Before President Donald J. Trump signed his executive order banning transgender athletes from women’s and girls’ sports, Republicans filed a dozen bills that would do the same thing in Connecticut, where a state law gives trans athletes the right to compete based on their gender identification.
Other bills filed by outnumbered Republicans in the General Assembly align with Trump’s order aimed at prohibiting gender-affirming medical care for trans people before age 19 and his intention of financially punishing jurisdictions that do not fully cooperate with immigration agents.
Few, if any, of the bills are expected to clear the lowest hurdle of being raised by a legislative committee for a public hearing, but taken together they make a statement about the GOP minority’s identity as it tries to reverse a string of losses since the 2018 midterm elections.
“Certainly, all of those bills make a political statement, but I think they’re all based in sound policy,” said House Minority Leader Vincent J. Candelora, R-North Branford. “So they’re not there to make a statement per se. They’re all substantive issues that we think need to be addressed.”
When similar bills were filed in previous years, Democrats could ignore them as fringe positions by individual members of a GOP that controlled barely one-third of the seats in the General Assembly.
This year, the bills are part of a GOP leadership package, and Trump’s executive orders since returning to the White House last month make the issues impossible to ignore. Republicans in Connecticut see a Trump agenda that coincides with their own on transgender and immigration issues, among others.
“I think it’s an agenda of common sense and an agenda built around addressing undocumented immigration, addressing crime in this country and restoring economic development through smaller, more efficient government and through tax relief,” said Senate Minority Leader Stephen Harding, R-Brookfield.
Beyond the overlap in legislation, Republicans have sided with Trump in ways not seen during his first stay in the White House or his campaign last fall, reacting coldly Wednesday to Gov. Ned Lamont’s criticism during his budget address of Trump’s hardline positions on immigration and diversity.
Candelora and Harding avoided defending Trump by name, instead casting the critique as a Democratic distraction from state fiscal issues and desire by some, most notably Democratic state senators, to hold Connecticut Republicans responsible for every Trump policy.
“If that’s the narrative they want to write, yes, it’s going to be a little bit tense this session, because I’m not here to roll over and put up with this behavior,” Candelora said.
Lamont and other Democrats said the Republican shift is especially noticeable in Connecticut, a state where Trump lost badly in three successive elections. Candelora has kept a cautious distance from the president, and the previous House GOP leader, Themis Klarides, was public about not voting for Trump in 2020.
“Remember, during the campaign in November, no Republican would mention Donald Trump, especially down in Fairfield County,” Lamont said. “Now we’re at a different place. He’s the president of the United States. The first three weeks, you’re generally pretty popular, so I think the Republicans are shifting a little more in that direction.”
Public opinion
At least for now, Trump and his torrent of executive orders are setting a new rhetorical tone at the state Capitol, defining Republicans in Connecticut — and to a lesser degree, the Democrats.
In the same way Trump’s placing immigration and transgender issues at the forefront of American politics is shaping the GOP brand, it also is stiffening Democrats’ commitment to positions that are mostly consistent with public opinion on immigration, but not on trans athletes in women’s sports.
Recent polls by Gallup and others show overwhelming support for the deportation of undocumented immigrants convicted of violent crimes but favor protecting young migrants from arrests at schools on civil detainers and also providing them a path to citizenship. Lamont says he shares those views.
The state’s Trust Act, which was passed unanimously in 2013 and revised in 2019 over the objections of Republicans, essentially bars state and local law enforcement from acting as extensions of federal immigration, a position consistent with the anti-commandeering doctrine of the U.S. Constitution that bars federal authorities from demanding that states act as their agents.
While Republicans say the law is too restricting on police, Lamont and other Democrats note it does not prevent Connecticut from honoring judicial warrants or cooperating in actions leading to the deportation of violent criminals. They are disinclined to entertain revisions.
On banning trans athletes from competing in sports against girls and women, public opinion is with Trump and the Republican lawmakers by a 2-1 margin in Gallup polls. The issue crosses ideological lines, with prominent female athletes like Martina Navratilova, who supported Kamala Harris, favoring the ban as necessary to preserve fairness and equal opportunity for women in sports.
Choosing between the rights of young trans athletes and cisgender girls has been an unpalatable choice for many Democrats, some of whom conflate Trump’s mocking stance towards trans people with the impact of deportation threats on young migrants.
“We’re talking about kids. What MAGA has come to represent, what this two-week administration has come to represent, is an attack and a war on children,” said Attorney General William Tong. “I don’t give a damn about the politics, and I don’t think we should be playing politics with people’s lives. We’re talking about kids.”
Tong voted as a legislator for a transgender rights bill that allows trans people to self-identify their gender, and he is willing to defend it in court. The law permits trans athletes to compete against girls in interscholastic sports.
“We don’t discriminate against people with respect to actual sports and competitions and real life situations,” he said. “We have sanctioning bodies, we have leagues, and we have said, and I think the governor has said repeatedly, they will make the best determination for their leagues and for their athletes.”
In response to Trump’s executive order and the threatened loss of federal funding to its member colleges, the NCAA has banned trans athletes from women’s sports. The Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, which oversees high school sports, has not announced how it would respond.
“I understand that the Democrats are boxed in on this issue. They would like it just to go away,” said Candelora, whose daughter plays college rugby.
Kim Jones of Darien, the founder of a group that advocates for a ban on trans athletes competing against women, said politics are keeping the General Assembly from hearing testimony on biological advantages transgender women have in sports, the degree to which they can be neutralized by gender-affirming hormone therapy, and the inconsistencies in the standards governing trans athletes.
“I’m sad that the Democrats are so entrenched in it, because, you know, I believe this from the bottom of my heart: We need two healthy political parties, or we can’t talk,” Jones said. “We can’t talk about the issues that are going to either make or break us as a country.”
Lamont: ‘We stand up for who we are’
Lamont, a Democrat who is averse to the bare-knuckle nature of contemporary politics and enjoys easy personal relationships with many Republicans, is quicker this time to engage Trump on immigration, most often by affirming what the governor calls “Connecticut values,” less by directly calling out the president.
“I’m not looking to pick any fights, but if fights come to me, and they really compromise our Connecticut values, and they compromise the rule of law, we stand up for who we are,” Lamont said.
The governor makes clear his belief that intolerance is a thread running through Trump’s calls for mass deportations, his casual equating of diversity with lower standards, and his actions to drive trans youths from sports.
“I think here in Connecticut, the bullying, mean-spirited streak that I saw during the campaign, we’re not going to allow that here. That’s not who we are,” Lamont said. “Don’t beat up on these kids. Don’t bully these kids. Don’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign TV ads mocking these kids.”
On Friday, Lamont attended a naturalization ceremony in Hartford, welcoming the new citizens with remarks that never mentioned Trump, but he held up other presidents as exemplars of American ideals. He praised Franklin Delano Roosevelt for establishing a social safety net during the Great Depression.
“Before he was there, it was a little bit, ‘You’re all on your own, and good luck.’ And he reminded us that America is a family. We look out for each other. The government stepped in to look out for folks in need,” Lamont said. “And he stood up and he helped reimagine the United States, not just what we do for our own people, but our responsibility around the world.”
Lamont, who did not join state Senate Democrats in calling out Republicans, phoned Candelora on Thursday, declining to share details. Candelora, while criticizing the governor’s budget address, said he appreciated Lamont’s relative restraint, as well as that of House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford.
On the day when a confusing freeze on federal aid was announced, Candelora said Ritter called him to talk about potential ramifications for Connecticut, not denounce him at a press conference.
Comptroller Sean Scanlon, a Democrat and former House member from Guilford who is close to Ritter and worked constructively with Candelora, wondered if some of the bipartisan relationships in Connecticut would survive.
“We have been very fortunate in Connecticut that some of the degradation of the rhetoric and the name calling and the culture war issues have not found its way into the mainstream body politic of what we do,” Scanlon said. “Civility and bipartisanship, while strained occasionally, still carry the day here, and I worry that this perceptible shift in more nationalized rhetoric is a dangerous harbinger of what might be coming."
This story was originally published by the Connecticut Mirror.
