There’s more to ‘replacement’ than Sen. Murphy acknowledges | Chris Powell

Republicans, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy charges, are partly to blame for the May 14 massacre in Buffalo because many of them espouse the “Great Replacement Theory” that the murderer says motivated him. This is the belief that powerful people are conspiring to change the country’s racial composition, replacing whites with Blacks and members of other races.

Of course in 2017 when a Democratic activist shot up the Republican congressional baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia, after expressing on social media hatred for President Trump and all Republicans, Democrats like Murphy were perfectly able to separate the perpetrator’s politics from his psychosis. No Democrats blamed their party’s hateful anti-Republican rhetoric for inspiring the crime, and few Republicans exploited it politically.

But now the “great replacement theory” is supposed to be a scandal, another club to beat Republicans with — and, it seems, to distract the country from a Democratic scandal.

For paranoid and hateful as promoters of the “great replacement theory” may be, it touches something real — the federal government’s long failure to enforce immigration law and the nullification of immigration law by state and local governments, a situation worsening under the Biden administration. This may not be a scheme to replace whites with Blacks, but what about replacing Republicans with Democrats?

After all, for years many Democratic academics and political analysts — including pollster Stanley B. Greenberg, husband of Connecticut U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro — have concluded that increasing immigration, bringing into the country more impoverished people from around the world, many of them likely to become dependent on government, will improve the Democratic Party’s prospects. Some of these academics and analysts have celebrated this.

In any case Senator Murphy and other prominent Democrats in Connecticut are not at all troubled by the failure to enforce immigration law.

So when he is done indicting Republicans for the massacre in Buffalo, Murphy might explain why he approves of open borders. His explaining might best be done in New Haven, Connecticut’s leading “sanctuary city” — and the state’s top producer of Democratic pluralities.

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WEST HAVEN ISN’T ALONE: With the assent of Governor Lamont, West Haven has just been subjected to the highest level of supervision by state government’s Municipal Accountability Review Board, “Tier 4,” a move prompted largely by the theft from the city of more than a million dollars of federal emergency aid right under the noses of the mayor and City Council.

While West Haven has been under some degree of supervision by the accountability board for five years, it hasn’t done much good. The board’s own competence should have been questioned by now. At least the governor acknowledges that the “mess” in the city “has gone on too long.”

But when “Tier 4” was imposed, the board showed why West Haven is not solely to blame for its shaky finances.

The board rejected the city’s proposed budget because it did not assure long-term financing for raises promised by the city’s new contract with its police union. But if the city’s financial condition is so dire, why is collective bargaining with city employee unions still in force? The ultimate sanction for municipal financial disaster should come with bankruptcy-like provisions, erasing the city’s commitments amid reorganization, liberating the city from expensive state mandates.

Even so, too much can be made of West Haven’s trouble. Hartford and New Haven also would be busted this year without their vast new state and federal aid. New Haven especially remains technically insolvent because of huge unfunded pension liabilities. Hartford and New Haven may belong in “Tier 4” as much as West Haven does.

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GANIM REBUKED: Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim got a much-deserved rebuke last week from a labor relations arbiter, who found that the mayor wrongly suspended a police officer on a complaint that he had failed to properly notify a city family about the untimely death of a young woman.

The mayor had no evidence of the officer’s neglect. He responded only to the complaint of family members and the protests they called, thereby betraying due process to assuage the mob.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer.