In a surprise move early Saturday morning, state Senate Democrats forced a debate on Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s deficit-mitigation plan.<\/p>\n
The move was made, shortly before 1 a.m., in response to Rell’s threat to veto the Democratic-written deficit mitigation package. The Democrats, who hold the majority and control the agenda in the Senate, forced the debate by taking Rell’s plan and making it an amendment to one of their bills.<\/p>\n
Sen. Dan Debicella, a Shelton Republican, said the Senate did not need to be debating in the early hours of the morning on a Saturday. The legislature, he said, never adopted meaningful spending cuts that would have prevented the continuing increase in the state budget deficit, which topped $500 million before various changes.<\/p>\n
“We didn’t have to be here in the sense of having a deficit today,” Debicella said. “It goes back to the biennium budget that was passed almost six months ago now. … The revenue assumptions were unrealistic, and the spending cuts were phantom. … We have had no spending reductions whatsoever.”<\/p>\n
“Deputy commissioners – they’re all valuable employees,” Debicella said. “But can we afford them? What we should do is eliminate those positions.”<\/p>\n
The debate was still continuing past 2 a.m. Saturday. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In a surprise move early Saturday morning, state Senate Democrats forced a debate on Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s deficit-mitigation plan. The move was made, shortly before 1 a.m., in response to Rell’s threat to veto the Democratic-written deficit mitigation package. The Democrats, who hold the majority and control the agenda in the Senate, forced the debate by taking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2522,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4821],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-702653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9NivD-2WN7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2522"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=702653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702653\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=702653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=702653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=702653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}