Sunday, May 26, 2013
 

Politics

With an eye to '14 campaign, Democrats back minimum wage increase

After one last tweak sought by the governor, the Senate began debate Thursday night on a bill that would raise Connecticut’s $8.25 minimum wage for the first time since Dannel P. Malloy's election in 2010 as the state's first Democratic governor in 20 years. 

Mark Ojakian, (l) the governor's chief of staff, talking to Vincent Mauro, a senior Senate staffer, about tweaking the minimum wage bill. The Senate acceded to a request by the administration to lessen its election-year impact on business.

House OKs driver's licenses for illegal immigrants

The push and pull of immigration politics played out over a marathon House session that began Wednesday with bipartisan consensus on one bill and ended Thursday in partisan rancor and recrimination on another, a measure allowing people in the country illegally to obtain a Connecticut driver’s license.

 

Ana Maria Rivera, with hand to mouth, and other immigration activists watch from House gallery as roll call is taken on GOP amendment to bill opening driver's licences to illegal immigrants. Bill passed on 74-55 vote at 5:48 a.m.

Jury convicts Donovan campaign aide

Robert Braddock Jr. and his lawyer, Frank RIccio II, at right, talk to reporters after the verdict.

Donovan asserts innocence in corruption case

Former House Speaker Christopher G. Donovan, D-Meriden, asserted his innocence Tuesday in a surprise appearance outside federal court as jurors began deliberating whether a top campaign aide was guilty in the corruption case that derailed his 2012 congressional campaign.

Former House Speaker Christopher G. Donovan makes a surprise appearance outside U.S. District Court.
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The 12-hour session that ended early Friday signaled that the season of deal-making is on at the General Assembly, yielding strange, if temporary alliances in the name of politics and pragmatism.

A day after the dyspeptic House required nearly eight hours to pass an immigration bill, the same legislators sitting at the same desks passed 26 bills, most with limited debate and lopsided votes.

“We’re all pals again,” said Rep. Arthur O’Neill, R-Southbury.

The House of Representatives voted 114-7 early Friday to approve a compromise bill on the labeling of genetically engineered foods, ending a day of frantic negotiation to resolve the issue before the General Assembly breaks for the Memorial Day weekend.

If passed by the Senate, the bill would make Connecticut the first state to enact a labeling law, but nothing would take effect unless five other states with an aggregate population of 25 million people adopt a substantially similar rule on genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.

It wasn’t exactly the campy skullduggery of Mad magazine’s Spy vs. Spy. In the final frame, nobody went Kaboom! But another chapter was written Wednesday in a quietly epic lobbying battle. Call it Speaker vs. Speaker.

Richard J. Balducci and James A. Amann are Democrats who served in the Connecticut General Assembly, reaching the top rung of leadership by winning multiple terms as speaker of the House. Both are now lobbyists.

When Maureen Gard goes running, the flashbacks come: riding in her Marine platoon leader’s car, the jokes about her bra size, the fondling, and the pinning her down.

She was 18 at the time and considered her platoon leader a friend when she went for a ride with him to a mall near their base in Virginia. They were classmates training to be Marine musicians.  He drove fast, her cell phone fell between her legs, he reached down to get it, she said. 

Stamford – Raucous union demonstrators outside a Connecticut Republicans’ fundraiser Monday showed that Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin remains a lightning rod for curtailing the collective-bargaining rights of public employees.

But does Walker’s battles with labor in the Midwest make him a role model for GOP candidates considering a challenge next year to this state’s Democratic governor, Dannel P. Malloy?

New Haven -- The defense rested Monday without offering testimony in the conspiracy trial of Robert Braddock Jr., the campaign aide whose arrest a year ago opened a scandal that mortally wounded the congressional candidacy of Christopher G. Donovan.

The jury in U.S. District Court will get the case Tuesday after closing arguments in a trial that focused on what the government says was an attempt by the owners of roll-your-own cigarette stores to bribe Donovan, a Democrat who was then the speaker of the state House of Representatives.

Leaders of small towns may have headed to the state Capitol this week to lobby legislators not to cut their state funding, but what they got instead was a front-row view of legislative leaders bickering over the state's budget crisis.

At issue is the fact that Democratic leadership and the governor are not allowing Republican minority leaders in the room as they finalize the state's two-year budget that is expected to be voted on in the coming weeks.

New Haven – The two biggest fundraisers for then-House Speaker Christopher G. Donovan’s 2012 congressional campaign were Harry Raymond Soucy and Mark Masselli, men with significant financial interests before the General Assembly, a campaign official testified Friday.

Soucy, according to previous witnesses, was responsible for delivering checks totaling $27,500 from donors trying to ensure that their roll-your-own cigarette business remained free of Connecticut’s steep tax on manufactured cigarettes.