New Britain Republican Moves Appear to Echo Trump

Editorial

While New Britain Republicans avoid their own party label, recent state and local actions by Republicans appear to resemble the political tone of Republican President Donald Trump.

Nationally, the Republican Party has been under the control of Trump. With Republican rank-and-file voters still heavily supporting Trump, Republican politicians nationwide, loath to cross their party’s extreme conservative base, have largely fallen into line with the Republican president’s bigoted policies and politics.

But, with Trump widely unpopular in Connecticut, local Republicans have sought, at least tacitly, to distance themselves, and the local Republican Party brand, from the increasingly reviled Trump Republicanism.

Democrats are quick to note that, while Democrats, like State Senate candidate Rick Lopes and Democratic State Representative candidate Manny Sanchez, openly identify themselves as Democrats on their campaign signs, Republicans, such as their opponents, Gennaro Bizzarro and Alden Russell, respectively, appear to not. Meanwhile, certain City Council members elected as Republicans have sought to portray themselves as Democratic office-holders. And, while Republican Mayor Erin Stewart does not deny being a Republican, she does claim that she is a “social liberal”.

This summer, massive protests that occurred nationwide, including in New Britain, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, as well as the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks and other African Americans, developed into a movement. That rising antiracism movement called for changes, statewide and in New Britain, to reform policing and for other measures to address systemic racism.

With that movement juxtaposed directly against the unsubtle racism and white supremacism of Trump, local Republicans ostensibly backed consideration of change called for by activists. But that ostensible support began to unwind, as the theory of action turned into concrete proposals for changes in state and local laws.

In July, Sen. Gennaro Bizzarro (R-6), who represents the district which includes New Britain, voted against the sweeping police accountability legislation, which makes a large number of changes to the laws concerning policing in the state. Despite Bizzarro’s opposition, the legislation was approved into law, with New Britain’s Democratic state legislators voting for it.

Bizzarro’s vote against the reform drew sharp condemnation from anti-racism advocates in New Britain.

Bizzarro’s position as the head attorney for the city of New Britain has also caused some to raise questions about his role in the drafting of the heavily criticized August version of proposed ordinance to create a police civilian review board. The proposal, introduced in August, was widely panned because the review board it proposed would have been advisory-only, appointed entirely by the mayor and lacking subpoena or independent investigatory powers.

In July, the New Britain Racial Justice Coalition and the Black Ministerial Alliance of New Britain, with the support of the NAACP New Britain Branch, the People’s Coalition of Central Connecticut and others had called for a “People’s Agenda” in New Britain. One of the key items the People’s Agenda was a call for,

The creation of a Civilian Review Board with subpoena powers whose membership is selected by the community.

In response to the August proposal, Council Democrats offered an amendment that would have given the review board subpoena and investigatory powers and made it appointed by the Council rather than the mayor, among other changes. But Council Republicans voted down that amendment, before voting down the police civilian review board, altogether.

During the debate on the police civilian review board, Council Democrats repeatedly asked the city attorney present at the meeting who, in the city’s Corporation Counsel office, wrote the criticized August version of the proposal. Democrats said that the version of the review board proposal that was introduced in the Republican-majority Council in August was a considerably weaker proposal than the version Democrats had agreed to in bipartisan discussions earlier in the summer and expected to be introduced by the Republican majority.

The reason Council Democrats were asking how that version came out of the Corporation Counsel’s office seems obvious. Bizzarro, in addition to being State Senator, is the head of the Corporation Council’s office, which is the city attorney’s office, since he is Mayor Erin Stewart’s political appointee as the official city “Corporation Counsel.”

Stewart has also come under criticism for the defeat of the police civilian review board. Critics have accused the Republican mayor of wanting to appear supportive of reforms after the killing of George Floyd, but not really wanting real reforms, like a strong, independent community police review board, to actually be approved.

Meanwhile, as the drama surrounding police accountability was happening, the New Britain Republican Party had nominated a candidate for state representative who was controversial on issues of racism.

The Republican candidate in the 26th Assembly district this year is the same candidate, Peter Ceglarz, who had been forced out of the 2015 election for City Council after social media posts that were widely criticized as racist.

As columnist John McNamara, who was the 2015 Democratic candidate for mayor, wrote this August,

His short-lived campaign for city office was anything but uneventful. Soon after the July nominations racially-charged social media posts attributed to Ceglarz’ Facebook page surfaced spreading white nationalist, hateful memes that have become all too familiar in Trump Republicans’ playbooks and are ever present on Facebook and Twitter.

At issue were Facebook posts by Republican Ceglarz in which he shared and agreed with messages from right-wing groups defending the Confederate flag and referring to such organizations as the NAACP, United Negro College Fund and the Hispanic Scholarship Fund as “racist.” In another post President Obama is linked with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin over gun ownership rights. Ceglarz also disparaged minimum wage workers in disseminating his views at the time of his candidacy for City Council.

Stewart, who called Ceglarz, “a good friend,” was widely viewed as dragging her feet on the matter, even after Democrats openly pointed out Ceglarz’ posts. As McNamara said,

The offensive posts led to immediate calls for Ceglarz to exit the campaign by Democrats and drew in media coverage that eventually caused Stewart, protecting her “socially liberal” Republican brand outside of New Britain, to dump Ceglarz once the television and newspapers came calling.

But Ceglarz’ return as a New Britain Republican standard-bearer in 2020 is viewed by many as further tarnishing local Republican efforts to distance themselves from the bigoted politics of Donald Trump.

With the disintegrating support for Trump in Connecticut, Republicans would have great political incentive to distance themselves, and the brand of their local Republican Party, from Trump Republicanism. But, New Britain Republican opposition to anti-racism policies and their nomination of a defender of the most notorious symbol of racism in the United States go in precisely the opposition direction.

Stewart, like her disgraced father, is fond of saying, “actions speak louder than words.” But the Stewarts and other Republicans apparently cannot see the irony that their actions actually reveal terrible things about their real character.