an ally in making affordability a larger component in energy policy.

“I think first of all the governor believes there should be an upward limit on what consumers pay,” said Fazio, who nonetheless acknowledges the governor’s options on sources of power are limited. “That doesn’t mean they should have infinite discretion, and I think consumers should have a right to legal guardrails as to what they will pay in the future.”

Some of the likely conflicts in energy policy this year were evident Thursday at the committee’s organizational meeting, where members broadly outlined their goals.

Sen. Norm Needleman, D-Essex, the other co-chair, said energy policy must rest on a three-legged stool of cost, reliability and climate.

“We are always looking at cost to the extent that we can control it in the deregulated market. We’re looking at reliability,” said Sen. Norm Needleman, D-Essex, the co-chair. “And I’m always focused on environmental goals that, in my world view, that’s a lot more to do with air quality and some of the things that really affect people’s lives directly.”

Rep. Nick Gauthier, a newly elected Democrat from a district that includes Waterford, the home of the Millstone nuclear power plant that produces the majority of Connecticut’s carbon-free power, warned against increasing a reliance on natural gas or other fossil fuels that contribute to climate change.

Rep. Joe Canino, a Republican freshman from Torrington, said voters were clear as he campaigned: Cost must be addressed.

Gauthier unseated a Republican in November; Canino, a Democrat.

Rep. David Yaccarino, a Republican who has represented North Haven for 14 years, is returning to the committee he served on early in his tenure to advocate for a greater reliance on market forces that favor electricity generated by burning natural gas.

“I think we need to listen to constituents and the market,” Yaccarino said. “I don’t think it’s that complicated.”

Eversource and United Illuminating, the state’s two major electric utilities, are primarily in the regulated business of distributing electricity, not generating it. They purchase power in competitive markets, though not without state intervention.

The state mandates the purchases of some power from renewable sources and a higher price for Millstone.

In 2017, when Dominion Energy complained that Millstone could not stay economically viable while competing with cheap natural gas, the General Assembly passed a law dictating that Eversource and UI, together, purchase at least half of Millstone’s output at a higher price negotiated by the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.

The law, which passed primarily with Republican support in a year when they occupied nearly half the seats in the General Assembly, expires in 2029, and the Lamont administration has begun preliminary discussions about how to keep Millstone open..

Dominion’s new chief executive, Robert Blue, was in Hartford on Thursday for separate meetings with key lawmakers and the governor. Steinberg said Blue and legislators spoke generally about the potential of additional nuclear capacity through small modular reactors.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has certified an SMR design for use in the U.S., but none have been built. Three have been built globally.

The second of two new reactors came on line in Georgia last year — the first new nuclear-powered electric generation in decades in the U.S. They cost billions more than originally estimated, though they are not SMRs. Lamont said there is an industry wariness about any new nuclear capacity in markets where power generation is deregulated and there is no guarantee of recovering costs.

“They don’t like Connecticut, because we’re deregulated. ‘The rate payers are not going to pick it up. My shareholders are,’” Lamont said. “So I’ve got to work through that.”

Mark Pazniokas is a reporter for the Connecticut Mirror. Copyright @ CTMirror (ctmirror.org) 2025.

Dodd spoke by phone from his law office a mile from the White House, a day after accepting a Presidential Citizens Medal from Joe Biden, a parting gift from a friend preparing to make his own departure from a much larger stage.

“A lot of memories today,” Dodd said.

When Congress acts today to certify the victory of Donald J. Trump over the man Dodd served as a friend, political adviser and part-time diplomatic envoy, Dodd expects his pro-forma resignation from the latter role — “just a polite letter thanking the president” — will be tendered.

It will be a footnote to a half century in public life.

Dodd was 30 on Jan. 3, 1975, taking office as one of the “Watergate Babies,” the 75 House Democrats who arrived in Washington after the Watergate scandal, hell-bent on upending seniority rules that kept Congress under the thrall of old white men, mostly from the deep south.

“We went right after them,” Dodd said, his voice raspy from a lingering respiratory bug. “You could see change happening. Traditions and institutions that existed throughout the 20th Century were about to disappear.”

It was a time of tumult and transition, dynamics that had gripped Washington before and will again, if never precisely the same way. Today’s transition is a step towards escorting the oldest man to ever occupy the Oval Office to retirement, succeeded by a man who would hold that distinction in three years and five months.

Biden turned 82 on Nov. 20. Trump’s 82nd birthday would be on June 14, 2028, six months before his own constitutionally mandated exit from the White House. Dodd, the Watergate Baby, turned 80 on May 27.

“It happens more quickly than you want to believe,” Dodd said. He laughed and added, “So enjoy the hell out of it.”

As the sun set Thursday, Dodd was seated next to Liz Cheney, the former third-ranking House Republican and Wyoming congresswoman, in the East Room of the White House. Cheney and Dodd were among recipients of the presidential medal, all seated in alphabetical order.

There are only one or two degrees of separation from Dodd, Cheney and major milestones of U.S. politics from the 1970s through this week, when Trump’s victory will be formalized and the body of former President Jimmy Carter will lie in state at the same U.S. Capitol assaulted by Trump’s supporters exactly four years ago.

On the day the Watergate Babies arrived, Cheney was 8 years old. Her father, Dick Cheney, was deputy chief of staff to Gerald Ford, who assumed the presidency upon the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974 and would lose to Carter in 1976.

In 2009, Dick Cheney was the Republican vice president who presided over the uneventful certification of Democrat Barack Obama’s victory as the first Black president and Biden as vice president.

Dodd, whose father was a Nuremberg war crimes prosecutor, once called for a criminal investigation into waterboarding authorized during the Bush-Cheney administration. Asked if the investigation should go “as high as Cheney’s office,” Dodd said, “You gotta go where you gotta go.”

Before their names were called Thursday to accept their medals, Dodd asked Liz Cheney if she ever could have imagined such a day, seated together and waiting to be honored by a Democratic president with the nation’s second-highest civilian honor. Dodd said Cheney only laughed.

Cheney was greeted by a standing ovation and sustained applause when her turn came.

She lost her leadership post and eventually her seat after denouncing Trump for his election denial and its contribution to the Jan. 6 assault. She called Trump’s actions a betrayal of the office, the Constitution and the American people and later was vice chair of the Jan. 6 investigation committee that elicited damning testimony from Trump’s inner circle about that day and what preceded it.

“If you want leaders who will enable and spread his destructive lies, I’m not your person, you have plenty of others to choose from,” Cheney said in a speech before losing her leadership role. “That will be their legacy.”

Now, Trump hints at potential prosecutions of her and other enemies, for crimes never articulated.

Dodd and her father overlapped by one term in the House. Dick Cheney was elected in 1978 as Wyoming’s one at-large congressman, the seat his daughter would assume in January 2017. Dodd had departed in 2011 after six years in the House and 30 in the Senate.

The last of the Watergate Babies in the House, George Miller and Henry Waxman of California, left the House in 2015 after not seeking reelection. Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who retired in 2023 after 48 years in the Senate, was the last member of Congress first elected in 1974.

On Friday, Dodd checked off things that might be remembered as his legacy, including two bills that framed his tenure in the Senate: A nine-year campaign to pass the Family and Medical Leave Act, which enabled tens of millions of Americans to care for loved ones without fear of job loss, and passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in 2010.

But he sped through a list of laws he helped craft and pass. He was more interested in reminiscing about his first day Congress — and Biden’s last in the White.

“I just called Tom Downey. We met 50 years ago today,” Dodd said.

At 25, Downey was the youngest of the Watergate Babies. The New York congressman was the minimum age for serving in the House.

Dodd recalled finding himself in a line waiting to take a photo with Wilbur Mills, one of the old guard the newcomers were prepared to push aside. “What am I standing in line for?” he asked himself. “I stepped out of line.”

Mills was the all-powerful chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. He also was an alcoholic whose affair with a stripper, Fanne Foxe, became public the previous fall after she jumped from Mills’ limo into the Tidal Basin, a big finish to a night of drinking. Dodd’s first term would be Mills’ last.

After leaving office, Mills established the Wilbur D. Mills Center for Alcoholism and Drug Treatment Center, helped raise funds for similar facilities and became a frequent speaker about alcoholism, at least once in Hartford.

“I went home and introduced him. I came out from behind the stage and introduced him, talked about how he changed his life and changed the lives of many,” Dodd said. “People aren’t all defined by bad mistakes they make. I’m always grateful that I had a positive relationship with him at the end.”

Dodd was among the last to defend the notion of Biden’s viability to continue his 2024 presidential campaign after his disastrous debate with Trump.

“He’s as decent a human being as I’ve ever known in any walk of life,” Dodd said. “He remembers people. He’s cares about them.”

Biden had stood with Dodd until he abandoned a run for a sixth term in the face of falling approval ratings. At a fundraiser in December 2009, the month before Dodd quit the race, Biden praised him as “the single most gifted legislator in Congress, now that Teddy Kennedy’s gone.”

Dodd served with Biden on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for most of his time in the Senate. Biden was the committee chair, Dodd the chair of a subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere.

Dodd was president of the Motion Picture Association of America for five years after leaving the Senate. In 2020, Biden asked Dodd to oversee the vetting of his potential running mates, a process that ended with the selection of Kamala Harris.

He was a special adviser to Biden on U.S. relations with the other nations of the Americas, helping to arrange a summit in 2022 and then to follow up on the resulting initiatives, primarily the creation of the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity.

The U.S. and 11 other countries with two-thirds of the population in the Western Hemisphere are signatories, including the major trading partners of Canada and Mexico, and smaller nations such as the Dominican Republic, where Dodd was a Peace Corps volunteer in 1966 and 1967.

Trump has threatened to upend trade agreements with major tariffs, but Dodd said there are Democratic and Republican senators and House members pushing to give the initiatives legislative backing.

Dodd also noted the president-elect’s choice for secretary of state, Sen. Marco Rubio, gave a speech in April about “the importance of private investment and increased economic opportunities in the majority of these countries in Latin America.”

“So even though I won’t be around to continue it,” Dodd said. “it’s kind of got a life.”

On Thursday evening, after the public medal ceremony, Dodd and his invited guests were ushered into the Oval Office, a courtesy not extended to all the honorees.

His wife, Jackie Clegg Dodd, whom he married in 1999, and their two college-age daughters, Grace and Christina, joined him, as did his brother Thomas Dodd Jr., a former U.S. ambassador, and two staffers from his Senate days, Steve Kinney and Lee Reynolds. His old chief of staff, Congresswoman Rosa L. DeLauro, popped in.

Dodd, a writer of notes, had reached out to other former staffers earlier, offering thanks. “This wasn’t a solo act by any stretch of the imagination,” Dodd said. “So many of them participated, so directly, in legislative stuff and everything else. I had great, great people, both in Connecticut and down there.”

The end of long political careers inevitably take on the some of the pleasant aspects of a wake. Respects are made, stories told. There is laughter. It’s what Irish Catholic pols do. It’s what they did in the Oval Office.

Dodd said his last conversation with the president was personal. They spoke of Michael “Goose” McAdams, who died in 1998. McAdams was Dodd’s best friend at Georgetown Prep, a prodigy in all things political. On a cold January day long ago, Dodd and McAdams watched John F. Kennedy’s inaugural parade.

Neither Dodd nor Biden could remember when the two of them first met, an odd lapse for two men who like to memorialize such things.

Dodd reminded Biden that one of his early hires after his election to the Senate in 1972 had been McAdams. Dodd could not conceive of his friend failing to insist he meet his boss, the youngest man in the U.S. Senate. It must have been then, a long time ago.

Mark Pazniokas is a reporter for the Connecticut Mirror. Copyright @ CTMirror (ctmirror.org).

In just weeks, when the 2025 session of the General Assembly convenes, those same advocates will be lobbying Lamont to reconsider his resistance to revisions to a volatility cap and other spending limits they say is diverting too much money to budget reserves and debt reduction at the expense of social programs.

Lamont’s relationship with the left has been defined by two contradictory impulses: a willingness to defy business opposition and support key labor initiatives, including paid leave and a relatively generous minimum wage, balanced against a fiscal conservatism he sees as crucial to budget stability and economic growth.

The path to passage of the paid leave program illustrated Lamont’s desire to be an ally of labor — but not always on their terms. Passage came only after Lamont threatened a veto over whether private insurers would have a role, and a compromise was struck.

That was overlooked recently when Lamont seemed eager to tweak the program’s opponents, primarily a Republican legislative minority uniformly opposed to its creation and business lobbyists who warned that the program never would be financially solvent.

“Just the opposite,” said Lamont, a Democrat and former businessman from Greenwich. “We’re managing this at a good basis. People said it was going to be bad for business. Look, business has never been stronger. I heard the same complaints about the minimum wage.”

The celebration outside Hartford Prints! — a woman-owned card and gift shop in downtown Hartford whose owner had urged creation of the program — came on the same day the latest job report showed Connecticut’s unemployment rate at 3% in November, the sixth consecutive month the state has posted a jobless rate lower than the national average.

Bills creating the paid leave program and raising the minimum wage both passed with Lamont’s support in 2019, his first year in office. The hourly minimum wage increased in annual increments from $10.10 to $15 in 2023, then was pegged to an economic index that raised it to $15.69 last year and will go to $16.35 next month.

The paid leave program essentially is a state-mandated disability insurance program funded by a tax on workers of one-half of 1%. No benefits were paid until January 2022, allowing the fund backing the benefits to accrue.

It provides up to 12 weeks of replacement wages, payable on a sliding scale ranging up to a maximum of 95% for minimum-wage earners, capped at $900 a week. Workers incapacitated by pregnancy could get an additional two weeks. Benefits would be cut if the revenue proves insufficient to meet demand.

That has not been necessary: The program, which is administered by a quasi-public agency whose membership is dominated by gubernatorial appointees, has collected about $1.6 billion and has a current reserve of nearly $600 million. Contributions have increased 3.6% in this calendar year.

“So with the continued expansion of the program and success, Connecticut really is leading the nation,” Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz said. “It’s so clear that our paid medical leave program serves our state and is a powerful tool for economic stability, for gender equity and for family support.”

About half the claims have been for the applicant’s own illness, about 13% for caregiver leave, 13% for pregnancy or child birth and 24% for bonding with newborns or adopted children.

Sen. Julie Kushner, D-Danbury, a retired union executive and leading liberal voice who disagrees with Lamont’s fiscal policies, said the relationship with the governor is one of mutual respect. She expects to have reasoned discussions with him over fiscal policies in 2025.

In a recent appearance on WNPR’s Wheelhouse show, Lamont made clear his focus remains on fiscal discipline and economic growth.

“I think the priorities for the state is to keep it growing. You know, we were a shrinking state. Young people were leaving the state. Companies were leaving the state, and we were going from deficit to deficit,” Lamont said. “It was a pretty tough time. I’d like to think that that is turned around, but you can’t take it for granted.”

Connecticut has posted five straight years of strong revenue growth and budget surpluses, but the governor’s repeated references to population growth have been undermined by a revision made to estimated in-state migration.

Census Bureau has corrected its state-to-state migrations estimates for Connecticut, turning a net gain of 57,000 into a loss of 13,500 people from 2021 to 2022.

Lamont has one more public event before take off for the holidays: He will preside Friday over a meeting of the state Bond Commission.

Mark Pazniokas  is a reporter for The Connecticut Mirror (https://ctmirror.org/ ). Copyright 2024 © The Connecticut Mirror.

There was no math, as no equation could explain how 992,053 votes for Kamala Harris and 736,918 votes for Donald J. Trump on Nov. 5 could result in five men and two women casting seven votes for Harris and none for Trump on Dec. 17 in the state Senate.

As Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas explained, it’s all in Article Two, Section One, Clause Three of the U.S. Constitution: Americans don’t actually vote for president; they vote for slates of electors to the Electoral College.

Similar ceremonies were conducted Tuesday in state Capitols across the U.S., formalizing but not finalizing Trump’s victory over Harris.

“These votes will be recorded on the certificate of vote sent to Congress to be counted on Jan. 6,” Thomas said.

Oh, yes, Jan. 6.

On that date in 2021, Americans got a civics lesson about the mechanics of electing a president and certifying the results. Vice President Mike Pence accepted the results as certified by each state, defying Trump and a riotous mob to declare Joe Biden the winner.

“We are here to bear witness to the ways democracy demands the best of who we are,” the Rev. Erica Thompson of Asylum Hill Congregational Church told the electors and witnesses in Hartford in an opening prayer.

For the first time in his three runs for the White House, Trump won the popular vote on Nov. 5, if by a relatively close margin, 77.2 million to 75 million. His win in the 538-member Electoral College was greater, 312 to 226.

Electoral College votes are based on a state’s representation in Congress: With two senators and five House members, Connecticut has seven. In Connecticut and nearly every other state, the contest for the electoral votes are winner take all, not proportional to the popular vote.

The race turned on just three states.

Harris lost Pennsylvania by 1.7 percentage points, Michigan by 1.4 points and Wisconsin by 0.9 points. Victories in those states would have garnered 44 more electoral votes, giving Harris the minimum 270 votes to win, with 268 for Trump.

There is no suggestion that Harris would reject the votes certified in Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin, as Trump asked of Pence four years ago.

Instead, Harris will perform one of her final functions as vice president on Jan. 6, 2025, presiding over the counting of state-by-state results reported to the Senate and confirmed in signed documents sent to the Archivist of the United States, including those completed in Hartford.

The ceremony opened with Connecticut’s Kid Governor, Cristiano Almeida of Southington, and his cabinet pledging allegiance to the flag. Faizan Seyal, 14, of Fairfield, the winner of the Connecticut Civics Bee, sang the National Anthem.

Connecticut’s slate of seven Democratic electors was chosen in May at the Democratic state convention. Biden still was the Democratic nominee for president. There had been no debates, no attempt on the life of Trump.

They are Democratic activists: Kevin Sullivan, the former Senate president pro tem and lieutenant governor, of West Hartford; Nick Balletto, the former Democratic state chair, from East Haven; Rep. Geraldo Reyes of Waterbury; Tiffani McGinnis, a town councilor from West Hartford and organizer for Harris; Michael Pohl, the Democratic chair of Manchester; and David Kostek of Westport and Dorothy Grady of Coventry, both congressional staffers long active in party politics.

Each signed engraved ballots the size of index cards: one bearing the name of Harris; the other her running mate, Timothy Walz. The secretary of the state had provided each with a boxed Waterman ballpoint pen, a souvenir to keep.

One by one, they walked to a wooden box, reputedly carved from the wood of the Charter Oak, to deposit the ballots. As they voted, Jenna Nome, an employee of the secretary of the state’s office, offered a musical interlude on her saxophone, playing “Fly Me to the Moon.”

Balletto then opened the box and confirmed seven votes for Harris, then the same for Walz.

In addition, all seven electors signed forms attesting to the votes. Those forms were placed in oversized envelopes. Thomas poured melted wax on each, then pressed the state seal.

It was over in 37 minutes.

Thompson, the minister, closed with a final prayer.

“We acknowledge that governing is not an easy task, given the deep divisions and outright hostilities so rampant in our country right now. We acknowledge that there are many who are fearful about the future,” Thompson said. “Give us the clarity of mind and the fortitude of spirit to do what is good and right.”

Mark Pazniokas is a reporter for The Connecticut Mirror (ctmirror.org). Copyright 2024 © The Connecticut Mirror.

Mariana Monteiro, who has overseen diversity and inclusion efforts for major corporations such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, Otis Elevator and GE, was introduced as the state’s chief equity and opportunity officer.

“We live in a day and age where, down in Washington, DEI is being challenged, to put it mildly, and [there’s] a lot of talk about meritocracy,” Lamont said at a press conference. “I don’t think you have a real meritocracy unless you do outreach.”

Elon Musk, the billionaire who has the ear of President-elect Donald J. Trump and is tasked with slashing the size of the federal workforce, equates DEI policies as a new form of discrimination, not outreach.

“DEI must DIE,” Musk wrote on social media a year ago. He called diversity, equity and inclusion “propaganda words for racism, sexism and other -isms.”

Lamont said the goal of the new office is to “make sure everybody, regardless of background, knows that they have an opportunity to serve this state. And you have to do some outreach. You just can’t round up the usual suspects, which is sort of the norm around here.”

The new job is based in the office of the governor and was created by an executive order Lamont signed six months ago.

Monteiro, 55, who will be paid $175,000 annually from existing funds in the governor’s office, began work Monday. She was hired after a national job search, the governor’s office said.

Her first task is an assessment of hiring practices across state government, where most agencies are required to draft annual affirmative action plans with hiring goals that are reviewed by the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities.

Under state law, the agencies are already supposed to be engaging in outreach as part of their affirmative action plan.

“There’s some good practices already in the state that we want to amplify and collaborate with, and some others that we may perhaps copy with prep from the industry, such as outreach to professional organizations that really host the best and the brightest of all the communities we serve,” Monteiro said.

Lamont said he was less concerned about precise percentages of race, gender and backgrounds represented in the state workforce than ensuring everyone has access to state job listings and state is hiring from the best possible labor pool.

“I don’t think in terms of percentages,” Lamont said. “I think in terms of outreach and making sure that everybody knows there’s a job here for them, and we can do that and give everybody that equal shot. I look at state government, I look at our commissioners, I look at our state police, and we are reflecting the diversity that makes Connecticut special.”

In June 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in higher education, fueling a broader look at DEI policies that had taken on higher visibility after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020.

Florida is among an estimated 20 states that have passed laws either barring or restricting DEI efforts in state governments, largely focused on state universities.

In signing an anti-DEI bill in 2023, when he was preparing a run for president, Gov. Ron DeSantis said, “This bill says the whole experiment with DEI is coming to an end in the state of Florida.”

Amazon, Walmart and other major corporations have since made cuts in staffing focused on diversity, often after being targeted by conservative activists. Three months ago, civil rights groups began pushing back in a national campaign.

The conservative Heritage Foundation, meanwhile, reported last month that while corporations have cut DEI staff and removed DEI statements from their websites, “nearly all Fortune 500 companies still list commitments to the DEI ideology on their websites.”

Mark Pazniokas is  is a reporter for The Connecticut Mirror (https://ctmirror.org/ ). Copyright 2025 © The Connecticut Mirror.

Rojas confirmed Wednesday what has long-been speculated: Currey, a former deputy majority leader, current Education Committee co-chair and well-regarded scion of a political family, will be his chief of staff when the the 2025-26 term begins on Jan. 8.

He will succeed Christy Scott, who is expected to become a sessional lawyer in the office of House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford. Her removal by Rojas has been the source of tension among House Democrats, in part because she is the wife of Joe Aresimowicz, the former House speaker.

The Office of Legislative Management is reviewing the circumstances of her removal and transfer, Ritter said.

“I’ve worked with Jeff for a long time and think the world of him,” Ritter said.

Scott declined comment.

Currey is finishing his fifth term representing the solidly Democratic 11th House District of East Hartford and Manchester. He was unopposed in 2022.

Returning as chief of staff was “in the range of possibilities,” but not a sure thing, when he ended his campaign and relinquished the Democratic nomination, Currey said Wednesday.

He was a key Rojas deputy, overseeing the screening of bills before they are called for votes and acting as a liaison with the Republican minority. Rojas said Currey has the skill sets for a legislative chief of staff.

Currey gave up that post two years ago to become the co-chair of the Education Committee. Before his election to the General Assembly in 2014, Currey was the chair of the Board of Education in East Hartford.

Once his term ends in January, there will be no Currey holding elective office in East Hartford for the first time since 1982. His late mother, Melody, was a state representative and mayor. His father, the current chair of the Metropolitan District Commission, was East Hartford’s elected treasurer.

Mark Pazniokas is a reporter for The Connecticut Mirror (/ctmirror.org). Copyright 2024 © The Connecticut Mirror.