April 14, 2026 · 49,577 words · 19 speakers · 347 segments
Will the Senate please come to order? And members and guests, if you would please rise and direct your attention to our guest chaplain, Kathleen Zabel of Burlington, who will lead us in prayer.
Thank you. Let us open our hearts to the welfare of all people in our state by respecting the inherent dignity and worth of each person, and realize our differences of race, religion, and party affiliation are merely superficial. Our common humanity unites us all, that we may recognize that through our interdependence we share a common fate. Amen.
Thank you so much, and now I will invite Senator Sampson to please lead us in the pledge.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
mw/rr 2 Thank you so much, Senator Sampson, and good afternoon, Senator Duff.
Good afternoon, Madam President. Good to see you there today. Congratulations to you and to Senator Sampson on some big news and your families over the weekend.
And we're excited to get going today. Madam President, is there business on the clerk's desk?
Mr. Clerk, what do we have, sir?
Good afternoon. The clerk's in possession of Senate Agenda Item Number 1 dated Tuesday, April 14th, 2026.
Senator Duff.
Thank you, Madam President. Madam President, move all items on Senate Agenda Number 1 dated Tuesday, April 14th, 2026, to be acted upon as indicated that the agenda be incorporated by reference in Senate Journal and Senate transcripts. mw/rr 3
So ordered, sir. No. 1 REGULAR SESSION the calendar and printing. JUDICIARY COMMITTEE SUBST. SB NO. 260 AN ACT CONCERNING ROAMING DOGS. JUDICIARY COMMITTEE SUBST. SB NO. 291 AN ACT CONCERNING THE RESPONSIBILITIES AND DUTIES OF THE STATE MARSHAL COMMISSION, THE STATE MARSHALS ADVISORY BOARD AND STATE MARSHALS. JUDICIARY COMMITTEE SUBST. SB NO. 293 AN ACT CONCERNING THE STATUTE OF LIMITATION FOR INJURY CAUSED BY FRAUD IN THE PROVISION OF FERTILITY CARE AND TREATMENT. JUDICIARY COMMITTEE SUBST. SB NO. 294 AN ACT CONCERNING TRADE NAMES, FRAUDULENT FILINGS, IMPERMISSIBLE BUSINESS SOLICITATIONS, DISSOLUTION OF CORPORATIONS, THE mw/rr 4 ISSUANCE OF AN APOSTILLE AND FEES CHARGED BY A NOTARY. JUDICIARY COMMITTEE SB NO. 343 AN ACT CONCERNING FEES CHARGED FOR CRIMINAL HISTORY RECORDS CHECKS. JUDICIARY COMMITTEE SB NO. 391 AN ACT CONCERNING THE AVAILABILITY OF BREAST CANCER SCREENING, DIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT SERVICES FOR WOMEN COMMITTED TO THE CUSTODY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTION. JUDICIARY COMMITTEE SB NO. 434 AN ACT CONCERNING A STUDY OF THE CIVIL PROCEDURE LAWS IN THE STATE. JUDICIARY COMMITTEE SB NO. 506 AN ACT CONCERNING CRIMINAL PENALTIES FOR INTENTIONAL DAMAGE TO CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE. JUDICIARY COMMITTEE SUBST. SB NO. 508 AN ACT CONCERNING THE SUSPENSION OF AN OPERATOR'S LICENSE FOR REPEATEDLY FAILING TO STOP FOR A SCHOOL BUS. mw/rr 5 tabled for the calendar. JUDICIARY COMMITTEE SUBST. SJ NO. 39 RESOLUTION CONFIRMING THE DECISION OF THE CLAIMS COMMISSIONER TO DISMISS CERTAIN CLAIMS AGAINST THE STATE. JUDICIARY COMMITTEE SJ NO. 46 RESOLUTION ACCEPTING THE RECOMMENDATION OF THE CLAIMS COMMISSIONER TO MAKE PAYMENT IN EXCESS OF THIRTY-FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS WITH RESPECT TO THE CLAIM AGAINST THE STATE OF KALLMAN, MCKINNELL AND WOOD, ARCHITECTS, INC. JUDICIARY COMMITTEE SUBST. SJ NO. 48 RESOLUTION VACATING THE DECISION OF THE CLAIMS COMMISSIONER TO DENY THE CLAIM AGAINST THE STATE OF MILAGROS POLLOCK HESS, ADMINISTRATRIX OF THE ESTATE OF JHECARI HESS AND GRANTING THE CLAIMANT PERMISSION TO SUE THE STATE. JUDICIARY COMMITTEE SUBST. SJ NO. 49 RESOLUTION VACATING THE DECISION OF THE CLAIMS COMMISSIONER TO DENY THE CLAIM AGAINST THE STATE OF WILHELMINA MCLAURIN, ADMINISTRATRIX OF THE ESTATE OF LEONARD MCLAURIN AND GRANTING THE CLAIMANT PERMISSION TO SUE THE STATE. JUDICIARY COMMITTEE mw/rr 6 SUBST. SJ NO. 52 RESOLUTION VACATING THE DECISIONS OF THE CLAIMS COMMISSIONER TO DISMISS THE CLAIMS AGAINST THE STATE OF KEVIN BERUBE. JUDICIARY COMMITTEE SUBST. SJ NO. 53 RESOLUTION VACATING THE DECISION OF THE CLAIMS COMMISSIONER TO DISMISS THE CLAIM AGAINST THE STATE OF CAROL FALCONE AND GRANTING THE CLAIMANT PERMISSION TO SUE THE STATE. JUDICIARY COMMITTEE SUBST. SJ NO. 55 RESOLUTION VACATING THE DECISION OF THE CLAIMS COMMISSIONER TO DISMISS THE CLAIM AGAINST THE STATE OF BRIAN VERTEFEUILLE.
SR NO. 12 RESOLUTION PROPOSING APPROVAL OF AN AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT AND THE STATE EMPLOYEES BARGAINING AGENT COALITION (SEBAC). Referred to the Committee on Appropriations
Thank you, Madam President. Madam President, we have two go items for today.
Thank you. mw/rr 7
The first go item will be calendar Page 11, calendar 106, Senate Bill 274, followed by calendar Page 25, calendar 245, substitute for Senate Bill 397 as a go as well, and that'll be marked order of the day.
And then, Madam President, if we can just stand at ease for a moment, please.
We will stand at ease. Will the Senate please come to order, Mr. Clerk?
Page 11. Calendar Number 106, Senate Bill Number 274, AN ACT CONCERNING NONRESIDENT LANDLORD REGISTRATION AND INCREASING PENALTIES FOR REPEAT BUILDING AND FIRE CODE VIOLATIONS. There are two amendments.
We will stand at ease briefly. Will the Senate please come to order? And I recognize Senator Rahman. Good afternoon, sir.
Good afternoon, Madam President. Madam President, nice to see you about there today, up there. Madam President, I move acceptance of the joint committee's favorable report and passage of the bill. mw/rr 8
And the question is on passage. Will you remark?
Yes. Thank you, Madam President. Madam President, SB 274, AN ACT CONCERNING NONRESIDENT LANDLORD REGISTRATION AND INCREASING PENALTIES FOR REPEAT BUILDING AND FIRE CODE VIOLATIONS. Madam President, Clerk in possession and amendment, LCO 3834. I'd like the Clerk to call the amendment.
LCO Number 3834, Senate Amendment A.
Thank you. Will you remark on the amendment, sir?
Yes, Madam President. Thank you, Madam President. Madam president, nonresident landlord, sometime tenant can reach to the landlord, and they sometimes don't provide the contact information. But this amendment fixing few little things. Building and fire code violations is the 200 to improving $1,000, and the current law substitute violation -- 500 to 200, but we adding in the six-month jail times also. Thank you.
Thank you. And sir, will you move the amendment, please? mw/rr 9
I move adoption of the amendment, Madam President. I've been given leave to summarize to the chamber.
Excellent. Thank you so much. I just wanted to make sure that we had it moved and you've discussed it. Will you mark further on the amendment?
Like I said earlier, thank you, Madam President. Madam president, there's a lot of landlords. They are not providing contact. And, also, sometimes they provide contact information’s, but they never receive the phone call or respond the phone calls. Either they have maybe fire code problems, or the leakings, or any other problem is there. But these bills and these amendment will allow landlord and the mass providing all the information to the town, the registry. And this is how tenants can access all those information and contact with the landlord. And this amendment going to make the bills much better and work for everyone. Thank you, Madam President.
Thank you. Will you mark further on the amendment? Good afternoon, Senator Gordon.
Thank you, Madam President. Good afternoon. And I rise to speak on -- I guess, we're on an amendment. I'm a bit confused because this is the first I'm hearing that an amendment was going to be proposed. And I guess there's two amendments in the system. So how would we even know which amendment was going to be brought up? I bit confused by why there wasn't mw/rr 10 any discussion about it. I don't remember the aspects of this amendment being brought up during public hearing or during screening of the [inaudible] committee, where the ranking members were, and the two chairs were. But, evidently, there wasn't anything necessarily spoken with me as the ranking Senator. So I guess it sounds like, at this point, that we're dealing with LCO 3834 for the amendment, as best as I can determine. So, through you, Madam Chair, I'm going to ask a number of questions so I can understand the amendment since there wasn't any discussion on either of these two amendments, prior relative to the work of the planning and development committee. So I'm just going to make certain that we're clear on what this proposed amendment is intending and what it might actually do in the real world. Whether or not that might take me a while, I don't know at this point in time, relative to that. So my understanding is that reading through this amendment -- and again, we're speaking just on the amendment, not on the actual bill itself, which I'll save other discussion when we get to talking on the actual bill. It looks like that this amendment has four different parts to it. And my first question through you, Madam President, to the Senate chair of the committee, if I may.
Please proceed.
Thank you, Madam President. Am I correct that to be put into line 87 would then try to clarify this, I guess, to also include some other municipal officer designated by the municipality, so it just doesn't mw/rr 11 necessarily fall into the tax successor. Is that correct?
Senator Rahman.
Thank you, Madam President. Through you, Madam President, before I answer my good Senator a question, I just want to clarify something. This amendment, we have discussed, drawing up our screening, my ranking members, Senator Gordon, and also House ranking members also was present during the screening. And we did discuss about the amendment. I just want to friendly reminder, my good Senator. And, yes, through you, Madam President,
Thank you. Senator Gordon.
I think we can agreeably disagree about how much this was really discussed, if at all, especially since there's two amendments. A bit confusing to know which one was even going to be brought up until, evidently, one got called up over the other. But that's a different matter that I may come back to. But I think communication and collaboration is important, and I just didn't see that this happened relative to these amendments. My other question through you, Madam President, if I may, of the good Senator, is with regards to the changes that are going to be proposed for line 121, where it looks like it's going to add in -- or it could be a fine, or now it could be a imprisonment not more than six months, or it can actually be, mw/rr 12 So my question to the good Senator is, is this consistent with current law? And which specific law is it that it would be comporting and compatible with?
Senator Rahman.
Thank you, Madam President. Through you, Madam President, yes, the line 121 is -- current law is the fine, but we're escalating the fine and adding the six month or six month prison times through you.
Thank you, Senator Gordon.
Thank you, Madam President.
Senator Duff.
Thank you, Madam President. Madam President, I just want to ask when we take a vote on this amendment, whenever it is, that'd be a roll call vote, please.
And so noted, sir. We will do that when the time comes, and Senator Gordon, back to you, sir.
Thank you, Madam President. I'll continue on. I appreciate the answer to half my question, and I'll mw/rr 13 ask the other half. Is this wording that's proposed to be put into line 125 consistent, even identical to what's currently in state statute, otherwise about this? Or is this new wording that's going to be added to a law relative to this issue?
Senator Rahman.
Through you, Madam President, it is not exactly identical. Also, it's not a new wording. Thank you.
Thank you, Senator Gordon.
Thank you, Madam President. So I'm a little bit confused. I'm just trying to sort out, is this already wording that's elsewhere in Connecticut general statutes? And this is just identical or similar wording to bring it up compatible, relative to this bill that's before us, and this what this amendment is getting to. Or is this going to be brand new wording that now will give an option of potential imprisonment that's not otherwise in general statute on this particular issue that this amendment is about?
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Through you, Madam President, it starts at 29-254A. This is the current law. Thanks. mw/rr 14
Thank you. Senator Gordon.
Thank you, Madam President. I appreciate the reference to 29-254A. So my follow-up question through you to the good Senator is, so this wording that's being proposed in line 125, is this new wording that's not in 29-254A? Or is it already wording that's in there?
Senator Rahman.
Like I said earlier, through you, Madam President, there is no new wording or identical, but refer to 29-254A.
Thank you. Senator Gordon.
Thank you, Madam President. So my understanding is that there is no new wording that a potential penalty of imprisonment, or a potential penalty of imprisonment and a fine, is already existing in current statute, from what I'm hearing. And so my follow-up question through you is, then the wording that's being proposed in this amendment relative to line 125, is it identical to what's already in Connecticut general statute, or is it similar enough to be considered identical? mw/rr 15
Thank you. Senator Rahman. Pardon me.
Okay. Through you, Madam President. Madam president, is current law is -- there is the fine, but we are escalating the fine and also adding the six month prison times.
Thank you. Senator Gordon.
Thank you, Madam President. So my understanding from that answer is that there is new penalties being added that are not already in state statute because earlier to a question, I was told that there isn't new wording. I'm just trying to make certain ones clear, on what this amendment is trying to do. And if it's something additional or new to state statute, that's one thing. If it's not, I just want to make certain we know that and that this comports is either identical or similar enough to be considered identical. I just think it's important we understand what this amendment is doing, given that the amendment is before us.
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Madam President, I just want to be clear for this. This is the current law, only the fine is there as $250, and also, I think, prison times. But we are adding subsequent violations to $500 and also prison times. mw/rr 16
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
At the same prison time, since nothing changed.
Thank you. Senator Gordon.
Thank you, Madam President. I just want to make certain that we're clear because this amendment talks nothing about the dollar amounts. It's just adding in some potential prison time. So if we're trying to be germane to the amendment, I just want to continue to talk about the wording that's in this amendment before us. So my understanding then is that this penalty of potential imprisonment is already in statute from what I'm hearing, and that this is not adding anything different or changing it in any other way, relative to line 121. Through you, Madam President, this amendment also talks about line 131 and talks about adding in, quote, or in prison not more than six months or both, end quotes. And my question to the good Senator, and I appreciate him taking the time to answer my questions, is this wording that's being proposed to be put into line 131, which gets to Section 4 of the underlying bill, otherwise before us. That is not anything new. That's already existing in applicable state statute. So, this does not add something completely new or changes it in any way? mw/rr 17
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Thank you, Madam President. Through you, Madam President, line 131, exactly same article. Nothing change, prison time, six months, or both.
Thank you. Senator Gordon.
Thank you, Madam President. I appreciate the answer to that. A follow-up question I have is relative to the part of the amendment that talks about making changes to line 141, which talks about potential imprisonment not more than six months, and also has the wording quote, unquote, or both, meaning you could be fined and you could be imprisoned. And I just want to make certain that this wording is not in any way something new relative to the applicable statute. Doesn't change it in any way. Is just the same wording that's already in statute, just being put into this amendment.
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Thank you, Madam President. Through you, Madam President, line 131, 141 is almost all the same. So, yes.
Thank you. Senator Gordon. mw/rr 18
Thank you, Madam President. So I'll take that since my question was about line 141, that it doesn't change the existing statute in any way, at all. So, with that said, I'll end my remarks on the amendment, and we'll see where things go with the amendment. Thank you.
Thank you. Will you mark further on the amendment? Senator Rahman.
Thank you, Madam President. Madam President, I would like to ask the roll call. Thank you.
Yes. That has already been requested. Will you mark further on the amendment? If not, a roll call has been requested. I will open the voting machines, Mr. Clerk.
Immediate roll call vote has been ordered in the ordered in the Senate. We're voting on Senate Amendment A, Senate Bill Number 274. We're not voting on the bill. This is Senate Amendment A. The immediate roll call vote has been ordered in the Bill Number 274, AN ACT CONCERNING NONRESIDENT LANDLORD REGISTRATION AND INCREASING PENALTIES FOR REPEAT BUILDING AND FIRE CODE VIOLATIONS. This is a vote on the amendment, an immediate roll call vote in the Senate on Senate Amendment A of mw/rr 19 has been ordered in the Senate. We're voting on roll call vote in the Senate on Senate Amendment A of Senate Bill 274. An immediate roll call vote in the Senate.
Have all the senators voted? The machine is locked. Mr. Clerk, kindly announce the tally.
Senator Amendment A, Senate Bill 274: Total Number Voting 34 Necessary for Adoption 18 Those voting Yea 24 Those voting Nay 10 Those absent and not voting 2
Amendment passes. Senator Rahman.
Thank you, Madam President. Madam President, I'm happy. Amendment passed. Thank you. Madam President, I mentioned earlier, and my good Senator also knows this is really good bill. It's a very long time, our state nonresident landlord continue ignoring our good tenants. And even though they want to contact with their landlord for any reason, either they are plumbing issues or moldy, whatever it is. There's no way they can contact with their landlord. And this bill makes it a little better and help our tenants in the United States. And population of 25 or more, they must provide the contact information mw/rr 20 to town, and this is how a tenant can reach their landlord also. And few other ideas that they -- are amended. You see that? So, with that, I would like to ask my colleagues to support these bills, and this is really important and good bill. Thank you, Madam President.
Thank you. Will you mark further? Senator Gordon?
Thank you, Madam President, and I appreciate the comments from the good Senator. I rise with a point of order. It's my understanding that the joint rules of the House and the Senate would require this to be a mandatory referral to the Judiciary Committee because now this amendment that passed has three separate points added in potential imprisonment as penalties. And so that is I rise as a point of order in that regard, mentioning that this should be a mandatory referral to the Judiciary Committee.
We will stand at ease for a moment, sir. Senator Duff.
Yes. Thank you, Madam President. Madam President, on the amendment, well, on the bill, I guess, at this point, as amended, these are technical changes, and that it just clarifies on the second or third offense and increases those penalties, but it's not new. These are not new offenses or new crimes. So I think that I would suggest and say that this should not be referred. Thank you, Madam President. mw/rr 21
Thank you, Senator Duff. And we'll stand at ease briefly. Senator Gordon.
Thank you, Madam President. I'll move forward. I think the point's been made that when amendments are decided and brought up, and it hasn't been fully discussed by the committee, then a lot of questions have to get asked, especially when we're talking about adding potential imprisonment to the bill itself. So I'll continue on with my remarks, and we'll see where the time takes us. Some comments about this bill. There's two parts of this bill. And one part, which is a part I do want to focus on, because I think it's extremely important part, and to me it's the crux of this bill, and could be a bill just by itself, is the part about what do we do when we have landlords who are repeatedly violating building codes, fire safety codes, or both building codes and fire safety codes. Now I'm not saying that all landlords are bad and that all landlords do this. There are a huge number of good landlords all throughout the state, and we should be thankful for what they do and the housing services that they provide. And we should be endeavoring to work with them and to help them. That certainly would be a way to, I think, reasonably, responsibly, and realistically address housing issues in different parts of the state. But we know that sometimes there can be bad actors, and definitely don't want to paint the industry with a bad brush. And, yes, when there are repeated offenses, then there should be a penalty if there is a violation and you're continuing to violate. And this is to me mw/rr 22 again, the crux of this bill, which is there would be some escalating penalty. That if you do it once, then that's one thing. But if you're doing it a second, a third time, and so forth, again, knowingly doing it and not fixing a problem, then municipalities are looking to see what they can do. We did receive testimony. I very much look at the testimony from the Council of Small Towns. I think they do a very good job, representing our towns, including towns in my part of Northeast, Connecticut, and they were in support of this. We've heard testimony from the fire services and our state fire marshal with regards to wanting to make certain that municipalities have tools that they could use potentially when applicable and appropriate in situations like this. So I don't have a problem per se with that part of the bill. There were other reasons, relative to what went down with the amendment, but I'm not opposed to where we are with regards to some of these penalties. And as we heard after a lot of back and forth with questions and answers, we've been assured that the wording that's now in this bill, relative to the imprisonment, comports, is compatible, and is consistent with already existing law that is in Sections 29-254A, Section 29-291C, and Section 29- 394. So we have that statement on the record, three separate times. One for each of those sections of the bill that we have to be careful about is there's already existing law that went into effect April 1st. We're right now April 14th. mw/rr 23 So it's been the law of the land now, effective law of the land, for a couple of weeks, that does require a good amount of this information for municipalities to collect. So we should be mindful that we're living now in an age where that law from last year went into effect, that parts of this bill are now duplicative, and really aren't needed when we already have existing law in effect as of April 1. That's important to note because it should on the record reflect work was already done on part of this issue. Information being provided to municipalities from landlords. That work was already done last year, and so that's already in effect. I think it's Public Act 25-44, perhaps Section 9. And anything additional in this bill, we just need to note because whenever this bill -- if this bill passes and if this bill, otherwise, gets through the legislative process with the house and the governor were to decide to sign it, we should know the additional parts that are going into this bill relative to notification. I don't have a problem per se and a priori with certain information being provided to municipalities, such as who is a landlord or who is the company, because many times these are LLCs, for example, who might be a contact name, such as a property manager. Those are helpful info. There's a lot of other information that the current law that went into effect April 1st has asked for. There's already forms that can be used. But some additional information to put into, gets into certain personal information. The current law doesn't ask for someone's residential address if they might be an owner, or maybe there's multiple owners and asking for all mw/rr 24 their residential addresses or certain personal information. So we need to be careful that we're not overreaching in that regard. It's one thing to ask who the owner or owners of an LLC that might own, say, a 30 residential unit apartment complex in a town. Who is the contact information? The property manager. But getting into some other potential information, we just need to be careful, because that might go a bit beyond what is really needed. I think if we have information of who is an owner, that's helpful. If we have a contact name and contact information, that probably is going to be the key info that a municipality wants, a building official wants, a fire marshal wants, because that's who you're going to You're not going to show up at an owner's residential address. You want to contact the person who is the person to be contacted, if there are issues. And again, current law that went into effect April 1st already has that in Our municipalities already have that tool in their toolkit. And that's good. And we want to make certain that information is kept up to date. As we know, the world is in static, and things change. There's flux and things like that. But we just need to make certain that when -- if there's overreach, we're not delving into someone's personal life. Perhaps they don't want their personal address out there, and they have an LLC that has the business address. Certainly, they'd be listed as an owner. And they're chosen to hire a property manager to be that contact, to have a number. And if we start asking more information beyond some of that basic information, some people might view that as intrusive into somebody's personal life. And one argument that can be made in that regard is, is mw/rr 25 that information that a municipality needs, and it could be made potentially public even if it might be exempt information. We all know not everything is truly in an airtight lockbox when we talk about exemptions. Perhaps that's not information that should be out there, and there's other information more pertinent and more important. So I understand those concerns, and again, those concerns have already been addressed by the law that went into effect on April 1st. With that said, again, to me, the crux of this bill is really looking into the safety of the tenants. Having certain personal information of the owners doesn't address safety. But the other aspect of this bill that I talked about before, I'm going to talk about again now, because it's germane to this bill, is the part we should be focusing on. And again, that's where the municipalities are coming in, with that. One other aspect of this bill we have to keep in mind is that it does impose on certain municipalities above a certain size limit, it does impose a mandate. And that's important to know because many of our communities don't like mandates. One of the reasons they don't like mandates is the state doesn't pay for them, which is a whole issue. And then what we find is that people in the communities have to pay for these mandates via property taxes. We do have an Office of Fiscal Analysis, report. Not quite certain exactly where they're coming from, saying that the reporting requirements might be a potential revenue gain that may get to fees. And whether or not there might be new fees, whether or not there might be increased fees, these are all things we have to be mindful of. mw/rr 26 But the testimony we really heard from municipalities, and again, I cite the Connecticut Council of Small Towns, was focused really just on what to do with building violations and public or fire safety violations. Didn't really get much into the other aspect of the bill. If this bill were just on the violation part, that's good. This bill has two parts to it, and it's trying to deal with two different things, I think. So I want people to know, I think it's important for landlords to know, as this bill is being debated right now here in the Senate of the state of Connecticut, and tenants to know, and municipal leaders and officials to know that this is a two- track bill. And one part dealing with the violations is important, and I support that part. The other part has already been addressed, as I mentioned by law that went into effect in April 1st of this year. And I think it was a law that gets to what was intended for that bill last year, and it's very pertinent now, to our discussions and decision-making on this bill. So I ask my colleagues to think about those two issues when they make their decisions, unless they've already decided what they're doing, before we've had our debate on this bill, and then we'll see where we go relative to this bill. Thank you, Madam President.
Thank you. Will you remark further on the bill? Will you remark further on the bill? Senator Sampson? Good afternoon, sir.
mw/rr 27 Thank you very much, Madam President. The bill that is before us, at first glance, it seems a little innocuous that we would want to track down the owner of rental property in case there's ever a situation where we need to get in touch with that person. But if you start to think about it and you start to dig a little bit more deeply, you start to realize that we already have mechanisms for this exact situation. And this bill actually attempts to undo some things that are given in our system, including the corporate veil, the notion that people who engage in business and commerce need protection from liability. So they establish corporations. They establish limited liability corporations, and business entities actually do operate and own property. The idea that we must tie that back in every case to an individual is kind of a new thing. And I understand that this has become en vogue and popular because there's been some recent activity, even right here in Connecticut, where we had a tragedy in Rocky Hill, where some apartment buildings were not prepared for the cold of this past winter, which was quite a rough one. And they had a lot of pipes break, and people ended up not being able to stay in their apartments. It was kind of a disaster. But at the end of the day, there was a property management company in charge and responsible for those repairs. And the owner, while ultimately being responsible, doesn't have the knowledge, ability, or know how to be able to run down there and fix a pipe. They've hired a property management company for that purpose. It's also a little ironic because I know that even this year and in previous years, this legislative body, the majority, continues to propose legislation to hide the residential addresses of various public employees. mw/rr 28 We've had proposals from everything from obvious situations, like law enforcement, where you might want to protect the identity of people. Although I might note that we're going to talk about a bill later today where we're purposely undoing something that is given as a protection for people who serve in law enforcement, because of the risk that they might face if people knew their home We've had the employees of the attorney general's office asking for this protection. We have had teachers, I believe we're going to see a bill this session that would hide the residential addresses of public employees of different types, college professors, you name it. So it's completely ironic to me that here we are, people that serve in the public sector, who are voluntarily employed by the state of Connecticut or a municipality, knowing full well that they're working for their neighbors. And that part of the deal is that your neighbors should know who you are because they're your boss. So we have Connecticut sunlight. We have a lot of different other ways that you can go and track state employees and know who they are. And that's a good thing because I do believe that if you talk about transparency and accountability, that is a factor is making sure that people have access to know who's actually working for them at the state level. So to see a bill come forward that says that we want to tell people that are in the private sector that you must declare your private personal information is a little bit hypocritical, frankly. And I don't know how anyone could argue against it. But I just want to ask a few questions about this because I I'm really not certain after reading through this just how expansive this, proposed, change in our current law is. So, through you madam mw/rr 29 president, a question to the proponent of the bill if I could.
Please proceed, sir.
The first thing I'd like to know is who this applies to. Does this apply to any non-resident landlord? And by that, I'm asking, I understand that maybe this is targeted, and I've heard the discussion. It's kind of described as maybe out-of-state nonresident landlords that own a lot of commercial property that have hundreds of units and things like that. But would this apply to someone who owns just one unit, a single-family house, for example, through you?
Senator Rahman.
Thank you, Madam President. Yes. It is applied for any nonresident landlord through you, Madam President.
Thank you. Senator Sampson.
Thank you very much, Madam President. And I appreciate that answer. Now, when a landlord and a tenant get together, they form an agreement we know as a residential lease, but that's a private contract. And that private contract will stipulate who the parties are in the agreement. mw/rr 30 What if the person actually renting the property is not the owner? Maybe it's a property management company who is actually doing the renting. In that case, it would be sufficient under this language to provide the property management company's information through you.
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Yes. Through you Madam President. Thank you. Yes. Point of contact must providing their contact information to the town, then tenant can contact with their landlord.
Thank you. Senator Sampson.
And thank you very much, Madam President. I appreciate the chairman's comments, although he didn't answer my question, which is the point of contact that I see referenced in the bill, describes the owner of the property. But many leases are written where the parties involved in the transaction are the tenant and a property management company. So the point of contact in the lease agreement would be the property management company. And I'm asking if that's sufficient, or does this bill require, even in a case where it's a property management company that is entering into the lease agreement and responsible for the upkeep, maintenance, and negotiations on the property, on a day-in, day-out basis, would you still be demanding the residential address of the owner of the building? Through you. mw/rr 31
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Through you, Madam President, it's a point of contact. Could be entity or management company. Whoever the point of contact, they must provide contact information to the town. Thank you.
Thank you. Senator Sampson.
Thank you very much, Madam President. Well, I appreciate that answer, except I don't think it's accurate. Can the good gentleman point to me where in the bill it says that the point of contact providing the residential address is the business entity through you?
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Through you, Madam President, line 26, Section 6, identifying information means group of any individual names, date of birth, the current residential address, motor vehicles’ license numbers, and other identification numbers issued by any government agency or entity. Item 30, Section 7, non-resident owner means any individual, corporation, partnership, trust, or other legal. So the item 30, Section 7. Thank you, Madam President. mw/rr 32
Thank you. Senator Sampson.
Thank you very much, Madam President. I appreciate that. And I have read the same exact section of the bill, but I think that this language is explicit that it is actually suggesting that a non-resident owner could be all of those entities, but the controlling participant is who we're actually talking about. So we're not talking about the property management company in my example. We're talking about the owner of the building. I want to be very clear about this, that this bill goes beyond any corporate veil. It goes beyond the property management company that is actually responsible for maintaining and managing this property and dealing with the tenant as far as a day-to-day operation goes, and says we must have the owner's information. So please just confirm for me that I have this correct, through you.
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Through you, Madam President, if you go line 43, owner or project-based housing, provider of such property, if they know residence owner or project- based housing provider, is an individual's or the current residence address. Agent in charge of the building if they are non-residents. Thank you.
Thank you. Senator Sampson. mw/rr 33
Thank you very much, Madam President. I appreciate the response, but again, I'm going by the language of the bill. The bill is very clear on lines 18 through 20. It talks about controlling participant, and that's who's ultimately, we are looking for their information. And the controlling participant means an individual. That's an individual. That's a person. I would also ask, how does a corporate entity or a property management company have a date of birth? Through you.
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Through you, Madam President. Yes.
Thank you. Senator Sampson.
Thank you very much, Madam President. I asked a question. How does a property management company have a date of birth? Through you.
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Maybe stand at ease for a moment. mw/rr 34
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Standing on the --
We'll stand at ease for a moment. Thank you. We will come back to order. And Senator Rahman, would you like to answer the question, sir?
Thank you, Madam President. Would you be so kind to repeat your question again, Senator?
Senator Sampson.
Thank you very much, Madam President. We seem to have a little disagreement about what the bill says. My understanding is that the reason why this bill is here is because the majority or the proponent of the bill is not satisfied with the current law, which basically would say that the lease the private contract between the parties in the agreement, the lessor and the tenant would put their contact information or their property management contact information, or whoever they deemed appropriate, in that agreement. And that would control the communication between the parties. And this bill, in my view, is intended to supersede that. To say the private contract, notwithstanding, you are now required as a non- resident owner of rental property in the state of Connecticut to provide your residential address, mw/rr 35 your date of birth, your driver's license information. So, if that's all true, what I'm confused about is the good chairman suggesting that no, you could actually use the property management company as the controlling participant. And I don't believe the bill reads that way. So I would just like to get it on the record that I'm correct. That the bill refers to the individual owner, not the property management company. Through you.
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Through you, Madam President. Thank you. So line 49 clearly saying owner or project-based housing providers are -- provider is an owner or corporation, partnership, trust, or other legally recognized entity. Owner in the properties, the either management companies or non-resident owners, either ones, any contacts, must provide the contact information to the town.
Thank you. Senator Sampson.
Thank you very much, Madam President. I appreciate the good gentleman and his effort to go through the bill with me. But if he continues the same paragraph on the next several lines, 51 through 53, 54, something like that, it says, yes, that the nonresident owner can be those entities. But it says, such report shall also include identifying information and the current residential address. mw/rr 36 Okay? You can't have a residential address for a business entity of each controlling participant associated with the property. If you go back to what a controlling participant means, it talks about the individual who exercises day-to-day financial and operational control. So let me just ask these questions then. If we can't get to that, at least simple understanding what the bill does, and I'll be frank with the people listening, the conversation we're having makes no sense at all because we don't need this bill, unless it's doing what I'm suggesting, because that's already the current situation. When a lease is drafted between the parties, it says in there who the tenant can contact, and the tenant can contact whoever the leasing agent is. That could be the owner, they might just put their name and address on it, or they might hire a property management company, or a real estate company, or someone else. Not to mention the fact that there are many different types of owners in this world. Could be a single person, could be a partnership, it could be 50 people. It could be a real estate investment trust with thousands of people that owed fractions of a share. That's another part of this conversation we haven't even gotten to yet. But if you're going to talk about the residential address, that means a person's address. And it doesn't mean, in my view, the residential address of the management company's CEO. It means the owner of the property. So I'm just curious, what is the need of all this information? Why do we need that residence address of the owner? Why do we need his date of birth, or hers, through you? mw/rr 37
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Through you, Madam President, I just want to clear again, that's, line 50, corporation, partnership, trust, or other legally recognized entity who's responsible -- property or managing the property must provide the contact information to the town for the tenants. At the same, application apply for tenant. When tenant apply for renting the property, an application said tenant must provide their address, date of birth, social securities, and more, but tenant providing all their private information to get approval for the apartment. But most time that we see the tenant can reach the landlord, and either the fire code problems of the property or the leakings, or roof, blow, whatever it is, they can reach out their landlord to fix their issue or mold the property for livable. And I think it's fair to say, my good Senator, if tenant providing their all private information, social securities, date of birth, their home address, a current resident address, whatever it is. Am I right? So they are titled to -- and I think the fair to have landlord contact information, then they can appropriately contact with a landlord to fixing their issues or sending also rents, even more. Thank you, Madam President.
Thank you. Senator Sampson.
mw/rr 38 Thank you, Madam President. I appreciate the gentleman trying to explain what I think are laudable goals of what is before us, which is to make sure that tenants have recourse. I could not agree more, through you, Madam President. The problem is that this bill is not doing any of that. This bill doesn't give anyone any recourse. And I would just suggest that the statements made by the good chairman are not altogether accurate either. There's no requirement in the law that the tenant provides their date of birth or their social security number. Now, it happens as a matter of practice, because to apply for a loan or a rental agreement that requires payments over a period of time, there's an expectation that you've got to prove your ability to do so. The landlord doesn't have an obligation to prove their financial stability to the tenants, the other way around. Just like when you go into Walmart to buy a can of paint or anything else, you're not entitled to the CEO's private information. You're not. So, this bill doesn't make any sense from a lot of standpoints. First off, it's a private contract we're talking about between the parties. State of Connecticut's got no business interfering with it. Now, I understand the desire to put in protections for the parties, and I'm with you on that. And we should even increase the penalties for people that engage in bad business practices that harm tenants. I got no problem with that. Come up with some bills for that. But what we're doing here is unworkable and frankly stupid. I don't think I've used that word in this room before, but it's just stupid. This is a stupid bill. Okay. Can I just ask, what defines an owner, mw/rr 39 through you, Madam President? Before I even go on, I just want to say, I'm talking about line 71. Non- resident owner. What defines that owner? Through you.
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Through you, Madam President, before I go line 71 answer, I just want to share with my good Senator. If any tenant apply for apartment, most time, landlord or a management company they check backgrounds and also the credit report. All those item is there. For that reason, most time require their address, phone numbers, their date of birth, and Social Security. For that reason, I'm share that. And as for the line 71, non-resident owner project based housing provider or -- as an in charge, I know I mentioned this few time, I want to clear and make sure my good Senator understand, is the person in charge and point of contact, either agent or non-resident owners or anyone, they must provide to the town, not the tenant, their contact information to contact if they need it, appropriately. Thank you, Madam President.
Thank you. Senator Sampson.
Thank you very much. Madam President, I appreciate the good Senator and his response, and him taking the time to explain a little bit more of the bill. I certainly want to get my questions answered as a priority, but I don't object to him explaining his reasons for the support of the bill, except that mw/rr 40 every time I hear the good Senator comment, it creates another question for me. He's concerned that somehow, tenants are required to provide a lot of personal information to the landlord during an application process. And I already explained that there was a reason for that. When you go to rent a car, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, you give them a lot of information. But the guy who runs Enterprise Rent-A-Car is not required to give you anything. And there's reason for that. Okay? Because you're borrowing their car. That's the reason. And when you're talking about a landlord-tenant relationship, you're borrowing the property owner's property. That's why they have a reason to be asking for information. But what's ironic, once again, is that the majority doesn't seem to have a problem with requiring the private information of the property owner to be made entirely public. Okay? Because that's what happens. Because now, as he pointed out, you've got to give that information to the municipality. And now it becomes a public record. So now we're not even talking about the tenant providing specific information to the landlord. We're talking about how the property owner now has to provide information to the world. So these things are not equal or fair, and I still want to get to the bottom of what is the definition of an owner. Because a single individual can own a property, for sure, but so can a partnership, so can two people, so can five people, so can a real estate investment trust where there's a lot of people who may not even know that they have ownership in an individual property because they just bought some stocks or a mutual fund, and they own one tenth of 1% of one share of one real estate investment trust company that owns a 100 properties? mw/rr 41 Is that person an owner in this bill? Because I see no distinction made about the level of ownership. We had a similar bill in the housing committee, and it said you had to have 10% ownership at least in the property, which, to me, is also absurd, but this has no requirement. So, presumably, anyone who owns a share of that stock or even a portion of a share is now an owner that is subject to this bill. I just got through saying a few minutes ago it was unworkable, and it's stupid, and I just wish that people were listening to me because I feel like I'm not getting anywhere with anyone actually paying attention to what I'm saying when I'm actually pointing out that this bill is completely, utterly unworkable. It makes no sense. It's not a realistic bill. Maybe it was put forward for political purposes because we want to highlight some bad actor landlords. No problem. I'm willing to help you. Senator, let's get together. Let's find a way to punish these people. But this bill, stupid, unworkable. I'll ask very clearly, what defines ownership? Do you have to be a majority owner? And if so, where in the bill does it show what the specific requirements are for ownership? Through you.
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Yes. Through you, Madam President, controlling participant. Controlling, I mentioned like five times, Senator. Thank you.
Thank you. Senator Sampson. mw/rr 42
Thank you very much, Madam President. I apologize to the senator if he's getting frustrated with me. But what defines a controlling participant?
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Through you, Madam President, controlling, there may be entity or not the -- controlling ownerships, not residents owner, or partner who's managing and has the controlling powers. Throw you, Madam President.
Thank you. Senator Sampson.
Thank you very much, Madam President. I just want to point out that the controlling participant language that shows up in lines 18 through 20 is very clear. It says the person who exercises day-to-day financial or operational control. That would make a lot of sense. That only applies to, as far as I can read in this bill, information that has to be provided to the tenant. The information that has to be provided to the town is included in line 65 to 71. And there's no mention of controlling participant there. I don't believe that tracks back to the controlling participant. I think that simply is the requirement for the residential address. And if I'm wrong, I would love to hear the good chairman explain to me how we are using the term non-resident owner in here mw/rr 43 without any definition of what requires or determines ownership. Is it a percentage of ownership? It is a complete of ownership? Do you have to be an owner that's also a controlling participant? I looked for all this language, through you, Madam President. I tried to find anything in here that would put these pieces together in a sensible way. But this bill is here for political reasons. This bill is not here because it's good policy. It's here because some folks on the majority think that it's a great idea to go ahead and whack around corporate landlords or whatever. And maybe it is. And I completely agree that people that fail to take care of the tenants ought to be punished. And we should be coming up ways to do that. But this bill is not doing that. This bill is inconveniencing a lot of people. It also applies to even a guy that owns one property. A couple that moved to Florida, and they kept their condo in Connecticut, and they rent that out. That's what we're doing here. And we're going to expose owners of property to having their public information released to the world. And I just don't see that that is a beneficial thing to do. It's also, in my mind, completely crazy to not only require how to contact them. Okay. We need their address. Okay. But what do you need their date of birth for? Do you know that our voter rolls in the state of Connecticut, they don't even allow people to see people's date of birth anymore? You can only see the month and the year. Because the majority here is constantly concerned with protecting people's privacy, as am I, okay? But they are not concerned with this person's privacy. You are suddenly not going to be given the same rights as other people because you're a landlord. mw/rr 44 Now your information has to be plastered all over. And the other thing is that it says driver's license. You can cast a ballot in the state of Connecticut without a driver's license. And in fact, you can cast a ballot without any proof of information at all. But can you own property? I don't know, because it looks like as a non-resident owner, you have got to provide your date of birth, your resident address, not a PO box, not good enough, and you got to provide your driver's license. This is a pitifully poorly drafted bill with bad policy in it, ladies and gentlemen. That's what this bill is. It's garbage, frankly. If we want to address the problem that the good Senator mentioned half a dozen times in our conversation, let's address the problem. Let's come up with a mechanism that actually punishes bad actors. Let's find a way to make it a crime. Okay? Or give some cause of action for civil liability if a landlord refuses to respond to a tenant's concerns. By the way, all those things already do exist in law in some factor or some way, but we could improve upon that. I have no objection. I also want to just say a word about the penalties portion of this bill, which, in theory, makes a lot of sense. If you have people repeating it and failing to make repairs, and they've been fined for not keeping their properties up, this would increase the penalties for doing so. It's fine. I don't really object to that portion of the bill, except I just want to remind people about -- we should be trying to make policy that is workable, too. There's a few things I would say. The first one is that there are certainly situations where you might have a landlord who's struggling. Okay? And they can't afford to make the repairs to the property. mw/rr 45 And if we're preventing them from making the repairs because you're putting more and more fines on them, that's not really solving the problem. The goal is to get the building back into a state of repair. That should be factored into this conversation, but it's not. And the other thing is that we had a similar bill in the Housing Committee, and I happen to have a member of the town council from the city of Bridgeport, there testifying in favor of either a similar bill or some other Housing Bill, and I took the opportunity to ask them, say, look, what's the story? We hear about people who live in the big cities primarily, although I suppose it can happen anywhere, but in Bridgeport, New Haven, in particular, where these buildings are in a poor state of repair, and the lane, in my words, is not fixing it and everything else. And I asked, I said, do you have a public health person? Do you have a building inspector? Are you sending them out? What budget do you have? She knew nothing. Absolutely nothing. I'm not going to mention any names here, but she knew nothing. She couldn't answer a single one of my questions. So, I really think you got to go back and look at these towns. The people that live in the city of Bridgeport really ought to be considering who they're electing to run their city government, and they should be choosing wisely to put people in place that are actually going to protect their And if that means making sure that there is action taken to make sure that landlords uphold their end of the bargain and provide a nice place to live, that's how you do it. You don't do it through this, frankly, insane and circuitous route, where you're exposing people's private information who really are mw/rr 46 not in a position to do something about it. The thought was nice. I'll give you that. You get credit for the thought of this bill, but in practice, it's not workable. It's only going to create more problems. And I can guarantee you, we can come back a year from now, through you, Madam President. We can come back a year from now, and I'm going to promise you that the situation will not be The situation is not going to be different. This is not going to fix it. Suddenly, tenants are not going to have a panacea. They're not going to have any problems with their landlords anymore. They're all going to be penalized. They're all going to be fixed. Everything's going to be great, and all the private addresses are going So I understand it's a nice show for political purposes. Look. We care. I care too, but I care enough to actually want to make a good law, not an unworkable, stupid one. I'll be a no today. Thank you.
Thank you. Will you remark further on the bill? Senator Martin, would you like to remark on the bill, sir?
Good afternoon, Madam President.
Good afternoon.
My hoarseness here. Yes. I rise to say a few comments and ask some questions as well. I read mw/rr 47 through the bill and the summary, yesterday and a little bit today, and a few points of, I guess, concern that I have is what is the need of providing, I guess, extra information that might be at risk of being, I guess what's the data term of the theft and data information, particularly when it comes to driver's license information and home address. I have an issue with that. Most of these properties, not all, but most of these, and I have to believe we're talking specifically about rental units, which I think there are, like, 8,000 properties that can be classified. 8,500 rental properties in the state of Connecticut. And the information, most of the time, that is filed with the state of the Secretary of State when you file for an LLC is you provide -- from my recollection. I haven't done this in a while, but I needed to provide the name of the entity. I needed to provide the address where I'm operating out of. And I don't recall if I needed to provide a phone number, but I'll say yes. So the state of Connecticut needed to send me some type of public notice, then that would be sent to me. I don't understand why that is not currently the process or why the bill is replacing that process. If it's for code issues, building code, or health code issues that are taking place within a municipality, the municipality has currently -- from what I understand, its own ordinances or can create an ordinance to get that information. But it also has access to what's on state databases as to who those owners are. So I don't understand what the need of the bill is. So through you, Madam President, if the good Senator can provide me that information, what is the reason for the bill through you? mw/rr 48
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Through you, Madam President. Thank you. The reason for the bill, a lot of good tenant, they can't contact with their landlords. Either they need to notify their landlord they have the leaking or any kind of issues, or maybe sometime they are -- PO box change number. They want to give them something to communicate with the landlord. Either way, either leaking, moldy, or the fire code issues, they want to notify landlord or communicate with the landlord. They deserve because they're paying good rent. Am I right? So most time, tenant can contact with their landlord. Either they are not providing the point of contact information, or management company not communicating with them, all the nonresident owner, they renting property are not communicating. So this is the reason we have the bill, and this is how this bill will help a tenant, they can communicate with their landlord. I want to give you one example. Last month, Rocky Hill attorney general and the local delegate, they had a press conference. Was outrageous what happened in the Rocky Hill. Month and month, and year tenant can't reach them, the landlord, and the moldy and broken property was crazy there. So this is why this bill is very important, and this is not stupid bill. This is really good bill. This bill will help improve quality of life as our state, and tenant can communicate with the landlord, and landlord appropriately they can contact and fix the issues that they need. So many reason, but all the item is there, is not changing anything. Amendment mw/rr 49 is saying specifically there. Through, Madam President.
Thank you. Senator Rahman. Senator Martin.
Thank you, Madam President. Some of that I understand. And if there are issues by the tenant regarding what repairs that are needed, seems to me that when they sign that lease agreement, that information where to contact the landlord would be in the lease. And further, when they first made the contact, they must have had a phone number to call or an address or a location to go to apply for the unit itself. So, again, I just don't understand if they have already made a phone call for a rent with a phone number. Well, that's your starting position, I would think. And then your lease should normally have all that information into it. So there's, to some measure here, is there's a responsibility of the tenant as well as to use that information through you, Madam President. I guess I didn't ask a question. So, I guess going down this path a little bit, regarding there is a certain amount of responsibility for the tenant as well, is to vet the landlord. Do I want to rent from this individual? So there seems to be maybe some of that, into play too, regarding choosing the right place where you want to live. So I did see in public testimony that there's, like, four or five different individuals that testified from Rocky Hill. mw/rr 50 So is this a bill specifically for Rocky Hill? And if so, why are they not creating an ordinance that will solve a lot of this, rather than come to us and have this bill put a burden on 8,500 property owners in the state of Connecticut to put personal information that's going to be accessible to the public? Through you, Madam President.
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Through you, Madam President, no. This bill is not just for specifically for Rocky Hill. I just bought off, what happened in Rocky Hill, couple of -- I think last month. No, this is not just for specifically for Rocky Hill, but as per my good senator's concern about landlord and tenant responsibilities. When tenant apply for apartment, providing all their private information for the credit check, background check, date of birth, Social Securities, address, phone numbers, and more. But the landlord don't provide anything other than their property address. Yes, point of contact sometime, signing or drawing of sign the contact lease agreement. Most time, the real estate agent is communicating with the tenant, prospective tenant, and landlord. So they are changing all those, but even though sometimes they provide tenant their contact information, and most time they change and they are not updating and providing new information. So this is why this bill for -- and landlord must provide the contact information to the town, but town cannot release for publicly. This is just address for specific properties tenants. Not just one tenant. Any other tenant needed. So can release mw/rr 51 for the public this first information. Yes. Did I answer? I don't know. This is question. Through you, Madam President.
Thank you. Senator Martin.
Thank you, Madam President. I'll go down the path a little bit about the logistics a little bit from the municipality point of view is that so a landlord -- should this bill go through a property owner, rental property owner, could be an individual or could be an LLC, an entity, will be required to provide some information or information regarding name, address, or where they can be reached, or the property manager's personal address in addition to phone number and driver's license information. Is there anything else that's going to be required through you, Madam President?
Senator Rahman.
Through you, Madam President, no. Just contact information to contact with landlord.
Lot. Thank you, Senator Martin.
Thank you, Madam President. So when there is a change of property manager for a property, same owner, but they have hired a third party who is now going to be the designated entity or individual. They are going to provide the manager's contact mw/rr 52 information. And that change is going to be required every time there's a change in that contact person through you, Madam President.
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Through you, Madam President. Say, yes. If I provide you my cell phone to contact with me anytime you need it, if my cell phone number or contact information change, I must provide you updated information.
Thank you. Senator Martin.
And if we do not do that, so the owner of the property hires a third party, if I understand the bill correctly, and that change is not done by them with the municipality, there will be a second fine if it happens again, a third, et cetera, for you, Madam President.
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Through you, Madam President, the landlord has, I think, 21 days to provide their information. And, yes, if they failure to do so, there is the escalated fine, but the state setting up the find from 200 to 1,000, or subsequent violation from 500 to 1,000, whatever it is, but up to the towns is optional. If towns want a $300 or they don't want to take any actions, it's up to the town. Thank you. mw/rr 53
Thank you. Senator Martin.
Through you, madam president. And how is this information going to be done? Will the designated person for the owner have to go in person? Can they make a phone call? Can they do it online? Has that been established through you, Madam President?
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Through you, Madam President, I don't know exactly how they should and could and will provide contact information to the town, but I know, the town may be doing now, but they will create if it's the population, at least 25 or more thousand. So, town will create registry, and I believe a landlord can log in, go to the town registry, and fill out their form over there, but that's not for public.
Thank you. Senator Martin.
Yes. But the city, the town will need to document it at their end in one way or form. If it's done personally, then they will have to take the information, go to their desk, input the information. So I'm looking at the time and effort from the municipal side because the bill doesn't address the cost. And it's saying, basically, there is no cost, mw/rr 54 which I beg to differ because every time there's a change, it's time, from someone's day to record all that information. Would you say that's correct, through you, Madam?
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Landlord or responsible person or a point of contact person, they can go in person, provide to the town contact information, or probably, they can mail it, but I don't know exactly, I can back to -- I don't know exactly, they have to really in person go over there. I believe they can go provide the contact information to the town, fill out the simple form there, sir -- the registry.
Thank you. Senator Martin.
Thank you, Madam President. And you're correct. You're correct in the sense that someone's got to go and fill that information out from the owner's side, whether it's online or whether it's in person. But on the receiving side, the city side, there's also someone there that needs to take that information and make that change, and that's a cost. Now, what it is, I think that's up to those in this building who do that, but to make sure that it's included in the fiscal note, I don't see it here. So that could be half up to half a million bucks based on the cost of a municipal average wages plus their benefits, et cetera, times whatever half hour, an hour, or what so forth. mw/rr 55 So that's a bit missing from the bill. So, let's just talk about a little bit about why are we saying may to the through you, Madam President, a municipality less than 25,000 people may or may not need to do this. And those that are greater than 25,000 shall do this. Why are we just discriminating and not why are we not just saying every town may or every town shall through you, Madam President?
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Good question, from my good Senator, through you, Madam President. This bill well negotiated, bill introduced on beginning was a 50,000, at least 50,000 or more residents. The well-negotiated came at least 25 or more residents. The town and not included, entire 169 town and cities because -- we don't just come in here, throw the paperwork, say this -- my way, or highway, or no way or my way, whatever it is. But we must bring all the stockholder on board, and mostly stockholder, including our rankings and committee members, and towns, mayors, and selectmen's. Everyone agreed to go with 20, at least 25, or more. This is how town, like Andover, like 3,000 residents and summer. So like that. So don't have the 20 storey building their apartment complex like Bridgeport or Waterbury, or Hartford. So, we don't need to include -- this is not me. All the stockholder [Inaudible], they'll ask go with at least 25 or more resident. Thank you, Madam President.
Thank you. Senator Martin. mw/rr 56
Thank you, Madam President. I don't know if I understood why municipalities, some can may decide to do this. And on the other hand, we are requiring larger municipalities to do this. I don't why are we differentiating and allowing one to choose and the other one not to choose through you, Madam President?
Thank you. Senator Rahman?
Through you, Madam President, my good Senator, thinking we should include 69,000 city and no cap or population. We can come back next year and talk about more and make bill better.
Thank you. Senator Martin.
I don't think I understood that, Madam President. Again, the question is why are we allowing some to choose and others we're telling them what to do through you, Madam President?
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Through you, Madam President, like I mentioned, we are not telling the town and city what to do or not to do. This is all the stockholder, small town, big cities, and the committees, everyone agree to go with 25 or more. mw/rr 57
Senator Martin.
Madam President, through you. So I beg to differ. We are telling some municipalities, you can choose whether or not you want to do this. And we are telling others, you need to do this. And we're telling them specifically, listen. You can ask for the entity name, the owner's name. You can ask for their address and particularly their driver's license information and date of birth. So is it fair that if we're going to tell someone that you're going to do this, this law is going to make you do this, and on the other hand, we're allowing smaller communities, nah, you don't have to do it? Where's the fairness in that for you, Madam President?
Senator Rahman.
Through you, Madam President, our small town, like I mentioned, Andover, 3,000 people. Columbia, maybe 4,000 residents, they don't have -- there is no 20- story apartment complex, hard port, big cities, they have that. But like I said earlier, if my good Senator thinking, oh, we should include 169 town and cities, and no population, or cap, or anything. Let's go open for everyone. We can come back, revisit next year.
Senator Martin. mw/rr 58
Yes. But still, regardless if we come back here next year or not, we are still making an unlevel playing field for municipalities the way this bill is being written today. So moving on, going back to the building code and health codes. I'm all for that. I think that we have building codes for reason and health codes for reason to make sure that people that rent or own homes are buying or renting homes that are safe, regardless if they are living in them or people who come to visit them, family or friends, that people are safe, and I am for all for that. There are recourses or means for recourse if a tenant does not hear back from a landlord. And it's called walking down or calling the building inspector or the fire marshal. Again, going back to the -- I don't understand the reason of the bill because they have those as remedies currently. So if a tenant, and particularly, let's say it's a 400-unit, 200-unit, and there are multiple violations taken place, you're darn sure, I believe, that that fire marshal or the building code, building inspector will have received a phone call. So I don't understand, again, the purpose of the bill because there are current remedies out there now. Why are they not being used? And going back to Rocky Hill, I saw four or five, six testimonies coming from them. And if this is their issue, then maybe they should be looking at their building department or their fire marshal and addressing it with them. So, what do you think a municipality ought to do if they have these violations and they are currently taking place? Why do they need this? They have their building code, their fire marshal. They have their building inspector that they can address it. Again, no need for this bill through you, Madam President. mw/rr 59
Senator Rahman.
Anything helping improving quality of life and public safety, and this bill will help improving quality of life and public safety. This is why this bill -- through you, Madam President.
Senator Martin.
Again, I am for making sure that tenants and homeowners are safe. I don't see how this particular bill would address that. One of my primary concerns is this data of providing a license, or date of birth, with a name specifically tied to it, and that could be at risk for theft, data theft. I don't see any remedy for that. I don't see that, should it happen, and it does. I think over 40% of municipalities have some type of breach in their systems during the course of a year, Madam President. So that to me is a high level. It's not 2%, 1%. We're talking about a higher level of risk here that is very concerning to me. And particularly, if I give it up my date of birth, my name, and my driver's license, and what could be done with those things. We currently have statutes in the books that protect our state employees from this type of information. And if that information is required or being sought through a FOIA request, then they are notified that that is being asked for, and they have to have mw/rr 60 permission from the member in order for that information to go out. So here, are we asking for any type of notification or are we notifying will we be notifying the person who is on the record here as the contact person that, hey, by the way, someone's looking for this through you, Madam President.
Senator Rahman.
Through you, Madam President, first, I want to go back to before I answer my good Senator question. We mentioned about the information, contact info, the town will receive from landlord, the town can release under any condition for publicly. The only reason for information providing to the town that way tenant can obtain information or receiving or a request from the town, and then they can contact their landlord. So this is not, we must trust our town, our government. It's a town government we don't trust who we should trust then. This information going to go to our town and they will supervise all contacts. The name, address, phone number, and their date of birth, license, whatever it is. The same time, landlord also providing all contact information to mortgage company, more than what we are asking. So they are comfortable in their buying the properties and providing all their contact information, including their Social Security or tax IDs, whatever is required, they're providing all. There's a non-government entity, but we are asking to provide town government. So I trust our town government and state government, federal government, but yes, we are not agree with mw/rr 61 everything they are doing. But I think they are secured, and I thought my good Senator love the local control, and this is the local control town going to have it. Through you, Madam President.
Senator Martin.
Madam President, thank you. You may trust government, but I don't trust government. So, I am concerned about the date of birth and the driver's license. I don't think that's required. I think what we currently have in our system, particularly with the Secretary of State, you have the entity name or a personal name tied to an address if you need to make that phone call. If you're looking for a phone number, okay, but date of birth, driver's license, I think that's way and above what should be required. Madam President, I will be saying no to this bill, and thank you for allowing me to ask my questions.
Thank you. Senator Rahman.
Thank you, Madam President. I know that my good Senator said I also blame our government. Yes. I do. I don't blame our government. City government, district government, federal government. I blame the leaders who leading -- sometimes we blame the leaders who's leading the town government or state governments, or federal government. But that's not the thing. With that, I want to ask my colleagues to support this bill. This is really good bill, and we have a mw/rr 62 moral obligation to support our tenants, whose -- people work hard and $1,500 two bedroom apartment, they pay $3,200 or $1,800 or $2,000, but then they can contact with their landlord to fixing their issues. Now we are questioning, and we are asking, we are debating, against the public safety. This bill will improve quality of life. This bill will improve the public safety because now they have the contact information. They can contact their landlord and fixing their all those issues. And I'm sure my good senators, my colleagues, the circle, they all are agreed to keep our community safe and healthy. For that reason, I'm asking my colleagues to support this bill and pass bill. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you, Senator Rahman. Will you remark further, Senator Lesser?
Yes. Thank you, Madam President, and good to see you up there. I rise in strong support of Senate Bill 274 and urge members to support it. I represent the town of Rocky Hill. And this winter, we saw in one exceptionally large complex the culmination of years of underinvestment from an out-of-state, private equity-backed landlord. And due to the scale of the devastation, we had, by some counts, thousands of people displaced. We were trying to figure out how to manage this humanitarian catastrophe, who to get in touch with, and something unprecedented happened. The attorney general of the State of Connecticut, William Tong, stepped in on behalf of the residents. He does not normally get involved in a landlord- mw/rr 63 tenant issues or issues about code violations and whatnot. But in this particular case, due to the number of people involved and the impact on the people of Rocky Hill, the attorney general said this rises to the level where I'm going to get involved. And even in that case, it was very difficult to track down the owners, to get in contact with them. And the only reason they were able to do so expeditiously was because the owner had been involved in prior litigation with the town. We need more tools to be able to track this. This is a huge and growing issue. Obviously, private equity out-of-state landlords are purchasing properties all across the state. And small towns, medium-sized towns like Rocky Hill, really struggle to hold folks accountable for repeat violations of building and fire code issues. We saw the town on a bipartisan basis come and testify in support of this legislation because they see this legislation as being directly helpful for combating this particular landlord and holding them accountable, and also dealing with similar situations should they arise in the future. And for that reason, I want to thank the Planning and Development Committee for moving this important legislation forward, to my friend, Senator Rahman, for leading the effort, and urge all members to stand in support. Thank you.
Thank you, Senator Lesser. Will you remark further? Senator Lesser? Senator Duff.
Thank you, Madam President. Will the Senate stand at ease?
mw/rr 64 Thank you, Madam President. Speaking in support of the bill as amended. First of all, I wanted to thank Senator Rahman and all of the members of the Planning and Development Committee for their careful and considered work on this bill. And I think this will be really helpful to municipalities who are engaged in an ongoing struggle to address blight and other noncompliance with city ordinances. And, of course, what it will do is provide for some additional penalties and additional incentives, and also more accountability to make sure that those who are responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of property can be contacted. There's not a hurdle to be jumped over to identify who to call when there is blight, when there is noncompliance. And I think it's important that municipalities with populations above 25,000, which are the ones most likely to run into this problem, will be in a position where they will be able to require the non-resident homeowners to register with the municipality -- the non-resident landlords to register with the municipality. And that also, the increase in fines for repeat violations of the building code or for fire code violations, those additional penalties will be an additional incentive for compliance. So, this is something we've heard from a number of municipalities about that would be helpful to them in their arsenal of efforts to fight blight and noncompliance, and urge passage of the bill as amended. Thank you, Madam President.
Thank you, Senator Looney. Roll call vote will be ordered. Mr. Clerk.
An immediate roll call vote has been ordered in the mw/rr 65 This is Senate Bill #274, AN ACT CONCERNING NONRESIDENT LANDLORD REGISTRATION AND INCREASING PENALTIES FOR REPEAT BUILDING AND FIRE CODE VIOLATIONS. We are now voting on the bill. An immediate roll call vote has been ordered in the vote has been ordered in the Senate on Senate Bill #274 as amended. An immediate roll call vote in the
Have all members voted? If all members have voted, the machine will be locked. Mr. Clerk, would you please announce the tally?
Total number voting: 34 Those voting Yea 24 Those voting Nay 10 Those absent 2
The bill passes. Mr. Clerk, please call the next bill.
Page 25, Calendar 245. Senate Bill 397, AN ACT CONCERNING DEMOCRACY AND GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY.
Senator Winfield.
Thank you, Madam President. Madam President, I move acceptance of the Joint Committee's favorable report and passage of the bill. mw/rr 66
The question is on passage. Will you remark further?
Yes, Madam President. Before I explain the whole bill, there's a strike-all amendment. So, the LCO is in possession of LCO -- the Clerk, rather, is in possession of LCO 4084. I'd ask that it be called, and I'd be granted leave of the--
LCO 4084. Will be designated Senate Amendment Scheduled A.
Thank you, Madam President. Madam President, I called him. I'm sorry. We were trying to coordinate, so I lost my way for a second. Madam President, I guess I've moved it. So, what this strike-all amendment would do it effectively comes to a bill. The strike-all creates a private right of action in our state courts for individuals who are aggrieved by state, local, and federal actors. It deals with authority that the attorney general has to bring action based on that section of the bill. It deals with the IG, our Inspector General, and their authority to deal with cases of deadly use of force. We've had a lot of conversation in the state, in this building about the issue of the use of masks with our federal agents, and this has a mask ban in it. It deals with the concept of protected areas, areas in which ICEs and other agents of the law are prohibited from arresting someone for a civil offense, without certain conditions being present, deals with police training. We've had a lot of conversation about whether or not some of these actors are fully trained that in a way that we want them to, and this would require that if they were mw/rr 67 going to become a law enforcement officer here, that they have a certain number of hours. It deals with immunity when one is interfering with recording, and whether or not that is something that they are able to avail themselves of. Madam President, this bill is important to a lot of conversations that are happening both in this building, in this state, and in this nation right now, and as we go on, I'm sure we're going to have robust conversations today. We will explore not only the letter of the bill, but why we are here, and I would urge passage.
Thank you, Senator Winfield. Will you remark further? Senator Kissel.
Thank you very much, Madam President. Great to see you up there this afternoon. I stand in opposition to the strike-all amendment, which actually becomes the bill. And so I would say for my colleagues that if you do intend to debate this bill, now would be the time, after I speak. And it's my understanding that there's also another amendment that may be coming down the road, which is more in the nature of a technical cleanup regarding various minor aspects. And I'll leave that for later this afternoon. I stand in opposition to this bill for a variety of reasons. While I understand that the intent by those that are putting it forward is most likely laudable, and my concerns are regarding various aspects. So first of all, I think it impedes the ability of the federal government to perform its functions through its various agencies in law enforcement. In particular, I am very much concerned with its impact on the ability of the FBI, Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the ATF, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the DEA, the Department of Justice, and the Secret mw/rr 68 Service to perform their functions here in the state of Connecticut. Those are the preeminent law enforcement agencies that the federal government has. They perform a variety of functions. We're very familiar, especially if we watch CBS. I think they have at least three different programs regarding the FBI, and how they go out there into our various states and help enforce laws, not only federal laws, but as they overlap state laws. But it's very crucial that we have an active and vibrant, and functional Federal Bureau of Investigation. They help with the most heinous of crimes, serial killers, murders, but kidnapping, and anti-terrorism, and you name it. The DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency, helping to stop the flow of drugs into our country, and we're acutely aware that not only we have a lot of illegal and illicit drugs coming from South America, and Central America, and Mexico, and some amazingly through Canada as well, but some of these drugs are manufactured in China, and then funneled through countries in the Western Hemisphere into our nation. And so, specifically, the DEA handles that. Alcohol, tobacco, and firearms. It's an amazing, amazing amount of profits are made in the illicit sale of tobacco products that are not duly licensed and stamped, but also alcohol, moonshining, not paying again the requisite taxes on alcohol and alcohol products, and firearms. And quite often, we hear stories of people utilizing firearms to commit crimes, and we have federal ATF agents out there taking care of that. We also have folks in the Department of Justice that help enforce the federal laws, in our federal courts, prosecutors, and very similar to what we have on the state level. And once upon a time, I was a special public defender, as those who sit on the Judiciary Committee have heard ad nauseam. But before I had to give up my contract as a special public defender mw/rr 69 upon being sworn in as a legislator, over 30 years ago, I was a special public defender for several years, and in dealing with the state's attorney, quite often they had their own investigators that would go out there and investigate the more complex matters that were before them. Federal government, exact same thing. So, within the Department of Justice, not only do they have prosecutors, but they also have investigators that go out into the community and help enforce the laws. And last but not least, in this swath of agents and groups that I'm concerned with is the Secret Service. Secret Service doesn't come to mind very often. Certainly, in an incident such as happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, and other places in our country, how the Secret Service operates comes to the fore. But wherever the president goes, there is a bevy of Secret Service agents that go out in advance, make sure areas are secure, and then are charged with making sure that the president and others in the administration are safe as well. And I believe that the parameters of this bill would touch upon the Secret Service agents' ability to perform their job in a meaningful way. So this bill is drafted in a way that is extremely broad and touches upon all of these federal agencies. I would guess probably others as well. I know that here in the state of Connecticut, for example, our DEEP agents, when they're out there policing our public forests and parks, I believe they can carry arms. Whether the Department of Environmental Protection on the federal level has agents that are authorized to carry arms, I don't know. But there's an abundance of federal authorities, but these are the ones that come to mind as being charged with making sure that the people of Connecticut are safe and sound, at least with our partnership with federal authorities. And I believe that the proposal in this bill would dramatically mw/rr 70 limit individuals in performing their jobs. Now when we get to that, one of the areas that I am concerned with, these inhibitions and prescriptions on federal authorities, as well as if there is an allegation that an individual working under the color of federal authority for one of these agencies, and let's just say the FBI, that they could be brought under charges under a 1983 Civil Violation and be held liable. And again, I would charge that while I can't call myself a constitutional scholar. One of the classes that I loved in law school was constitutional law, got an A, had a wonderful professor, Sam Stonefield, and of course, constitutional law figures into many other areas that one would study if one went to law school, or actually, you don't even have to go to law school. I also have a degree in history, and loved the classes that had to do with legal aspects of our history, and also the English common law. And believe it or not, I took a class at the University of Connecticut on the English common law. It was fascinating. Maybe that's why I ended up going on to law school. In any event, the case I would cite as the preeminent case, and I want to thank Attorney Melanie Dicus for bringing this to my attention and jiggling my memory regarding this seminal case from way back when. It is McCulloch v. Maryland, and the cite is 17 U.S. 316, and that's dated from 1819. And that case was the first case that came down, in our country's early history, that said that there's supremacy of the federal government when it comes to their federal duties as they are being performed by federal agencies, and that the states cannot prescribe that authority. And so over the years, over the decades, actually over centuries now, it has come to be called Supremacy Clause in our Constitution. That is one should look at that as the overarching umbrella as stated initially in McCulloch v. Maryland, that when it comes to the federal law and federal agencies mw/rr 71 doing their duty, doing their actions, doing what the congress has charged them to do, that the states cannot enact laws to infringe upon that, and that the only entity that can rein it in, or expand it, or change it, is the federal government itself acting through congress. And so, when it comes to liability, such as this bill proposes to enact through these 1983 provisions, that's in here, that underneath McCulloch v. Maryland, there is a slew of cases that I'm sure Attorney Dicus could cite if I asked her to, and other legal scholars here in the circle. And Madam President, I would suggest that you are one of them as well, as you are a constitutional law professor outside of this building. But there's many, many, many cases that have come down and said that federal officials acting under color of law cannot expose themselves to liability simply because of a state law. That exposure is either proscribed or limited, or expanded in some way through acts of Congress. And so, when it comes to the behavior of federal agencies, it's outside of our bailiwick, it's outside of our wheelhouse, it's outside of our authority, and maybe by doing laws such as this proposal and given who is the cosponsors on this bill proposal, I'm guessing it's going to sail through the Senate and sail through the House, although I cannot be in support of it. Because, at first blush, it just violates the Supremacy Clause. So it might be something that somebody wants to plant a flag and say this is what we believe in, but I certainly would bet dollars to donuts that as soon as it's challenged in the federal courts, it'll be struck down. And so, I think that it is just completely undermined on those grounds alone. There's another area in here as well regarding the Inspector General. Now, the Inspector General here in Connecticut, a wonderful gentleman, great judicial background, and we have charged that individual by urging him to investigate matters where there's been a death. And if there's a death mw/rr 72 at the hands of local law enforcement, that individual then will go out and do an investigation, an impartial investigation to make sure that everything was done appropriately. That there was no overreaction or acting beyond one's authority by local law enforcement, or whatever the state or local agency was that ended up in the death of an individual here in Connecticut. And it has worked really well, I think, so far. The individual has a sterling reputation, and we felt as a state that it was extremely important, and it's not a slight to local law enforcement whatsoever or the state police, but you can't really have an entity investigate itself, not that they wouldn't do an excellent job or be completely truthful or honest. But fundamentally, when an entity investigates itself, it's hard for the public to have full faith and confidence that, that was a completely honest and above-board investigation. It's just human nature that one would be a little skeptical if, to use a colloquial term, the fox is guarding the hen house, or if you're just doing your own investigation and then clearing yourself. And also, it'll be very difficult within a department to find an entity or an individual within that department who actually did something that caused the death of an individual. So that's why we created the whole investor in this -- Inspector General position. What this bill proposes is that if there is a death or a violation that the inspector -- by federal authorities, that the Inspector General then will utilize similar powers. That is completely unworkable, and I could not, for the life of me, ever imagine that if there was a death of an individual at the hands of someone that was in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the DEA, ATF, Secret Service, or the Justice Department themselves that they would clear the way so that our state mw/rr 73 appointed Inspector General could conduct his own investigation. And if it's a woman down the road, her own investigation. I just don't ever see that ever happening, and my guess is that the same Supremacy Clause that essentially will nullify the parts of this bill that attempt to regulate the authority of federal agencies would also limit any authority that our Inspector General would have if somebody lost their life at the hands of a federal official. Again, I totally support the idea that if anybody suffered any harm at the hands of a federal official, a full and active investigation should be conducted thoroughly, so that we know where the wrong lies, if there indeed was wrong behavior, and that the perpetrators can be duly punished, and that that behavior doesn't happen again in the future. Those are completely laudable goals. But to think that federal authorities will clear the way so that our individual Inspector General can walk in and have free rein to conduct an investigation, I think, is sort of pie in the sky. And I don't think it's workable, and I also don't think it's enforceable. Again, it's not our bailiwick. It's not our wheelhouse. It's not within our area of authority. There are different levels of government. Just like imagine if one of our hometowns said, hey, state of Connecticut, we really don't like what you're doing in Hartford. So we're going to pass a local ordinance, X, Y, Z, to prescribe what you're doing. I'm going to tell you right now, the state authorities, I don't care what it is, DEEP, DAS, Department of Corrections, they may not laugh out loud, but they're not going to jump when the town says jump. I got to be honest, as much as I feel that the state works very well with my communities, it's not always easy getting simple cooperation on something that's not even controversial, but I have never seen a town say jump and a state agency say how high. It just mw/rr 74 doesn't happen. When I have issues in my constituencies, in the eight towns that I represent all or part of, they come through us. They come through their senator, they come through their representatives, they go through us to try to effectuate change and get answers. And that's part of what our job is as elected representatives of our constituents. That is how it was designed from the beginning. So, first of all, I think that this bill is just fatally crippled, because it will fall because of the Supremacy Clause from all the way back in 1819 in McCulloch v. Maryland. I think that the goals of the Inspector General, while laudable, also suffer from the same Achilles heel that he will not have the authority, or she will not have the authority, to conduct a full, fair, and free investigation regarding federal actions or inactions. And another area that I feel is of concern is the license plate reader area. And we work together in this part of the bill in the Judiciary Committee. There were other bills that I believe came out of Public Safety Committee and government administration and elections. I think that the proposals in here were cobbled together from those various committees. And while it may not be perfect, that's probably the part of the bill that I have the least concerns with. So like so many other proposals that we have in the state Senate and the legislature, there's things that I can support and things that I can't, and on balance, unfortunately, the things that I cannot support in this bill make it so tainted and unenforceable and misguided that I can't support the bill as a whole. The last part that I want to stress, though, is this bill, in making these prescriptions on what can be done regarding law enforcement in Connecticut. It doesn't just speak in terms of federal agencies, like the FBI, like the DEA, like the Alcohol, Fire, and AFT, like the Secret Service, like the Justice mw/rr 75 Department. It also speaks in terms of local law enforcement very, very loudly, very clearly. And to me, that's the poison pill that hurts the most. First of all, not that long ago, probably four or five years ago, and it seems to be a recurring theme every decade or so, we had this hue and cry primarily in urban areas, but in various parts of our nation, defund the police. Defund the police. And for a lot of people, that seemed scary. I know people in my neck of the woods, people in North Central Connecticut, the towns that I represent, not a one that I spoke to were championing defund the police. They may have wanted some restraints on some of their behavior on occasion, but I never heard a hue and cry about defund the police. I will say this, in my hometown of Enfield, the people trip over themselves praising our police. And I got to be honest, we're really lucky right now. We have Alaric Fox as our Chief of Police. He's the former colonel of the state police in the Malloy administration, and he was the top person in the state police. When he retired, we were lucky enough to get him as our town police chief. A wonderful person who teaches at the post, who not only is a wonderful law enforcement officer and chief, but he has a law degree as well, smart as a whip, and a great family. And our officers from the chief all the way down go above and beyond. And that's just Enfield. I have all are part of seven other towns. And 201, I would stand side by side with all of those law enforcement officers. We cherish our law enforcement. We couldn't live freely and happily and work and raise families in our neck of the woods unless we had law and order. And we know that if you're a man or woman, it's a thin blue line. When I come to work, I don't know if I'm going to be here till four in the afternoon or six in the evening, but I don't really worry if I'm going to come home in one piece or not. In this day mw/rr 76 and age, you never know. No one can give you a guarantee that you'll even see the sunrise. That is a fact, but as part of the job description, they don't say state senator risking life and limb each and every day. They do if you're in law enforcement. You do. And you could be out there investigating a dangerous criminal, or you could just be pulling someone over on a highway trying to write a ticket, and that has all happened in my neck of the woods. I mean, I had a state trooper not that many years ago, just got killed, just writing a ticket on 91 in Enfield. And later on, Waystation was dedicated in his name. And I met with his widow. It's a dangerous job. You can just walk from the Legislative Office Building here to the Capitol. And as you're going, right before you turn the corner to the escalators, they have a screen up there. You know, it's just these sort of sad black and white pictures on this television screen. Those are the fallen officers from Connecticut. Look at those pictures. They all got up to work one day, and they didn't come home. And their loved ones and their children and their spouses, they never got to see them breathe again. Never got a hug, never got a pat on the back, never got a kiss. It's a dangerous, dangerous job. What we're doing here with this bill, when you strip out all the references to the federal agencies, because they will fall by the wayside in any court challenge due to the Supremacy Clause from over 200 years ago as an articulated in McCulloch v. Maryland, and then all the subsequent cases either specifically on the Supremacy Clause or related to the powers they are under, and the way they cannot affect the individuals implementing federal laws for federal agencies, that that is only as prescribed by Congress in Washington, then when that gets taken away. When the powers of the Inspector General get taken away, because they're unenforceable and won't be followed, when you leave the license plate readers, mw/rr 77 okay, we'll set that aside, that's okay, generally. It's a compromise. Maybe not be the best, but it's okay. But what you get left with is highly prescriptive rules on our local law enforcement. What message does that send to the men and women that are thinking about joining police departments throughout the state of Connecticut? I go back to how I started this part of my argument, that five years ago or six years ago, when a different incident took place in Minneapolis, George Floyd, in other areas where people rose up in anger. The human cry from many was, defund the police. And since that time, there's been a chilling effect on law enforcement. Ask any department, large or small, throughout the state of Connecticut. It is hard to recruit officers. It's just not a job that's as appealing now as it may have been a few years ago, for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which is you put your life on the line, and people say for what? We had law enforcement reform here in Connecticut. As part of that, the protections that we afforded the men and women that are on that thin blue line were taken away a little bit, such that you could be exposed to certain liability. Now, I will say this, we haven't had any giant tidal wave Tsunami of lawsuits against law enforcement officers. Thank God. Thank God. But I've had ample information given to me that, unfortunately, on many of these situations out there in our communities, there's a little bit of hesitancy. And it might not even be conscious. It may even be subconscious as to putting yourself on the line, going the extra mile, doing something that might get you exposed to a lawsuit, that is not a criticism of the men and women that put their lives on the line. Absolutely not. It's more of a criticism of how I think we may have gone too far, how I think we did go too far. When we passed our police reform bill, probably about, I think, around five or six years mw/rr 78 ago. And we're living with that. So you may agree with that sentiment, you may not, but I don't think you can disagree by the notion that we're having a much more difficult time recruiting men and women to be on our police departments. And in part, we're having a more difficult time getting people to become corrections officers. Anything that has to do with interpersonal contact where you can be harmed. There's also another factor too that rose up in the pandemic. All of a sudden, technology melded with the exigencies of the pandemic, and people in certain areas were able to work from home or work from a distance. Zoom meetings, things like that, the laptop computer. Now, since we've come out of the pandemic, thank God, a lot of those situations have become much more flexible. You can like it or not like it, depending on if you feel like the person doing the job should be at work during that shift, or whether you're okay with them working from home. That's not my call that has to do with each individual job, who the employer is and do they work for the state of Connecticut, and what our expectations are. I personally don't care if someone works from home if they get the job done. I don't have to see someone in person. And in many respects, as an attorney, I'm able to do a lot of things from afar that I would use to have to go in court. I mean, if it's a short calendar and it has to do with just marking a calendar one way or another, and I can do the argument for five minutes via Zoom. Hey, I don't have to drive an hour and a half to another part of the state to do that? That is much more efficient, much more practical, and better for my client, who has to pay the cost. So that doesn't get undermined, that gets enhanced. Whereas something where interpersonal contact on a human level is absolutely critical, then you really can't do that from afar. And one of the areas, and talking to our latest corrections commissioner, he mw/rr 79 said that a lot of young people say, you know, I'd like to have a job where maybe not every day, but there's an option that I can maybe work a couple days from home. Guess what? You can't do that if you're a corrections officer. 24/7/365, you got to be there. You can't do that as a law enforcement officer if you're doing it on the beat. You can't be in a patrol car from afar, you can't be in a neighborhood walking a beat from afar, you can't be in a bicycle if you're doing community policing from afar. You can't do that. You can maybe do the office stuff, and how that runs all depends on how it's organized, how big it is, and what the chief says, and what the policies are, and all of that. What I'm saying is when you strip this down, the bill that we have before us, it's going to dramatically hobble, more so than ever our ability to attract young men and women, in particular, don't have to be young, could be a career change, but to law enforcement. Because when you take away the federal prescriptions, all you're left with is some heavy-duty prescriptions on all our local law enforcement. Really? That's the message that we want to hold up on high today? That's exactly the wrong message I want to send to my communities. That's exactly the wrong message I want to send to our young people. I want them to know that that is a worthy career choice, and that we highly value anyone, anyone that will go through that incredible amount of training in Connecticut that we require, through the standards set by the police officers' standards and training post, where Chief Fox, remember, from Enfield? It's one of the trainers. I hold those men and women on a pedestal because, gosh darn it, I couldn't do that job. No way. There's no way I could pull a gun on someone if they were holding someone hostage. And that's not like something you see dramatically on some TV show. That can happen anytime you're out there, and it doesn't have to be like a dramatic mw/rr 80 holding hostage. It could be like just a fight situation, where two people are going at it, and you've got to stop that violence then and now. And you have to make split-second decisions that are life and death. And we're going to pass a bill like this that says you are extraordinarily limited in your ability to do your job, even more so than you are now. And by the way, you might be exposed to even further liability, more so than you are now. The ultimate result of this will have nothing positive that will happen in my community. It just won't because we have no ability to effectuate what is going on in Washington. We have a federal delegation, all one party, not my party, but they're down there in Washington to do what they can, and that's their area of authority. We go through exactly elections for them as we do for us, as the people in our towns do for their local elected officials. And it's three areas, and they cooperate, but it is not set up where the lowest area can dictate to the higher area to the higher. And I only say lower and higher, not because of like some vaunted great benefit, like oh, the federal people are so much better than the state people, and the state people are so much better than the local. I come from a philosophy where I think the closer you are to the people, the better. When I go and I talk to my town leaders, they think that we're crazy here in Hartford. Like, what are you doing? Like every time you pass a bill to help us, it hurts us. Like you gave us two choices for car reform, and how much do we lose? Do we lose x, or do we lose two x? And that's the choice you gave us. Or you promised us pilot money at a 100%, and we're lucky if we get 60%. I hear that all the time. And by the way, I hear it all the time from people in this circle about the federal government. No matter which party you're talking about, we're going to put the party aside. mw/rr 81 It's like, what are they doing in Washington? If you have an issue with, like, for example, trade policy, one can point to either party and say that they're inactive or they're doing crazy stuff for whatever benefit they might think they're getting politically. Sometimes, my constituents shake their head and say, what are they doing in that city? And quite often, I shake my head as well. But guess what? Our local constituents sometimes think that about us, and sometimes I do as well, and I do the best I can, but sometimes it doesn't make sense. We all do the best we can. I think the vast majority of us in this circle, in this legislature, want to do the very best we can for our constituents. But passing legislation because it feels good or because it's aspirational. While one can point to that and say that's the world I want to live in, when it comes to laws, we are constrained to live in the real world, where we know quite often how things are going to turn out. I'll give you an example, and then I'll shut my mouth because I probably gone on way longer than I wanted to. But when we were debating the death penalty, that's something that Senator Winfield and I rigorously debated for years and years and years. I think one of the first things that when we met, we were like probably head to head on like some FSB or something like that. And we were sitting there in like the green room, waiting to go on and probably glaring at each other. I hope I didn't glare more than he did, but he came out just at the end of this last judiciary and said, you know, the first time I met Senator Kissel, I didn't really like him. He said that right out there, and I took it in stride, because we've gotten to be very, very good friends in our years working together. I have the utmost respect for Senator Winfield. I have said, as co-chair of the Judiciary Committee, for a guy that's not a lawyer, he could go head-to- head with any lawyer in the state of Connecticut. mw/rr 82 He's that good. He's that good. You got to respect the guy that goes down in submarines, too. That being the case, when we debated the death penalty, we decided, oh, it's only going to be prospective. We're going to eliminate the death penalty and only make it prospective. And I did the research with my legal team in the caucus at the time. Attorney Dicus wasn't there with us at the time, but she would have been right on top of it. And all the legal precedents said, if you do this prospectively, then there is a much greater chance than not that your court system will look to that as the sentiment of the public and basically get rid of the death penalty for everybody on death row. And I stood on top of my soapbox here in the Senate chamber, and I cried to high heaven, and I said, listen, you keep trying to sell this get rid of the death penalty as a prospective bill. I'm telling you, if you do that, it'll be wiped out for everybody on death row. And at that time, the triple homicide in Cheshire had resulted in the death penalty sentences for two gentlemen named Hayes and Komisarjevsky, who were found guilty of perpetrating that most horrific crime, so horrific that at the time Governor Rell stopped the whole parole and probation and all of that, the whole system ground to a halt for over a year while we assessed how could those guys be out there to do such a bad thing. And there were legislators here in the circle, Republicans and Democrats alike, said, I could never support any proposal that would allow those two people off of death row, but I'll support this prospectively. And I said the legal precedent is clear. This is going to wipe out our death penalty statute in Connecticut. Now, how do you feel about that law? That was way then, this is now, and that, to my mind, was clear, but no way as clear as the prospect that this will be undermined, the bill we have this afternoon will be undermined because of the Supremacy Clause and all the legal precedent that mw/rr 83 falls underneath that. And the point of that story is this, guess what? Within a year or two, Supreme Court of the Connecticut came down and said, well, you know, based on legal precedent, even though Connecticut has abolished its death penalty prospectively, we're going to make it apply retroactively because it is symbolic and sentiment of the people of Connecticut. And there's a term, it's like community. There's a whole legal term. I went through all the research, and now I like chucked it out of my head because that was then and this is now, and I'm an old git, and I can't remember everything like I used to. But when I stand here, and I say that we've done the research on the legal precedent and this is what's going to shake out, I'm not just making it up out of whole cloth. And I've seen this story before, and not only have I seen this story before, but I've seen this story much less clearer than today, and it still came to fruition the exact way that was predicted. Doesn't mean we make me a huge legal scholar, but I try to do my homework, and I'm not giving you just a bunch of happy hogwash. Supremacy Clause is real. All the federal precedent is real. Most of this stuff is going to be thrown right out the window as soon as there's a legal challenge, and all that's going to be left is these prescriptions on our local law enforcement. I don't want to be any part of that. That goes in exactly the wrong direction for my constituents, for the direction that I want the state of Connecticut to go, and I want to make law enforcement a wonderful career choice for our men and women who are willing to do all the hard work, put in the training, risk their lives, and know when they give a hug to their children or kiss their spouse, they know they may not be coming back, and they still want to serve. That's the message I want to give to the people of Connecticut. And for those reasons, Madam President, I am not going to be able to support this bill this afternoon. And with that, mw/rr 84 Madam President, I would like to yield to Senator Sampson.
Senator Sampson, do you accept the yield?
Madam President?
Senator Duff.
Thank you. Would the Senate -- would the chamber stand at ease for a moment?
We'll stand at ease.
Thank you. Madam President, I'd be happy to yield to Senator Sampson.
Senator Sampson, do you accept the yield?
Yes, ma'am. Good to see you up there, Madam President. I want to start by aligning my comments with the good Senator Kissel. He did a very, very good job of kind of getting to the heart of what this bill is about. And that is, and my words, not his, but I would call it a Trojan horse anti-police bill if I was going to characterize it to someone in a short few sentences. But I really want to mw/rr 85 especially align myself with his comments in favor of our local and state police and law enforcement in the state, and the law enforcement agencies that protect us nationally. He mentioned the DEA and the ATF, and so on. These are folks that put a uniform on day in and day out, and they keep the people of Connecticut and America safe. And it cannot be overstated just how important they are to maintaining law and order and making sure we live in a peaceful and prosperous nation. And when there are proposals to change our laws, to undermine our laws, that make police vulnerable or less capable at doing their jobs, we are risking not only the individual safety of those officers, but all of us. And that is, to me, the reason why this bill, frankly, is extremely offensive. I don't use that term lightly. And that's because I guess I'm a little frustrated. When I was first elected back in 2010, I think the biggest surprise that I had was to walk into the House Chamber at the time and to discover that we were debating policy in good faith. That there were people of both parties there, passionate about what they believe in, but we were getting up and making the case for our positions, but we were doing it with respect, we were doing it with diplomacy, and an understanding that everyone had a right to speak, to speak their mind, to make their case for what they believe in, and we stuck to the policy. And of course, there was partisan politics going on then as there is now, but the partisan politics kind of stayed outside the building. It very rarely entered into the building, and I think the leadership in both parties made a point of saying, you know what? That's for the election stuff out there. Let's not bring this really divisive rhetoric and maybe imperfect truths into our chamber. Inside the building, where we make laws, we're doing something much more important, which is we're representing our constituents. We're not here just mw/rr 86 making political hay and trying to move our agenda and argue with the other side. We're here representing our constituents. We're the face, we're the voice of the people that elected us. And we should behave in a way that respects that. So I get very upset. I get frustrated when I see bills come to this chamber that are wholly partisan and political in nature. And this is right up there at the very top of partisan and political bills. As Senator Kissel laid out, most of this bill is patently unconstitutional. I think if you grabbed every member of this chamber. And again, it's not right of me to put words in people's mouths. But if you grabbed everyone off the record, I think they'd have a hard time explaining how this does not run afoul of the Connecticut or the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution. And just for the edification of people who don't really understand what that is, it's very straightforward. We have different levels of government. We have a municipal town government that is established as a direct result of the state, declaring the existence of those towns. And they are giving a set of parameters to operate within. And the states, when we first formed our union as the United States of America, determined to maintain our individual state governments. That's why we're here in Hartford at the Connecticut state capital, writing our own laws and our own policies to govern the state of Connecticut. But at the time that happened, we also established a national government, and we gave the national government some responsibilities. And one of those very, very specific responsibilities, along with our national defense, we're not in here deciding whether we're going to go to war or we're going to engage in any military actions because we're a state government and we don't have a role to play there. That's been transferred to the federal government at mw/rr 87 the establishment of our great nation. And so has the subject of immigration. And since the beginning of our country, it's been understood that immigration policy falls under the realm of the federal government. That is why there is a Customs and Border Patrol as a federal agency and not a state agency. That's why all of our immigration-related federal agencies are federal because they are in charge of the subject of immigration, customs, citizenship, and so on. It's the United States, not the state of Connecticut, that makes immigration policy. And as a result, we do not have the power to govern the activities of federal agents or federal agencies when it comes to immigration law. What's so ironic about this is that this bill has been described to me by some as an extension of the Trust Act. And that's not true in the least. Because let me explain something. The Trust Act is a policy that basically tries to tie the hands of local and state police. And now, every state official in Connecticut so that they cannot engage with the federal authorities on the subject of immigration. And the reason why the Trust Act was born, created, invented by the majority was because they knew they couldn't do this. They knew they didn't have the power to tell the federal government what to do on the subject of immigration. The most they could do was try and hamstring our local and state officials when they interact with those federal officials. That's what the Trust Act is. Terrible policy, mind you, because that policy in and of itself has prevented federal immigration authorities from being able to apprehend and deport numerous criminals that have made the lives of Connecticut residents and those around the country, frankly, less safe. Before I get into the language of the bill, I just want to talk about a few more things. I want to start first, by talking about the title. That's where I had originally intended to go. mw/rr 88 The title of this bill is AN ACT CONCERNING DEMOCRACY AND GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY. And it might, like, seem like a small thing for me to be arguing over the title of the bill, but titles of bills is something that really gets me going in this place. In fact, every year, I put a bill proposal in myself to allow individual lawmakers to be able to challenge the titles of bills when they feel they're unfair. This is about as unfair as it gets. Because this bill is not about democracy and government accountability. And I resent, and I want to repeat, I resent the idea that at the end of the day, when I vote no on this, that somehow someone's going to say Senator Sampson voted against democracy and government accountability. Because I'm the government accountability guy. I'm here to hold the government accountable. You can go around this building and ask my fellow lawmakers what made them come and run for office to come up here. But if you ask me, the answer I'm going to give you is I came here to hold this place accountable. Because I didn't like what our state government was doing. I still don't. But this bill is not about government accountability. This bill is about a few things. The first thing it's about is a distraction. This is a distraction from what's actually going on in Connecticut. My constituents back home are scratching their heads today, wondering why we're talking about this ICE business and federal agents and all that, because they're not asking for this. My email box fills up every day. I don't have a single soul asking me about this. They're asking me why their taxes are so high, why their electric bills are so high, why it's so unaffordable to live in Connecticut. What are you guys doing to help with property tax relief? My municipal leaders are asking the same thing. What are you guys going to do to help us? We're going to get killed with these revaluations and the constant mandates coming from Hartford. mw/rr 89 That's what the people care about. They don't care about this. This is the majority distracting from their record of being in power for decades, holding every lever of power in the state of Connecticut, and failing on all the levels that I just described. This is a distraction. It shifts the debate away from affordability, taxes, energy costs, and onto ICE and national politics. The majority is legislating national headlines instead of solving actual problems. I think for the majority, they feel comfortable attacking the president and the national Republicans and capitalizing on what's happening in the news media and the news coming out of Minneapolis. I'm sure that's very comfortable for them. It's in vogue for them. It's something that is fashionable and politically convenient. It's probably even emotionally satisfying to get up and talk that way. But it is a distraction nonetheless. This bill is also a strike-all amendment. I just can't let it go without mentioning it because this is a bill that properly went before the Judiciary Committee, had a public hearing in a different format, and also because I spent the entire day yesterday preparing for this debate, looking at an entirely different bill. I took a lot of time with a highlighter, going through the bill, circling things, writing comments in the margin, remember to ask about this. And then I show up here this morning ready to go, prepared to debate this bill, and guess what? Senator, there's going to be a strike-all amendment. And now the bill has 15 sections instead of 12. And maybe it's not as bad as some other strike-all amendments that entirely change every word of the bill, because I think most of its probably intact, although it's a bit rearranged. But it's not the way we're supposed to do things. mw/rr 90 The way we're supposed to do things is we're supposed to put the bill in front of the public, and they're supposed to comment on that, and then we come in and vote on it. We're not supposed to let them comment on a bill, and then we never vote on that one. We create a new bill out of whole cloth moments before we vote on it. And we provide the minority with as little time as possible to actually prepare and be ready for such a debate. It's not the way we should be doing things. Before we get too far into the details of the bill, I just want to make a couple of things very clear. I don't need a lecture from the majority about civil rights. I feel like watching the press conference that the majority held earlier. And some of the comments that I've heard discussing this bill since it's been floating around this building is that somehow they want to take the mantle of defending the individuals of the state of Connecticut against the evil federal agents that are rounding up people and locking them up. I want to just say very clearly that I am the very first person to jump in the way if that I believe that some innocent civilian is being harassed, targeted, or abused by any of our government officials or law enforcement. I believe very strongly in civil liberties, the rule of law, due process, et cetera. But what's happening here is that there is a manufactured outrage. Certainly, things that have happened in other states, like Minneapolis, are concerning. But even those instances, we don't have the facts yet. Those items are under investigation. We do not have any convictions. We do not have any documented evidence to suggest that any particular individual was at fault. And even if it turns out that way, and I would condemn the people responsible, even if that's the case, that is not the policy of the federal government. It's not the policy of the president of the United States to attack and round up innocent people. He's been as explicit as anybody you can mw/rr 91 imagine, and I have been as well, that I will support the president and our federal immigration officials as long as they are sticking to prosecuting criminal aliens and removing them from our streets to keep people safe in America. Beyond that, I'm on the other side of the issue, protecting and defending the innocent. The fact of the matter is that there is an entire news media out there that is stirring things up and creating this false reality. But as I said from the outset, I don't want to bring politics into this room. In here, I want to talk about truth. I want to talk about what's really happening and the substance of the policy that is before us. I do not believe in weaponizing civil rights law like this bill does. And expanding government power under the argument that somehow you are holding the government in check. Because this bill does the exact opposite. Madam President, I want to ask a few questions to the proponent if I could.
Please proceed, sir.
Thank you very much. Just looking at this section by section, the first section of the bill, from what I can tell, creates a new civil cause of action. Basically, it's a mechanism that will allow federal officers to be sued in a state court. So I'm curious. Why are we creating a new cause of action specifically targeting federal officers? Through you, Madam President.
Thank you. Senator Winfield.
mw/rr 92 Yes. Thank you, Madam President. Madam President, I don't know how to answer that because that would require, say, some things that aren't here in the room with us right now. Things that have happened outside of the direct conversation we would have about what's happened in Connecticut, in some ways, but there are some things that have happened in Connecticut. Look, the reality is, whether we want to create a box for me to operate in during this debate or not, there have been some things that have happened in this country. There have been ways in which certain federal agents have operated that we want to make sure it doesn't happen here, and it should happen here. There's recourse for the citizens of the state for violation of their rights. So what we are trying to do here is make sure that when there are violations. And I just want to be clear because I heard during, both of the good senators’ discussions at least to this point, that we're just out here making the job more difficult for police officers, and because we're going to strip away all of the federal stuff and we're going to just apply this to the officers -- police officials we have here in the state. But what we're talking about here is when they have violated someone's rights, that's not part of their job. Right? So we're not saying, you go about your job. You're doing a good job. We're saying you violated someone's rights under the Constitution of the United States, which we say is what we're here to defend. And I say when that happens, there should be a way to deal with that. Now, since I have the microphone now. There's also this conversation about the Supremacy Clause, and what happens when federal agents are doing their job. It is not their job to violate the rights of anyone. They have constitutional rights which should never be violated. I would assert that most federal actors aren't doing that. I would assert that most police mw/rr 93 officers aren't doing that. I've asserted this for every bill I've ever done, and we know what people think about what I've said versus what they believe I've said. I'm not pointing at Senator Sampson. I just want to be clear. But the point of this is to protect people, what we've all said, and to make sure that when something goes awry, they have the ability to get into a court and deal with that. And it's not a violation of the Supremacy Clause, though I know we're going to hear that over and over again. And it's not a violation of the Supremacy Clause for a lot of reasons. One of which is that what you're doing here is allowing people to defend their constitutional rights. And there may be federal policy, and there may be federal law, but the supreme law of this land is the Constitution of the United States through you, Madam President.
Thank you. Senator Sampson.
Thank you, Madam President. I appreciate the answer, and I take the gentleman at his word. And in a vacuum, looking at some of the language in this bill, I don't disagree with the concepts behind it. I disagree with the fact that we have any say over the activities and actions of federal agents acting in their capacity as immigration officials for the federal government. That's prima facie law. That is exactly what is on the books right now. There's little argument over it. Senator Kissel mentioned several cases. I know the most recent one, I think, is Arizona versus the United States. It's been played out many, many times in the past. When states try and enter into the realm of regulating immigration, they get turned over. They just do. So, attempting to do it here only has one purpose in my mind, and that is a mw/rr 94 political purpose. That is my objection, is that this bill is here before us to make a political statement. It's not a legitimate policy statement. It's a political statement. It will be overturned in court, and all that has to happen is that the majority gets to go out and say, look at us. We stood up against Trump, and we stood up against ICE, and those Republicans, they voted against it. Blah blah blah. It's a phony argument. It's a phony argument because the fact of the matter is I'm standing here willing to defend citizens' rights also and due process, and hold people accountable as much as my colleagues, including Senator Winfield, all day long. There's no argument about that. People that are committing wrongdoing, whether they're doing it in the name of Republicans or Democrats or Trump or anyone else, should be held accountable. Period. End of story. I don't know anybody who says otherwise. Nobody wants a king. But at the end of the day, that is not the policy of this administration or that agency, and I don't believe that it's something that is happening on the ground carte blanche everywhere, much less in Connecticut. That's not to say that you couldn't point to a specific example here and there. You're talking about tens of thousands of interactions in law enforcement. Mistakes are going to be made. Those mistakes should be held to account. But that is much different than trying to create some sort of illusion that there's some sort of terrible, heinous policy afoot, because I don't believe that's what the case is. The section that we're referring to in the bill is all about creating a system to sue federal officers in court, which is something you cannot do. Can I just ask, through you, Madam President, is there any projection about the number of new lawsuits that might occur, or how much this is going to come at a cost to taxpayers? Because obviously, now what's mw/rr 95 going to happen is if we are going to start suing different law enforcement entities for actions accounted for in this bill, that's going to end up driving up costs. Will municipalities be responsible because they cooperated with ICE authorities? Will the state be responsible because something happens on their watch? Will taxpayers in the state or the towns have to pay the bill? And how much? Do we have any predictions? Through you?
That's a lot of questions, Senator. Senator Winfield, we can take them in seriatim or all at once. Your pleasure.
Madam President, it's fine. This bill isn't expanding, causes of action against this. That's not what we're trying to do here. And I think Senator Sampson started off talking about what the point is here. Right? So it is to make sure that there's a way to get those federal actors who, yes, may be rare, who act outside of what their duties are, who act under what we would call the color of law, looking like they're operating under the law but really doing things they're not supposed to do. So this is one, not something that I've figured out what exactly it's going to cost. Folks have tried to do that before. They tried to do that with police accountability, telling me that there'd be all these cases. It's just none so far, six years later. But this is about the federal agents who are operating in a way that we don't want them to operate. And I'm hearing that it's not the policy of the federal government. I'm glad that it's not the policy, which should say to most folks, for the most part, this is not going to do all that much because there won't be that many opportunities. mw/rr 96 But when those opportunities arise, it should. And folks will tell you can't sue a federal actor, which happens all the time, by the way. Post office, someone's driving a postal truck, and they're reckless, they find themselves in court. I don't know why people think the federal Supremacy Clause necessarily means that you can't do some of the stuff we're talking about. I mean, you know, you want to talk about cases, there's Bivens v. Six and then the cases that fall after Westfall and the Westfall Act. You know, they talk about there's a loophole in it. You know what that loophole is? The constitution. You can't violate the rights of folks. And, yes, people can find themselves in court because you have to have a way for the Constitution to matter. Otherwise, what you would actually be setting up is a system in which federal actors could do whatever they want inside of a state, and the laws of the state don't matter. And I don't think anybody who says they support the Constitution want that. Through you, Madam President.
Thank you. Senator Sampson.
Thank you very much, Madam President. I appreciate the comments by the good chairman, who I have tremendous respect for. And I will address his comments first, and then we'll get back to the question I asked, which is that no one is suggesting that the Supremacy Clause means that federal agents can do whatever they please inside the state of Connecticut. The Supremacy Clause, as I described earlier, says that the federal government has supremacy on certain policy issues, including our borders and immigration. mw/rr 97 So when they are acting as officials regulating our border or immigration, they are acting under federal law. The state does not have the ability to interfere with that law or to change that law, or to tell them otherwise. And that is precisely what Section 1 of this bill does. Section 1 of this bill creates an entirely new cause of action that allows a mechanism to sue federal agents for performing their duties as federal immigration agents. That's what it does. The issue I have is I don't know whether I should be happy about the response I got from the good chairman, that if nothing's happening, that means that it's not going to end up costing the towns a lot of money because of the lawsuits that might come, or that it might cost them a lot. I don't know where to go with that. So which is it? Is this a good policy that is going to cause more lawsuits to hold these federal agents, acting outside their role defined by Connecticut, not the federal government, accountable? Is a good thing, and we're going to sue them, and we're going to collect damages? Or is it a bad thing because it's going to end up costing taxpayers? Through you.
Thank you, Senator Winfield.
Well, Madam President, I did answer that question, and I said that this doesn't create any new liability from municipality. I think I said that. So that is an answer to the question. May not be the answer that's desired, and I get that, but that is the answer to the question. But I don't think the answer -- I don't think the paradigm is as simple as one might put it. Is it a good thing because it does this or a bad thing because it does that? Similar to what I said at the time of the work we were doing on the police accountability bill. Right? mw/rr 98 It's not good because a bunch of police officers would get sued. It's not bad because they don't. It's good because should something happen in which I don't know when or if that's going to happen, should something happen, the citizens have a right to access the courts and potentially find relief. That's what makes it good. And I think when we try to put it into a specific box of good is this and bad is that, we forget that this is not, and I know it's been characterized by some in this way. This is not an attempt to wring all the money out of anybody. This is not what we're trying to that's not what I'm trying to do. What we're trying to do is make sure that the people who live in this state, on what probably would be one of the worst days of their life, should their federal constitutional rights be violated, also know that we thought ahead and protected those rights by putting together a bill that does exactly what this does. And I would be remiss if I don't say that say this because I think some people are going to be, when are you going to get to it? When the voters taken out, ask it to be taken by roll, Madam President.
Thank you. Senator Sampson.
Sampson. Thank you very much, Madam President. And, thank you again for the response from the chairman. And I don't want to go tit for tat or, come across that, I'm arguing with the good chairman. He has the right to his opinions and his beliefs about what is going on in this bill. For me, it's pretty clear. Our federal -- no. Let me rephrase that. Our constitutionally protected rights are just that. That's what they are. They're constitutionally protected already. mw/rr 99 Okay. So if there is a violation of someone's due process today, right now, forget this bill or any other. If that bill or any other. If that happens, guess what? A lawyer can go into a courtroom and argue in defense of someone's civil rights if they're being violated. If someone's due process rights are being violated, that can happen. You do not need to pass a new law. The constitution is the constitution, and our rights are already protected. You don't need a new law to make sure someone's rights are protected, which is the answer that I heard. And that's not what Section 1 does. Section 1 creates a new mechanism for a civil cause of action. That's what it does. It's an entirely new language. It's 30 lines. Not only does it create that new cause of action, it also creates a lengthy list of potential awards as far as damages. I believe that is going to create an instrument of encouraging lawsuits, which I don't think should be the goal. Let's move on to Section 2. Because I think that we have to take this bill as a whole. Step one establishes the cause of action. Number two is all about the attorney general's authority. And I'm reading this to say that there's a new addition to a current statute that now provides that the attorney general of the state of Connecticut will have this expanded authority to now investigate, intervene, or bring civil or administrative action. On and on. I won't read the whole paragraph. Based on someone who engages in a practice or has established a policy. And I'm just going to ask right out of the gate. I think I know what that means, but I want to ask the good chairman what is meant by or has established a policy. What kind of policy through you?
Thank you, Senator Winfield. mw/rr 100
I'm sorry, Madam President. I was trying to keep up with that. I hadn't gotten away. Where are you in the bill?
Senator Sampson.
Through you, Madam President. I am on line 40 in Section 2.
Thank you, Senator Winfield.
I think it's language that clarifies that if there is a policy that functions in the way -- in a way that the following section -- not section, sub one, sub two, forward, would operate, that would apply to any policies that established in addition to actions that have been taken.
Thank you. Senator Sampson.
Thank you very much, Madam President. So this new addition and power that the attorney general has goes from simply being able to investigate, intervene, or act when there is a pattern of conduct. Now, he can act based on the establishment of a policy. And it goes on to add additional language, which I think is actually quite key to this, in lines 59 and 64, I noticed that there are words that have not been included up to this point, mw/rr 101 where it says, other persons. And without getting into a big debate about the difference in what type of constitutionally protected rights individuals have inside the confines of these United States, I do believe there is a dispute over whether or not folks that are in the country unlawfully have the same level of rights as someone who is a US citizen. And I believe that this section, Section 2, and the paragraphs that I just mentioned, the one starting 59 and the one starting 62, are designed to expand into an area of providing additional constitutional protections that are not in the constitution, for other persons, which would be people not in the country lawfully. Am I correct about that, Madam President?
Thank you. Senator Winfield.
Thank you, Madam President. And as the good senator says, this is a subject that is being debated. But to this point, the way that, that constitution has been interpreted is that the constitution applies to the folks who are here, not just citizens. And so, while -- and I can think this is a perspective thing. While some might take the argument, I sat around all day fascinated by the arguments at the Supreme Court, not too long ago, while some might take the argument, being made by one side, and believe that that's where we're going to wind up. I think the way that we have operated. The way that the constitution has currently been interpreted would say that we're not expanding anything, but making sure that we cover all who have been covered to this point through you, Madam President.
Thank you, Senator Sampson. mw/rr 102
Thank you very much, Madam President. And again, I appreciate the answer. But what I would say about that is that it was very similar to the previous response I got, which is that we're not adding anything. We're not doing anything. We're not creating a cause of action. All we're doing is ensuring the constitutional rights of individuals. And again, I'm going to repeat. If that was merely all that was going on, there'd be no bill. The constitutional rights already exist. Citizen, non- citizen, whatever the circumstances are, if you have constitutionally protected rights, you can make an argument for them. Right now, you don't need a Connecticut bill, which will ultimately be found unconstitutional for violation of the Supremacy Clause, to try and enforce something that already exists. And I also don't believe that's what's happening here. I believe that what's happening here is that we're trying to expand the protections to folks that are not citizens, unlike our current statutory framework. And I believe this is another piece of this larger puzzle of this 15-section bill, where the first 12 sections are all designed to create a mechanism that will allow a course of action to occur for a couple of reasons. One, to make a strong political argument condemning the president of the United States and federal law enforcement officials. And I can't go by without saying it once again that if there are some situations that have arisen around this nation in Minneapolis or elsewhere, those are one-off circumstances. And those things should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. I'm not going to defend bad behavior from anyone. I'm not going to defend any overreach of any government entity, whether they're in my party or not. I'm the first guy to be like, look, the government should be held accountable. mw/rr 103 So to me, that's a specious argument completely. Section 3 is another interesting section of the bill because this one intends to redefine something that we have in our current law, which is the notion of peace officers. And now what it will do is it will add federal agents. And by the way, I just want to point out that nowhere in this bill is the word ICE or immigration. What the heck is the name? What does ICE even stand for? I forget. That's right. That's right. That's not mentioned anywhere in the bill. Okay? The framework of the bill is inclusive of any federal law enforcement. So we're talking about DEA agents, ATF agents. We're talking about even IRS agents, presumably. Maybe we can let it stay. I'm just kidding. The thing is that section three redefines peace officer for the purpose of including federal agents. And now, what it will do it will allow the state to take over investigations where they had no authority before. Can I ask through you, Madam President, what is the purpose of allowing the state of Connecticut to interfere with a completely federal investigation on a subject that the state has no authority in, through you?
Thank you, Senator Winfield.
Madam President, I think that the state does have some authority. It happened within the bounds of the state. There are laws that deal with those things. And, yes, this does deal with federal actors, but no federal actors should be violating people's constitutional rights. And in terms of being able to get into the court and defend your rights right now, that's just not how it works. I've mentioned Bivens mw/rr 104 and then Westfall, and I'm not going to get into all the specifics of those cases. But the thrust of that is that the Supreme Court actually said, hey, people should be able to, when their rights are violated, get into a court and defend the fact that their rights were violated. And then there were people who didn't like that. The federal government didn't really like that. There are actors who wanted to have more immunity. And so we created this whole hodgepodge of laws and cases in which it is really difficult to get into a court. It's really difficult. And the loophole in all of that happens to be that whatever they've tried to do to limit this, they just can't figure out quite how to limit it enough that the supreme law of the land, the Constitution, doesn't prevail. Right? And so what we've said is, yeah, because that matters. And that is what we're doing here to make sure that at the state level, where it's very difficult to get into a federal court to defend your rights, you have the opportunity to do it here in the state through you, Madam President.
Thank you. Senator Sampson.
Thank you very much, Madam President. I just want people who are listening to recognize that I'm actually listening to my colleague here. I'm paying attention to every word that he says, and I'm trying to understand his perspective and really get to the heart of what's going on here. And I will say that I'm completely sympathetic to what was just described, which is the notion that there may be efforts on behalf of some government entities, frankly, to basically block or restrict the imposition that's a bad word to use when you're talking about the constitution. mw/rr 105 But the use of the constitutional framework in some circumstances because it makes it inconvenient for law enforcement. And I can certainly respect and desire to protect against that. I'm with you a 100% in the concept. But what we have to remember here is that this bill has no influence over any of that. Any attempt to rewrite those that implementation of those obstructive clauses in law is not going to prevail in a state level policy. I would strongly encourage the majority to go talk to their federal delegation. And go to work making these same cases on a federal level. If you think that we need to change the rule of law when it comes to law enforcement and federal law enforcement, and how it is applied to make sure constitutional protections are stronger and that they're preserved properly, then do that. But trying to write a state law that does that, it doesn't work. We don't have the power to do that. I want to be as polite as I can, but one of the things that frustrates me about this place more than anything, in particular serving in the minority, is that I witness frankly -- again, I this is going to come around as bad, but the arrogance of the majority that they think that they could do so many things beyond what you can do. You cannot rewrite federal law. I'm sorry that you don't like the results of the most recent federal election and who's in control of Congress, or who the president is. I'm sorry you don't like that. I didn't like it much before this most recent election either, but I didn't go try and rewrite state law to fly in the face of federal supremacy. I didn't do that, because I recognize that more important than me or my views or who the president is, I recognize that the rule of law is what's paramount, and that we have to respect it, that we have to respect what's written down. That we have to honor the notion of our principles as Americans, and the way our founding documents were crafted, and the laws mw/rr 106 that rights that are protected by our founding documents. This is a political attempt to undermine policy implemented under federal law. If that policy was actually a threat to constitutional protections, I guarantee you, there would be prominent court cases out there that would be debating it ad nauseam on a day-to-day basis. Let's talk about the next sections. Looks like four and five are more or less conforming. There might be a few things to talk about there, but I want to keep it moving. 6. Section 6. This is about masks. I find this ironic. This is going to be a policy that says that federal agents can no longer. And again, this is one of those policies that will end up after the Supremacy Clauses brought up in some courtroom somewhere. This is something that will end up interfering with the ability of local and state police officers to function. This is a restriction on officers wearing masks, facial coverings, and putting requirements on them to make sure that they have a visible badge and name tag. All of that sounds really, really good until you start to recognize that sometimes there are sting operations and there are tactics involved and there are different aspects of criminal justice and enforcement that might preclude some of these things on a day-to-day basis. I also want to say something that is unbelievably ironic about this bill, which is that every year since I've been here, including this one, we have had numerous bills come to this chamber about protecting the identity of various state employees, whether they be people that work for the attorney general's office or college professors or teachers. And I completely understand my colleagues when they come forward, and they say, look, you know, the world is dangerous today, and we need to protect certain people and everything else. mw/rr 107 But to do all that and to make the case for that and then to come here and to bring out a bill that's going to tell us that what's a good idea to make sure that the federal enforcement agents that you are vilifying on a day-to-day basis should not have the same protection. The fact is that those folks are wearing masks because their very lives are in danger because of the political climate in this country, because there is an entire political party and a national machine trying to undermine the efforts of the national immigration enforcement, that's going on. That's what's happening. So those people need to protect themselves. They are in grave danger, frankly, just for doing their job. There were ICE agents, brand new on the job. I think one of them was something like a 22-year-old girl. She was murdered in cold blood just because she was an ICE agent. She hadn't done anything to anyone. She didn't deprive anyone of their rights. She wasn't in Minneapolis. So these law enforcement agents, and I'll extend it beyond, obviously, ICE. The local police back in my hometown of Wuket, the state cop that pulled me over the other day, nice guy. They go to work every day at risk of not coming home. Senator Kissel said this so eloquently. I hate to even say it again because he did such a good job, but it is true. These people put on the uniform in the morning, and they go to work, and they do a job that is so hard because they don't know on any given day what they're going to run into. What chaos is waiting for them? And maybe it'll be an average day, and nothing happens. But for that young ICE agent, guarantee you she didn't predict that was going to happen. And just cause she was wearing a specific uniform. And this bill says, no. We're going to make sure that you are made public to everyone. We're going to put a target right on you. That's what this bill does. That's what Section 6 is about. It's about putting a target mw/rr 108 on people. Through you, Madam President, would you agree with me that this makes those officers more vulnerable?
Senator Winfield.
Thank you, Madam President. I don't know how I could agree with that. I think if the question were, is it possible that anyone who's wearing a uniform and doing the job of a law enforcement officer might find themselves on a certain day in a place where they never wanted to be, experiencing things they don't want to experience, including and up to assaults and potentially death? Well, that's part of the job as suggested. Do I think this makes them less safe? No. I think we could talk all we want about this, or some agenda to go after ICE. I think ICE, the way it is operated, has caused people to have a perspective on ICE. Maybe some people don't want to say that, but I'll say it. The way that they have operated it has caused people to have a perspective on them. Regardless of all of that, we don't have a secret police in the United States of America. And when you can cover up your name badge and your face and no one knows who you are, that's what you are. So I guess the question really should be, what do we want in the United States of America? And if they're bad actors who go after and do things to ICE, they should be prosecuted and put in jail or whatever the appropriate punishment is. That doesn't mean we create a system of secret police. That doesn't mean we say they can go forward and operate in however they want because there's nothing the states can do. Although, I just pointed to the law that says that we the laws that say that we can. mw/rr 109 Maybe for some people, it is a political thing. Maybe for some people, they have a -- thing about ICE, and they want to go after ICE. But the person standing here defending this bill is concerned about the citizens of the state of Connecticut. And what happens to them when either ICE or the police, because you don't have a whole history, do things they are not supposed to do up to and including the violation of people's civil rights. And if we say there's nothing we could do, I'm not sure what we're doing here through you, Madam President.
Thank you. Senator Sampson.
Thank you very much, Madam President. I appreciate my colleagues so much, and I appreciate his passion. But I have to tell you, I could not more strenuously disagree with the categorization of any group of people based on their job. It's worse, in fact, maybe even than generalizing people based on their race, their religion, their complexion. It's insane. Why would we say we're concerned about the way ICE is behaving, so maybe the way we ought to treat ICE? ICE is not some kind of cohesive one entity. There are a bunch of individual Americans doing a job. A very difficult job. And I would argue that most of them are doing a very good job. Does that mean that I'm going to defend the bad actions of a few? No. And anyone who tries to put that on me, you're doing it in error. But the fact of the matter is to make a categorical statement that ICE should be held responsible for the actions of other ICE agents. That's like saying somebody should be held responsible because somebody of the same religion committed an act. That's absurd, Madam President. It's fundamentally flawed, and it goes against everything that we mw/rr 110 believe in America, which is that we protect the rights of individuals. Everything in our entire foundational system is about putting the aspect and recognition of groups as a separate thing that is secondary to respecting the rights of individual people. Individuals have rights in America, not groups. And we do not categorically condemn people based on their race, or their religion, or their job. We don't. If you want to condemn the policies of ICE, go ahead. But to suggest that somehow, what has gone on in this country over the last several years, ever since, I think, the George Floyd incident, where there's a movement to defund and vilify police officers, and now to vilify agents of the federal government simply doing the job that they were hired to do, which is to protect the safety of American citizens against criminal aliens. And we're going to talk more about criminal aliens, monsters, frankly, that have harmed innocent American civilians in a few minutes. But to suggest that all of that has not put ICE agents in a position where they need to fear for their very lives because of their identities being exposed is absurd to me. That young lady was shot in cold blood because she was wearing an ICE uniform. Where have we strayed from our path? And we could think that somehow there's any justification to blaming all ICE agents for the behavior agents for the behavior of a few magnified under the microscope of national media attention and rhetoric coming from a political party and a bunch of people bent on their hatred of the president. I get it. But I will never stoop that low. When I debate my political opponents, I do it based on the substance and the merit of the policies that we're putting forward. I don't categorize them. I don't vilify them. I do not misrepresent even their point of view on things. We should be above that, which is why I said we shouldn't be bringing that kind of mw/rr 111 political garbage into our Senate chamber. The next section of the bill is all about creating protected areas. It also does something that I think is very, very sneaky, which is this notion of judicial warrants. What this bill does basically is it says now that law enforcement officials, federal law enforcement officials, are no longer allowed -- excuse me, to do their job effectively if they're doing it on any property that is government property. And I know that some of my colleagues are going to talk about this at some greater length later, but that also means that, like, you can't have the immigration officials show up at a prison, for example, to take custody of someone. It's an absurdity. And some have said that, well, we want those folks to serve the crime that they did. So do I. But on the day that they've served their sentence, this bill would suggest that somehow that person should just be left to go back into Connecticut society. And they shouldn't be susceptible to immigration agents intercepting them. But the other part of this, I think, is even more concerning, and that is this notion of a judicial warrant. Anyone who understands our national immigration policy recognizes that these immigration officials do not rely on judicial warrants to do their job. This is the same debate we had during the Trust Act conversation. Fact of the matter is that they are empowered to detain people suspected of being in the country illegally, particularly if they have criminal activity and criminal backgrounds. They have that power. They do not need a judicial warrant. They will use something called an administrative warrant. And I understand that there are folks in this room that would like to change that and require a judicial warrant. But guess what? You don't serve in Congress. mw/rr 112 You don't serve in Congress, you can't change it. If you want to change it, run for Congress. ICE agents need an administrative warrant, and putting it in this bill to suggest that they need a judicial warrant is not going to work because the very first time that is cited, the Supremacy Clause will be brought forward in that courtroom, and that part will be struck down. I could ask a few questions, but I don't know if it's really necessary. I want to get to what the heart of this bill is about for me. I know what it's about for the majority. This is all about making some sort of strong statement condemning the president and condemning the misbehaving ICE agents and things like that. And I get it. That might be a convenient political argument to be making in an election year, and it might be very inconvenient for me to try and defend common sense to say, look, let's prosecute the bad guys, but let's not go ahead and throw the whole baby out with the bath water. Let's suggest that we still need to have immigration enforcement in this country, and that we should try and stand by our law enforcement officials unless they're doing wrong. I think that's a pretty common-sense argument. I'm just saddened that it doesn't get more airtime because I think that argument got as much as much airtime as the constant vilification of some law enforcement officials that are trying to do their job. Maybe we might have officials that are trying to do their job, maybe we might have a more reasonable discussion. But for me, my immediate reaction upon hearing some of my colleagues talk about ICE as if they're such tremendous villains, and about how this is a terrible thing, and conflating the notion of immigrants with illegal immigrants, and ignoring the fact that a lot of the people that we're talking about are extreme criminals. What's about for me? And what's so important to me about this debate are the victims. mw/rr 113 Where are the victims of criminal aliens that have harmed innocent citizens in this bill? Nowhere. They are forgotten. They are ignored. They do not exist. I think the majority would like to pretend there is no such thing and that every person that ICE picks up is somehow some angel, which is why, anytime there's some mishap, there's some opportunity because ICE picked up someone, a school student who had a different name, or there was some typo or something like that. Boom. Let's run to the cameras. Let's make sure we highlight this incredible atrocity. But you know something? They never bring it up when they actually bag someone who is a rapist or a murderer, or a killer. They never bother. We never hear about that. There are people, were people, that are dead now, no longer with us. Parents who lost their children. There are husbands who've lost their wives. There are kids that lost their parents because of criminal aliens in this country, bent on doing harm. And before I go any further, and I feel stupid having to do this all the time, but I got to make sure that no one misrepresents what I'm talking about. I believe America is a land of immigration and freedom, and it should welcome as many people from all over the world as possible, but we have to do that through a process. Everybody knows, I just got married a couple of days ago. I married a woman who came here from another country lawfully. She had to wait in line, she had to go through the process, she had to pay a bunch of fees to do so, but she came here the right way. And I get it. Even when we're talking about people that don't go through that process, people that cross the border because they're looking at their life in Mexico or someplace else and saying, you know what? I want the best opportunity I can have, and America still represents that. I kind of get it. I totally do. I'm not defending crossing the border illegally, but I get it. mw/rr 114 I'm not hostile to people who want to live in America for a better life. I'm certainly not anti- immigrant. And I noticed when these arguments are always made in the press or by political entities, they always forget the word illegal when we're talking about policies that are specifically about illegal aliens and not just plain immigrants. So that's my aside to remind you, I'm an American like everybody else. All of my relatives came here in the 20s from all corners of the world. I got relatives from Greece, from Italy. They came here looking for a better life. How could I ever be against that? But what I am against are gangs and drug dealers and human traffickers and people that want to prey not just on Americans, but also on their own neighbors and friends from people from their own country. This is my objection to the Trust Act, to begin with. The Trust Act was sold to this legislature way back in 2013 as a mechanism to say, well, you know what, Senator? What we need to do is we need to create a mechanism for people not fear for being deported, but we want them to be able to come forward in case there's a problem. That was never an issue. That was never an issue. The New Haven Police Department is not going to be like, oh, madam illegal immigrant, since you've called us to report the drug dealer down the hall, we're going to call the immigration services and have them come get you. That never happened. You could report things anonymously, for crying out loud. That was an absurdity even when it was told to us then. But what it did is, it created a mechanism where we protected the criminal element in those neighborhoods. And what did they do? They preyed on their other, more law-abiding neighbors. A series of very, very bad policies that have undermined everything. Let me just say this, too. People that defend the Trust Act and try and condemn ICE and everything else as if they are such mw/rr 115 tremendous friends to our undocumented immigrant friends. They're not your friends. They're not actually helping you. You might get to live in Connecticut, in a sanctuary state, but what kind of sanctuary is it when you don't have the same rights as the other people around you, where you have to live as a second-class noncitizen? You can't vote. You can't legally work. What ought to happen is we ought to go back to enforcing our actual national immigration policy in full and finding a way to make sure that we have the ability to let in as many people into this country lawfully as possible, as long as they are adding to this country and our heritage. That's what should happen. That's a common-sense way to look at immigration policy. And I could talk about it here, but nothing I can do because I'm not in Congress. I wish we had people in Congress willing to have that conversation, though. So now that I've made it very clear where I stand on the subject of immigration, I want to go back to talking about the victims. You've heard some of these names before. There's certainly national names. There is Laken Riley. She was a real person. She was a 22-year-old lovely woman. She was a student at Augusta University in Athens, Georgia, and she was murdered by a guy named Jose Ibarra, who was an illegal immigrant here from Venezuela. She died by blunt force trauma and asphyxia. And the police documentation says that she fought him off while he was attempting to rape her. This guy was a monster, and he was in this country because he violated our immigration laws and because many, many people involved in politics have been trying their best to make sure that the Jose Ibarra's of the world are allowed to stay here in sanctuary cities and sanctuary states, hiding behind the Trust Act and so on. mw/rr 116 Maybe Laken Riley's family would still have Laken Riley in their lives if that was not the case. You may have heard the name Rachel Morin. Victor Martinez Hernandez was found guilty Monday of the murder of Maryland mother, Rachel Morin in 2023. The jury convicted Martinez Hernandez on charges of first degree premeditated murder, first degree rape, third degree sex offences, and kidnapping. She was a 37-year-old mother of five. This woman had five children. Those five children have no mother now. And they have no mother because Mr. Martinez Hernandez, who was arrested in Oklahoma, entered the United States illegally from El Salvador in 2023 and has known ties to gangs. He left this woman brutally attacked and murdered in a drainage ditch. Sorry, I'm a little choked up. If you read these news stories and you find out about these actual people, and let's not forget, these are real people. These aren't just random names I'm pulling out of a hat. These are people who had relatives. They had lives. For the most part, they're young people who were at the start of their lives. I got so many articles here. I don't know what's what. Kayla Hamilton. This is a new story from Baltimore. Kayla Hamilton's murder recorded on voicemail while her killer claims more victims. This is another gentleman, Walter Javier Martinez from El Salvador. She was 20-year-old girl with autism. She was raped, tied up, and strangled with a phone cord by someone who was not even supposed to be in this country lawfully. You probably heard of Mollie Tibbetts. There's not just pain and destruction in the rest of the country. Sometimes there's pain and destruction in Connecticut, too. Here's a case. I just want to get my notes all set here. This is the case of Christian Espinosa. Federal immigration authorities are slamming Connecticut's sanctuary rules after agents mw/rr 117 had to track down a man who was charged with seeking sex from a 13-year-old girl, and then released on bond. Christian Espinosa-Sarango, 33, faces charges of enticing a minor, attempt to commit a second degree sexual assault and risk of injury, and so on. And I want to just get to the rest of this story, because I believe that this gentleman was actually released. You don't have to look far. There was a Connecticut Insider article that came out in August 20th of just this last year that describes ICE arresting 65 people in the US illegally over a four-day Connecticut operation. And before anyone suggests that somehow these were all innocent angels, I want to point you to a website that anyone watching can go visit right this minute. And that is the Department of Homeland Security website, dhs.gov. And right on their website, you can look up Connecticut, and they have a section state by state, and you can look up arrested, Worst of the Worst. And it is page after page after page after page of undocumented aliens that are also violent criminals that have been apprehended inside the confines of Connecticut. I'm just going to give you a smattering, but understand that I have pages and pages of these. Nery Alberto Aragon-Ruano, Waterbury, assault. Jorge Nava Soco, aggravated assault, weapons, robbery, drugs. I can't read the town. I'm sorry. Jorge Castro Tello, cruelty toward child, Enfield. Brijesh Goel, obstructing justice, fraud. It's not just violent crime either. There's fraud. There's a guy in here who was arrested under some sort of RICO charges. Here's a guy, Addely Rosario-Ramirez, Hartford, drug trafficking. Here's Jose Yadaicela Morquecho. I'm sorry about that. Sex, neglecting a child, cruelty toward a child in Danbury. mw/rr 118 Joan Chacua Diaz, sexual assault, cruelty toward a child, Brooklyn, Connecticut. Burglary, assault, aggravated assault, lewd or lascivious acts with a minor, sexual assault, sexual assault, that's the most common thing in here, sexual assault. It's off the chart. Molestation of a minor, Douglas Flores, Brooklyn, Connecticut. Again, page after page after page. Go up and look. Dhs.gov. Don't take my word for it. You got your phone? Go take a look. Look up Connecticut. That's what this bill is about. This bill, I know the majority thinks that they're having a big win here because they're getting to slap around Trump and ICE. But what they're really doing is protecting monsters, like these people that I just mentioned that murdered these innocent civilians, like the guy that murdered that young new-on-the-job ICE agent. That's what this bill does. It is designed to protect those monsters. These aren't political talking points. Some might say, oh, Sampson's in their grandstanding. Damn right I am. Somebody needs to understand that these are real people, that this isn't a game we're playing. This isn't just about who makes the most quirky, cool talking points to the press so that we can win the next election. We're talking about the actual lives of real people, innocent people taken too early because of terrible policy enacted for political purposes, not because it's good policy. My number one thing that makes me the most sad as an adult. You know how when your kid, everything seems bright and there's opportunity. And when I grow up, okay, I'm a grownup now. And the one thing that I discovered as a grownup that makes me sadder than anything else is that the Connecticut state legislature doesn't make policy that's good for people. No, that's not what's going on here. We're not sitting in a room trying to figure out what the best policy is and working mw/rr 119 together and trying to figure out how we're going to keep our people back home happy and full of opportunity. It's not what happens here. Very rarely. I don't want to say never. Can't say some of my colleagues, we work on some things very well together. But on these big items, it's not about good policy. It's about politics. It's about rhetoric. It's about crushing the other side. It's about mischaracterizing the other side in a way to vilify them, to make them hated. And in fact, to put targets on all of our backs. And I think it's true regardless of what political party you're in. I've seen Senator Duff's Facebook commentary. Glad I'm not him when I read some of the comments. I get terrible comments too. What we ought to be doing is being better examples to the people back home to show that we can actually work together and that we might disagree, but we can disagree respectfully. But when we see a bill like this, for me, it's out the window. This is no attempt to disagree respectfully. This is no attempt to come up with some good policy for the benefit of Americans. That's not what this is. This is a political game. This is about slapping around people for political reasons because we've got to win an election. These are real people, real victims, real lives lost, and plenty of other people whose lives are forever altered because they were a grandmother who lost their home because of fraud or because they were molested as a child by someone who shouldn't have been in the country at all. And you know what the most uncomfortable truth is about all of it? Is that every one of these was preventable. If we had leadership on a federal level that actually recognized the importance of having a secure border for many, many years, decades, in mw/rr 120 fact, when we didn't, if we didn't have state policy finding ways to attract criminal aliens into our state by flashing a big neon sign, come here, we'll give you a driver's license, we'll give you tuition benefits, we'll give you health insurance. Forget the fact that there's a law out there that says that you're supposed to go through, the border properly with permission. Forget that there's plenty of other people around the world that are waiting in line doing the right thing. Civil rights matter. I do agree with the good chairman as far as that goes. I think what's funny is that early on when I was still in the House, I remember there were a couple of votes that were very, very civil libertarian- oriented. And I believe Senator Winfield and I were the only two no votes in judiciary on a couple of those items because we were such strong defenders of civil liberty. I haven't changed, and I know he hasn't. And I understand that he comes from this bill as a mechanism to actually produce additional civil liberty protections for undocumented people. I think that's where he comes from this bill. But as I said, I don't think the bill passes its constitutional muster. And at the end of the day, what it really does is it undermines the federal law enforcement officials that have a very tough job to do. Civil rights do matter. There's no question. But so do the rights of innocent people to get to see their 23rd birthday. So does the right of a child not to be lured by a predator. If we're going to talk about justice, then we need to talk about all the victims, not just the people that might have been wronged in Minneapolis or somewhere, who I certainly care about their civil rights too. But you can't just pretend they're the only victims. I got a much longer list of victims. This is not theoretical. This bill is going to have consequences. mw/rr 121 And when someone commits a crime down the road as a result, and some young woman doesn't get to go home to her husband or her family, or someone dies of an overdose because some drugs were trafficked into the country, or God knows what else, the question we should ask ourselves is whether the policies that we made in this Chamber had anything to do with that. If we had the opportunity to vote in a certain way, to prevent those things from occurring, did we do our job to help prevent that outcome? I kind of got off track because I was going through the bill section by section, and I didn't get to the end of the bill. I'll just add that Section 11 is the section that really takes away the federal immunity that federal agents are accustomed to, much like the police accountability bill took away qualified immunity for Connecticut police officers back in 2020. I don't believe that we are in a better place now as a result. Now, we can argue that, but I don't believe we are. I think what happened when that bill passed in 2020 is many of our most qualified police officers left the force for greener pastures, fearful that they could get embroiled in some lawsuit for doing nothing wrong. Imagine how difficult it is to be a cop just for a minute, knowing that your qualified immunity is now gone. And you're being asked on a day to day basis, hour by hour, to go show up in places where there's drama, where there's confrontation. Even if it's just a domestic, you're showing up, rolling up in your cruiser to somebody's house, and inside, you got a couple screaming at each other, throwing pots and pans. Do you want to be in that room knowing that you could end up getting sued for whatever happens? Of course not. So clearly, the quality of law enforcement has declined as a direct result. No mw/rr 122 fault of the police. They just have to be that much more careful now, because this body passed the stupid law that undermined their ability to do their jobs safely so that they could, after putting on the uniform in the morning and risking their lives every day, at least have some confidence knowing that if they followed the rules, they could actually be protected. This bill is laid out in a very, very specific way, and it's not random. Section 1 creates the new cause of action. Section 3 puts the federal law enforcement officers into state law. Section 6 is the one that restricts how they operate. Section 8 restricts where they operate. And section 10 removes their protections. Well, I suppose that's section 11. But it's all designed to undermine law enforcement at every level. And as Senator Kissel so appropriately pointed out during his remarks, and Senator Harding during our little press gaggle earlier, stated what's really at stake here when you strip away all of the part that is going to be found unconstitutional via the Supremacy Clause is more restrictions on our local and state police departments, making it even harder for them to do the very difficult job that they do. This is not about accountability. It's not about reform. This is political theater. This bill is here to make some statement about Trump and ICE. Meanwhile, families are struggling, costs are rising, the state is more and more unaffordable, and we are wasting our time having this political debate. I believe in civil rights, as I pointed out. I believe in accountability. I believe in limiting the government power maybe more than anybody in this room. And that's exactly why I oppose this bill. Because while this bill claims to be limiting the overreach of government in one area, it is expanding the government power dramatically, particularly the mw/rr 123 Attorney General of this state of Connecticut. Do not tell me this is about accountability when this is about accusation. Do not tell me that any of this is transparent, when we got a 40 page strike all amendment hours before we had to debate this bill. Do not tell me that this has anything to do with leadership when this is all about theater. The people of Connecticut deserve better. That's all I have, Madam President.
Thank you, Senator Sampson. Senator Winfield.
Thank you, Madam President. I usually would let that be the end, but I do have to respond to some of this, because I know what I said. I know the words that came out of my mouth. And when I talked about ICE and them having something to do with the responses people have to them, that's true, and that's not an accusation of everyone. It is what happens when you're part of a group. Then I hear that uniform you get to put on and take off, being accused of being part of that group is being something is worse than even like this skin that I don't get to take off, that I've lived every day of my life in. That's insane. There's no way for me to take this off. There's no way for anyone else who has to deal with the repercussions of having been born in the way that we were born to all of the things we've experienced, which, by the way, we come into this Chamber, talk about our experiences, and people tell us, well, that didn't happen in my community. That's not important to me. At least if I wore a uniform, which at one point in my life I did, I could take that uniform off. And I hear all the time about how people are offended. That's offensive. There's something wrong with us mw/rr 124 when we talk about people like that. We talk about I don't mischaracterize. That's a mischaracterization of exactly what I say. People ask me all the time, how do you stand there and deal with it? Sometimes I don't know. This is political. That website, the Worst of the Worst is political. In the first year of the Trump administration, 14% of the people they dealt with in terms of immigration were criminals in the way that we talk about it. But the way we talk about it, you would think it was 100%. That's a political thing. They created the Worst of the Worst for that purpose, so that all you would talk about are the worst of the worst. So that a group of people, we're talking about groups of people, so that a group of people will be characterized in a certain way, so that we can have this debate developed the way that it's developing here today, so that we can talk about everything but what the bill is. This is not changing immigration policy. You're right, we don't have that power. This is saying, when you come into our state and you violate the constitutional rights of people in this state, this state deals with that. People have asked me about going to Congress. I don't want to go to Congress. I don't want to be a Congressperson. I want to be a state Senator. That's why I'm here. And as a state Senator, I look out. And despite what I've heard today, and I think I'm going to continue to hear about the Trust Act, and what the Trust Act did and didn't do, I know this because I was the person who brought that to the state. So I know a lot about the Trust Act. I went to a conference, people were talking about what was going on. I come back to my community and people are talking about what's going on in their part of the community and their relationships to the police. I didn't make that up. We passed the Trust Act, people tell me, mw/rr 125 when I was in the House here at the Senate, this has only made this more difficult, and people don't want this. And I hear all the time from the very people who asked for this, thank you. But in this circle, we tend not to listen to people's actual experiences if they don't mesh with ours. And we tend to say that the reality is something different than it is. And I know that it's not just because I'm listening to the people on the Trust Act and on other issues, I know this because I talk all the time. I stood right there for half a day talking about my experiences. And I watch people in this circle tell me, it doesn't matter because it's not my experience. Well, I'm here to tell you, other people's experiences matter. And, yes, I represent New Haven and West Haven, but as I have said many, many times, I'm a member of the circle. And so all of those experiences are important. The mixture of experiences are important. And reality is not my reality or your reality. Reality is where our realities meet. And when our realities meet, things like this come about. I don't care about Donald Trump. In a couple of years, he'll be gone. I don't like the things he does, but in a couple of years, he'll be gone. But in a couple of years, what will not be gone is what has happened to the people in this state, if we don't have the ability to push back and say this is not right and you violate. And I want to just say, on section 11, because I don't know if we're reading the same bills. Because when you lose your immunity is when you're not operating under authorized federal law, which you should be, when you're not operating and doing something that is necessary on your property to execute your duties, which you should be. So if you're doing the opposite of that, why are we so concerned about it? What are we trying to protect mw/rr 126 here? I think it should be the citizens of the state of Connecticut. Thank you.
Thank you. Will you remark further? Senator Gadkar- Wilcox.
Thank you very much, Madam President. I rise in support of this amendment, and have just a couple of things to say. Would like to weigh in on the constitutional conversation. It's hard to sit here and not add a comment to that when it's being discussed. So I will add to that in a minute. But I just wanted to start maybe where Senator Winfield ended, and that's sort of the feeling of what's happening at the moment. This is not an abstract issue for me, or a political issue. I have heard from numerous constituents that they're scared, they're frightened. Children are watching. Families and communities have been disrupted. There's a young group of brilliant students in Bridgeport making and who decided to create a play around the disruption that was caused to a family as a result of an interaction with ICE. So this is very real, and this is very disruptive. And I'm still haunted by the phrase that I heard from a family who told a child, in the case the door is open when you come home from school, something might have happened to me. I'm still haunted by that. I have no idea of the impact on the child. Why is this significant? Because you would think ICE just started operating in Connecticut this year. It didn't. We have had federal investigations in this state and ordered under both Democratic and Republican administrations for many, many years. So why are we having these conversations now? Because we are mw/rr 127 seeing agents that are, in fact, acting in ways that violate state laws, state protocols, and state policies. We haven't seen that in the past. And of course, if there is a violent criminal, not only do I want them and not also to remain in Connecticut, but according to our laws and the Trust Act, that we already cooperating with federal agents to make sure that that information is provided, and they can be removed. So, I don't think anybody here is arguing that we want violent criminals to remain in the state. However, what we are seeing though is the way in which families and communities are being disrupted, again, in a way that they've never been disrupted before in all of the years that states, including Connecticut, have been cooperating with ICE investigations for many, many, many years. And so the question really is, when we've come to a moment where we have federal agents violating state policies, do we just stand aside and say, oh, well, I'm sorry, Supremacy Clause? No, I'll talk about this Supremacy Clause in a second. So there is a Supremacy Clause and it is important to mention. But again, we're talking about an instance where we're talking about state action, state response to federal violations of state policy. So, let's talk about constitutional law for a minute and the Supremacy Clause. So the Supremacy Clause in Article 6 is important, and as was described, is applicable when there is a conflict of laws. So when there's concurrent jurisdiction on the part of both the federal and state governments and there's a conflict, in order to decide the conflict, it is the federal law that's supreme. However, we'll talk about the nuance with that. When we talk about federal and state power, what's important to keep in mind is you may think that it's the federal power that's just unlimited, but in mw/rr 128 fact, it's the opposite. If we want to understand where federal power is, and a number of my students who are watching will appreciate it because we've talked about this in class many times, Article 1, section 8 is where we look. We look for the powers of the federal government that are entirely listed and enumerated in Article 1, section 8. Those are limited powers. That's it. If the power is not listed in Article 1, section 8, the federal government does not have the power to act, which means it's the government of limited jurisdiction. The power to coin money, the power to regulate the mail, that's why tampering with the mail is a federal offense. The commerce power, which is what has broadly been expanded and interpreted broadly to expand federal power. So that's all in Article 1, section 8. And, again, if it's not there, if it's not enumerated, except for the expansive reading of the commerce power, the federal government can't act. So what's left then? The 10th Amendment. The 10th Amendment is what's left, and it's called the Reserved Powers clause for a reason, because it says that anything not enumerated in the Constitution, that's reserved to the federal government is left to the states. That's what this bill is about, is to define what the state can and cannot say when it comes to the violations of its own state laws and protocols. The state also has police powers to generally regulate the health, safety, and welfare of the state itself. That's really, really important. So let's look at the case of McCulloch v. Maryland, a very important case that we start with also. The Supremacy Clause question is, in fact, the second question in that case, because the first question is whether or not the federal government even has the jurisdiction to create a bank. Why was that the first question? Because it's not enumerated in Article 1, section 8. And Article 1, section 8 is mw/rr 129 so specific that if something is not enumerated in Article 1, section 8, it means the federal government, by presumption, does not have the ability to act unless it falls under, as was in the case of McCulloch v. Maryland, the necessary and proper clause. So, it's necessary and proper to enact one of the enumerated powers, or it falls within the expansive sort of interpretation of the commerce clause. But that's important that in McCulloch v. Maryland, the first question was whether or not the federal government even had the power to act because there isn't a presumption that they have unlimited power. There is, however, a presumption in the 10th Amendment that the states have the power to make judgments for the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens. The difference and what's happening particularly in this bill and what we're trying to establish here is the difference in instances where, for example, federal agents are going beyond state protocol or going beyond the power that has been assigned to it under the federal government, in this case, immigration. So the wearing of a mask, for example, has to do more with conduct than it has to do with the power of immigration. This bill does not allow the state to come up with a number of individuals who can be asylees in the state, how many people should be allowed lawfully or to enter the United States under any immigration policy. That is entirely of power of the federal government. However, when it comes to the wearing of masks, for example, we can imagine what would happen if a copycat walked into any courthouse, any school building, any church, armed and unwilling to identify themselves and actually injured individuals. This is a question of the health, safety, and welfare of residents in the state of Connecticut. mw/rr 130 That is a question directly under the police powers of the state, a question that falls squarely within the 10th Amendment, which is why we need to have legislation now. Right? This was not necessary five years ago when ICE was also in the state. It was not necessary even three years ago when ICE was also in the state. It's necessary now because ICE is violating state policies and state protocols and constitutional rights. And this is why we need to act. This is more about the state being able to protect the health, safety, and welfare of its own individuals. In other cases, like US v. Lopez, the court has said that even the broad commerce power doesn't give the federal government police powers that the state has. So, this is a question of ensuring that when it comes to the actual engagement of ICE officers in the state, that families aren't being disrupted unnecessarily. That, of course, according to state law and in practice that already exists, if it does come to an instance where an individual is violent and has committed a violent act, that information will already be turned over to ICE, there is already a mechanism for cooperation. But to have families routinely being disrupted and to have individuals being detained in the way that they're being detained in violation of due process rights in a number of instances where they were in fact being arrested on their way to a due process proceeding, that's unconstitutional. It's not only is it unconstitutional, it's not who we are. This is not the country that our framers set up. In fact, when it comes to the rights because it was mentioned, I will just clarify that when it comes to the constitutional rights, it is not only US citizens that are extended constitutional rights. The court said in cases like Plyler v. Doe, that undocumented children have the right to education. mw/rr 131 In cases like Boumediene v. Bush, that you cannot detain someone indefinitely, even if they are not a US citizen, without some access to due process. So we have maintained a framework of guaranteeing and protecting rights that the state has absolutely an obligation to continue to protect. We have to let our residents know, the ones who are scared and frightened and have no idea what's going to happen from one day to the next, that there are limits to what the federal government is allowed to do when they're acting in ways that violate state policy, and they're frankly going beyond what is sort of authorized under their federal jurisdiction for immigration policy. That's what this bill is really doing. It's stepping in to ensure not only that we're constitutionally able to speak as a state for policies that are important, but that we have a moral obligation to step forward and protect families to make sure that they know, that their rights are the thing that is the most important in the state to all of us. Thank you, Mr. President.
Thank you. Will you remark further? Senator Gaston.
Thank you, Mrs. President. It's good to see you there today. I just wanted to opine about a couple of things that I heard mentioned across the Chambers on today. First and foremost, I am a student of civil rights, and I stand before you today to say that but for people pushing back against laws that were unjust, I would not be standing here today as a man of color. And injustice anywhere, as Dr. King said, is a threat to justice everywhere. What we're talking mw/rr 132 about today is power. Power requires accountability. We talk about accountability, but accountability, more specifically and not so broadly, is ensuring that we are accountable to our democracy, that we are accountable to the institution of government that we created for ourselves here in the United States of America. We have the Executive Branch, Judicial Branch, and the Legislative Branch, coequal forms of government. And when one is out of alignment, the other one serves the check and balance. It is interesting to me that there's a particular party that loves to talk about law and order, but where is that same level of commitment when bad actors within systems are protected instead of being held accountable? True respect for law enforcement means that we must demand integrity. We must demand that when someone operates in a way that violates someone's constitutional rights, that we stand up against that, and that we hold that system and that institution accountable. There are great actors and there are bad actors, but we often know that when we hear about the bad actors, it's really bad, and we have a responsibility to call it out and to correct the wrongs. We represent the people of the state of Connecticut. And when we took our oath, not only did we say that we're going to protect and defend the constitution of the United States, but to protect and defend the constitution here in the state of Connecticut. We talk about politics all the time, but politics is the process by which we choose our elected officials, and we hold them accountable to the constituents they represent. All of us in this circle, we were sent here to represent our constituency, and we come here to make policies on behalf of the residents of the state of Connecticut. And so, when we see that we have an unhinged, rogue federal administration that's doing mw/rr 133 everything to violate people's rights, we have to stand up as people who have been elected in this state. I often hear people in here talk about state rights, and they're huge proponents of state rights when it's convenient, but won't exercise the political will in moments that require us to protect the very citizens within our state. You can't have it both ways. We talk about the way in which ICE have been acting all across the United States and even in some instances, perhaps, in the state of Connecticut. I believe that every person deserve to be treated with respect, and that human dignity is something that is universal. Every person, every citizen, whether you're a citizen or you're not a citizen, you are worthy of respect from our government. And your immigration status should not erase someone's humanity and the way that we interact and the way that we treat them. The rule of law includes restraint, not just enforcement. It's about fair enforcement. It's a respect for due process. And if enforcement and law enforcement agencies violate rights, then I think that they weaken the very institution that they say that they're there to serve. And so I stand here today to say that we have a moral obligation to make sure that we are standing up for the people of the state of Connecticut, and I believe that this is precisely what this bill does. And so I stand flat-footed here today to say that there are people in my district, in Bridgeport and in Stratford, who are scared. They are terrified. Some kids are afraid to go to school because they don't know whether or not they'll be picked up by ICE agents, or that their families will utterly be destroyed. No one should have to live in fear. And I believe that today, this is one step to obliterate that kind of fear that many people are mw/rr 134 espousing in many of our neighborhoods in our communities. And as Senator Winfield said earlier, oftentimes people say, this doesn't happen in my community, but you can't take away a person's lived experience. You can argue with me about policy, you can argue with me about whether or not you think that it's too cold in Connecticut, but you cannot argue about my humanity as a black person in this country and the way in which I have been treated and the way in which other folks, who are of a different hue, are treated. And so these are the stories that I'm hearing anecdotally in my neighborhood, and I have a responsibility to stand here in this circle to say that those people matter too. Thank you.
Thank you. Senator Lesser.
Thank you, Madam President. Madam President, I rise in support of this bill. And first of all, let me just say I am deeply grateful to my leadership, to Senator Looney, for Senator Duff, to my good friend, Senator Winfield, who's the Co-Chair of the Judiciary Committee for making this bill a priority. It is proactive and not reactive. And what do I mean by that? It looks to the crisis of the moment, but it also looks ahead to what has happened in other states and what could happen here. And while the circumstances specific today, we are looking at today's events, the law that we passed today or sent to the House today will provide protections for the people of Connecticut for years to come, and we should be proud of that. This is an incredibly important strong statement about our values as a state. I'm not going to be able to compete with my good friend, Senator Gadkar- mw/rr 135 Wilcox, who gave us a lecture on constitutional law, but I'll just speak very briefly to what I understand to be the history, which is that this year, we are celebrating the 250th anniversary of our country. And 250 years ago, there was a really radical shift in the nature of sovereignty. See, prior to 1776, sovereignty was reserved in the power of the body of the crown. And what happened in 1776 is a revolution where we switched it, and now sovereignty in this country is held by the people. And that was the really innovative shift, the creation of our founding leaders who created our country. And what does that mean in practical terms? You see, it's not reserved in any one man or woman. Right? The president isn't sovereign in our country. It's rather in our constitution, in our system of federalism, and the interplay, the system of checks and balances that the framers set up at the onset of our country. So, it is not the job of the president to protect the constitution, although he did swear an oath to protect and uphold it. It is the job of all of us, and it is definitely the job of the state of Connecticut. What does that mean in real terms? It means a lot of things. But what we are doing here today on the Converse 1983 is making sure that if the federal government doesn't do its job of enforcing the constitution in Connecticut, then we will enforce the US constitution in Connecticut. And why is this an issue? Well, there is a history of federal law enforcement throughout the history of our country, but until very recently, it was quite limited, there was the US Marshals Service, there were revenue agents, but for the most part, law enforcement was conducted by state and local governments until very recently. mw/rr 136 But then last summer, the big beautiful bill, the so-called big beautiful bill, put $165 billion into the States Department of Homeland Security. And all of a sudden, federal law enforcement, which before was a fairly small thing, became a very large part of our lives. In the district that I represent, we've seen Department of Homeland Security raids on Main Street in Newington and Main Street in Middletown. We've seen it disrupt, people's lives, not just immigrants, but American citizens too. We had pandemonium when a car wash was raided. We just had our big scene in Middletown last week, and it is causing disruption, it is causing anxiety, and it could be the first step to something much more concerning. It is an unprecedented situation in the history of our country, and it requires a new framework as we work to respond and to understand what that means. In 1987, in a law review article entitled "Of Sovereignty and Federalism", a Connecticut resident, Yale Law professor, Akhil Reed Amar, urged states to embrace our federalist traditions and pass so-called Converse 1983 laws to protect the United States Constitution, and ensure that it applies uniformly to state, local, and federal officials alike. He argued that true sovereignty in our system lies only in the people of United States and that all governments are necessarily limited. Not just state governments, but all governments. If a person's constitutional rights are violated, there should be a remedy. And we heard this conversation earlier between Senator Sampson and Senator Winfield. But right now, there is a glaring loophole. See, after the US civil war, Congress created accountability for state and local governments, which were then attacking the civil rights of newly freed slaves. And so the idea behind 42 USC section 1983 was that there should be protections when a mw/rr 137 person's civil rights were violated by state or local officials. But there has not been a comprehensive protection for people if their rights are violated by the federal government. And so the question is, well, what do we do? Well, we have all sworn an oath to protect and uphold the United States Constitution and the state constitution, and yet right now, there is no meaningful remedy. This bill corrects that. It creates that remedy. And so, in the wake of professor Reed Amar's article, a whole bunch of states have come and done what he suggested. We're talking about California and Massachusetts and New Jersey and Illinois, and we should join them and make sure that there are no loopholes. Because if we have constitutional rights on paper but there is no meaningful way to enforce them in practice, then those constitutional rights are not worth the paper they're printed on. We have to have remedies. Those are the things that will make sure that our rights are protected. And whether we like the president or whether we don't like the president, we need to make sure that in this state for now and for the future, people's constitutional rights are protected. There's been a lot of talk about the Supremacy Clause, and Senator Gadkar-Wilcox made the case, and I'll just reemphasize it, which is that Supremacy Clause comes into play when there's a conflict between state and federal laws. There is no conflict here. We are simply codifying on the state level the United States Constitution, which applies to all 50 states. It applies today to Connecticut. What we are doing is creating a mechanism for enforcing it, which is what is lacking. We're not creating any new laws, we are enforcing the United States Constitution. When we think about what's happening, I think we need to think about, are we mw/rr 138 being more safe? Are we being made more safe by federal government policy or not? Are we more safe or less safe? What we saw in Minnesota this past winter was a clear sign that the federal government is making communities less safe. I spoke to a colleague of mine, a state Senator in Minnesota, and he told me this winter that in his city, there had been three homicides since the beginning of the year, two of which had been perpetrated by ICE agents. Does that make us more safe? Does it make it less safe? We have seen abuses around the country, detainee abuses that have been well documented, and I think a lot of people right now across our country are cowering in fear. I have a friend, my friend, dear friend, Christina, who actually helped officiate my wedding. She is a person of color. She recently had a head injury. And watching the news and looking out her window and seeing acts of violence happening on a day-to-day basis, really horrible interactions between police and protesters, federal agents and protesters was really trying to figure out what will happen to me if I get stopped by an ICE agent, and I can't explain due to my head injury, if I can't adequately explain why I'm here or where I'm going or that I'm a United States citizen? She was born in this country. She's a natural born US citizen for what it's worth. And she was so worried about potential interactions, as a United States citizen, with ICE that when the invasion of Minnesota happened, she relocated to the other end of the country for her own safety. What are we doing if US citizens are moving to flee our federal government? What has happened to us? Have we lost our way if we're in that position? My mother grew up in a country in South America where on the regular, when she was a girl, men would mw/rr 139 drive around in unmarked cars, typically Ford Falcons, and they would pick people up on the street, and they would throw them back in the back of the cars, and they would never be seen again. They would disappear. When she came to this country, she came to a country where we did things differently, where we had the rule of law, where we had accountability, where people didn't wear masks. We did not have secret police in this country. That is what has always made this country different. That is what's always been special about this country, that we are a country of law, of order, of the rule of law. We pass a lot of moral judgment on immigrants. We say, oh, you are illegal, you are undocumented. We make assumptions about who they are and why they're here. I can just tell you that a lot of cases, when you look at families, when you talk to people, you'll find that stories are often very complicated. Oftentimes, they're mixed status questions. Oftentimes, there's ambiguity about someone's status. I can tell you about my own family story because we talked about my mother a second ago. I also talked about my grandmother. When my grandmother was 10 years old, her country was invaded by a foreign army. And the question was then what do you do? Do you flee? Do you stay? What do you do? And for two years, her family made the decision to keep their heads down, to not make a lot of noise, to keep working, to pay their taxes, to not make a fuss and hope things, get better, hope the war ends. That situation for her family became untenable. And so, in the summer of 1942, she walked across her country, they walked across in the middle of the night, and slept in farms or in fields during the day, and they got to a border. And they couldn't cross the border because the border was closed. So mw/rr 140 they paid human traffickers to take them across the border illegally into another country. They then got on a boat. They went to South America and they were told, oh, no, you don't have permission to come here. So they bribed an immigration official to let them in the country. She was an undocumented citizen not once, but twice. She broke immigration laws twice. She was 12 years old at the time. Most of the rest of her family that didn't do that, that followed the law, was killed. She was not. She's still alive today. And so, when we see people make tough decisions, it's very hard to judge their actions. We can do so. We need immigration laws in this country. We need immigration enforcement in this country. But we've had a culture in the last few years where we're demonizing immigrants, where we've seemed to turn our back on that message that is at the base of the Statue of Liberty that recognizes that this country has always been built on immigrants from around the world, that we are stronger because of our diversity, that we have been built from, whether your family came from Italy or India, whether it came from South America or from, Africa, we are all stronger together. We've been walking away from that. This bill just simply says that in this state, we should have some rules, we should have some protections, we're going to take care of one another, and we're going to reject the politics of fear and hate. Madam President, I urge support.
Thank you, Senator Lesser. Senator Winfield.
mw/rr 141 Yes, Madam President. Just briefly, I'm told that I may not have been heard when I asked for a roll call, so I want to clarify that. And just really briefly, there was a concern that was expressed at some point about hospitals and whether or not this bill does anything to prevent police from operating there as they currently do. It does not. Law enforcement can continue to protect the public and respond to conditions in hospitals. And if somebody is a danger, they can be removed from the hospital as they currently can. So it doesn't restrict arrest in any way as it relates to that. And I just wanted to be clear about that. Thank you, Madam President.
Thank you. And we will have a vote by roll on the amendment. Will you remark further? If not, the machine is open. Mr. Clerk.
An immediate roll call vote has been ordered in the substitute for S.B. No. 397. An immediate roll call vote has been ordered in the Senate. We're voting on voting on Senate Amendment "A", S.B. No. 397. An immediate roll call vote in the Senate on Senate Amendment "A". This is not the bill. We're voting on the amendment.
Have all the Senators voted. The machine will be locked. Mr. Clerk, kindly give us the tally.
mw/rr 142 Total Number Voting 34 Total Voting Yea 24 Total Voting Nay 10 Absent and not voting 2
(gavel) Amendment passes. Will you remark further on the bill? Senator Winfield.
Thank you, Madam President. Madam President, the clerk is in possession of an amendment. I believe it's LCO 4114. I'd ask that it be called, and I be granted leave of the Chamber to summarize.
Mr., Clerk.
LCO No. 4114, Senate Amendment "B".
Senator Winfield.
Thank you, Madam President. This is an amendment we kind of think of as technical, but maybe it does a little more, so let me explain. It allows for the retention of data in criminal cases where there's a conviction. So you can hold it till the end of sentence because people have habeas rights. Also, in constructing the underlying bill, there was a way in which we wrote it that would exclude storing data in the cloud. There's further clarification that allows for data for ALPRs to be stored in the cloud. I would urge adoption. mw/rr 143
Thank you. Will you remark further? Senator Kissel.
Thank you very much, Madam President. Despite our disagreements on the underlying bill, I find this amendment to be a friendly amendment and one that's helpful to the underlying bill. And I would urge my colleagues on our side of the aisle or our side of this issue to support this amendment, and probably could do it by voice vote, although that's not my call. That's Senator Winfield's call.
Thank you. Senator Winfield, would you like a roll call?
Thank you, Madam President. I know when to agree with Senator Kissel.
All right. Very good. Will you remark further on the amendment? If not, let me try your minds. All in favor, please signify by saying, Aye.
Opposed? The ayes have it. The amendment is adopted. Will you remark further? Good evening, Senator Fazio.
mw/rr 144 Thank you, Madam President. I rise in opposition to this legislation today. I think the vast majority of our constituents here in Connecticut want to see balance in our state government and our state policies. They want public safety, and they want clarity. They, generally speaking, want an immigration system with a strong legal immigration pathway that benefits the public interest here in Connecticut and across the United States. They also want to see immigration enforcement prioritize getting criminals off our streets and having a regulatory system that ensures the public safety and the public interest. This proposal today brings Connecticut further down the path of an ideological anti-public safety immigration enforcement system. It doubles down on the sanctuary state policies in Connecticut that protect people who have been convicted of serious crimes, including felonies, undermining our public safety for law abiding Connecticut citizens and residents. I often think to myself that oftentimes, legislation could be better predicted taking the opposite of what the title of the proposals entails. Our democratic system in this country, the rules are set by our constitution, where we have one person, one vote, rule of law, and clarity. That means, among other things, that we have a Supremacy Clause that says that the federal law is superordinate to our state and local laws. And yet, in the name of democracy, this proposal today sets out to turn that exact paradigm on its head. That duly passed constitutional provisions of our US government and our federal government can be undermined simply by an act of a state. I did enjoy some of the remarks of some of my democratic colleagues talking about the enumerated powers, Article 1, section 8, the 10th Amendment, and the mw/rr 145 concept of individual sovereignty on which this country was founded. And I certainly hope that going forward, the majority in this state government keeps those concepts of limited government and individual sovereignty in mind when it comes to other areas of policy. Certainly, in a country and a state where the state, local, and federal governments take up about 50% of the entire economy, it is in question whether our state and federal governments have gone beyond the reach of Article 1, section 8 in the 10th Amendment and the values of our founding documents. But I digress. I simply hope that that is a standard that we apply evenly going forward. What is clear is that when you have a proposal like this, which seeks to regulate federal law enforcement in an area where there is clearly an enumerated power, meaning regulation of immigration, and where you have a proposal that would tell those federal authorities following on what is clearly constitutional power, what they can and cannot do, that you have a violation of the concept of the Supremacy Clause and of the concept of democracy in our country, where we have rule of law. The first and second iterations of the Trust Act, they might have been bad policy, but they were clearly within the scope or the realm of what is constitutional or not. The first Trust Act dealt with anti-commandeering concepts, and the second Trust Act, which I think is horrible policy, nonetheless, was dictating to what state and local law enforcement could or could not do. But this proposal seeks to dictate from a state level as to what federal law enforcement can or cannot do. The point is that much of this will not stand up. It will be struck, as Senator Kissel well pointed out. But there are other policies entailed, even after many of the provisions of this legislation is essentially voided, there are also mw/rr 146 provisions that will further undermine the public safety here in Connecticut. Section 7, saying that there should be no detaining of any individuals on any number of different properties across our state. Some of them you can very much understand, and some of them, federal policy already seeks to limit the actions of law enforcement in those areas. But the idea that any state or municipal property should be restricted from law enforcement, even in the case of people who have been convicted of the most heinous violent felonies, is beyond the pale of what is reasonable even to the average person in a very blue state. We need law enforcement to protect us from the most violent of individuals who should never be in this country in the first place. I think there was much made of some of the controversies elsewhere around the country with regard to federal law enforcement. And obviously, the example of Minnesota has resonated. After the controversies in Minnesota, the governor of that state, a very progressive governor who was picked as the vice presidential candidate for the Democrats nationally, discussed discussions he had with Tom Homan in the administration, and he was bragging about the fact that Minnesota would turn over people in this country illegally who were convicted of crimes and served jail sentences in their state prisons to federal law enforcement for deportation. This very progressive governor and major figure in the Democratic party nationally was bragging that in the case of many criminals, the state of Minnesota, a blue state itself, was actually cooperating in many cases in order to take violent criminals off the street. That is not the case in Connecticut. Our state law is far to the left of even blue states and blue progressive leaders like Tim Walz. mw/rr 147 We have very much lost the plot in Connecticut. We are prioritizing the interests of convicted criminals in this country illegally over that of law enforcement and law abiding citizens. And this proposal brings us further down that path, limiting whether law enforcement can arrest or detain people convicted of crimes in this country illegally. It goes far beyond even the Trust Act of 2019, which is far to the left of what even many blue states have enacted into law. This is not simply a constitutional or theoretical exercise. The undermining of public safety, the prioritization of ideology in the Trust Act in this proposal over common sense and public safety is actively undermining safety for law abiding citizens here in Connecticut, in the backyard of my district in particular. In 2021, a man named Edgar Gomez, who's in this country illegally, was arrested and plead guilty to assaulting a one-year-old boy, his son named Liam Rivera, who the evidence would indicate was a US citizen. He had broken his arm from beating him, from assaulting him. He was arrested. He plead guilty. He served a prison sentence. And then less than a year later, which raises its own questions, he was released and put on probation. Instead of his conviction and release resulting in transference to federal immigration authorities for deportation, because of the Trust Act, and because of the policies of this governor and this state government, that man, that criminal who's in this country illegally in the first place, was released on the streets, and months later, he beat and killed that two-year-old boy, his son, Liam Rivera. If not for the sanctuary policies of this state government, of this governor and this state legislature, that two-year-old boy, Liam Rivera, would likely still be alive today. If we were actually doing what some have stated we should do, mw/rr 148 even on the other side of the aisle, prioritize the public safety, prioritize getting criminals off our streets, that boy, Liam Rivera, could still be alive today. And that's not the only case of violence being done, of the safety of law abiding citizens being undermined in this state because of our sanctuary policies for criminals. Also, in the backyard of my district, Angel Semenago, a 59-year-old Stamford resident, was killed by two people in this country illegally who were involved with the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, in all likelihood. Those individuals, if they were in contact at any point with state or local law enforcement, the state and local law enforcement could not communicate with federal authorities to take those individuals off the street. Our state government should be prioritizing public safety, prioritizing taking dangerous criminals in this country illegally off the street. Yet, because of policies like the Trust Act, we continue to undermine public safety and common sense here in the state of Connecticut. We continue to put the lives of people like Liam Rivera, a two-year-old boy, innocent, who was killed by an illegal immigrant, in jeopardy. There will be more if we do not get our act in order. There will obviously be more, because across this country, federal law immigration enforcement has been on the rise. And that means that states like Connecticut are opening themselves up to more and more people like Edgar Gomez coming to our state for sanctuary because they know it is less likely that they, as criminals, will be arrested, or detained, or deported if they are in a state with the policies like the Trust Act, like S.B. 397 today. All we are asking for is balance and common sense, that the resources of our governments be used for mw/rr 149 their primary purpose, which is to protect law abiding Connecticut residents and citizens and their safety, that it not be used to protect people who have been convicted of serious crimes, felonies, and who are not supposed to be in this country in the first place. This proposal today will only make us less safe. It does not answer the question of how to balance the very difficult questions of immigration policy, the needs of our economy, etc., and the need to protect the public interest and the public safety. It goes so far beyond the pale of what is reasonable that it would even make progressive governors like Tim Walz blush. And yet here we are today not debating how to balance those considerations and roll back the most egregious and radical aspects of our state law, the Trust Act. We are going further to undermine the public safety. This bill should be rejected outright, but at minimum, I suggest that it be amended to protect some of those considerations that I mentioned. Madam President, the clerk is in possession of LCO No. 4100. I would ask the clerk to please call that amendment.
Thank you. Mr. Clerk.
LCO 4100, which be designated Senate Amendment Schedule "C".
Thank you. Will you remark on the amendment? Senator Fazio.
mw/rr 150 Thank you, Madam President. I move adoption of the amendment, waive reading, and seek leave to summarize.
Please do summarize.
Thank you, Madam President. This amendment would change section 7 of the legislation, and create a carve-out that would allow law enforcement in exigent circumstances to detain individuals who have been convicted of serious felonies, like murder, sexual assault, risk of injury to a minor, human trafficking, and others. It simply says that if we're going to extend this policy in S.B. 397, that there should at least be an exception that federal authorities can detain and arrest individuals who have already been convicted of such serious felonies as murder. It's not dissimilar from some of the carve outs that we have debated for existing policy in the past. Having this exception at least will make what is, I think, a very bad proposal a little more palatable to the public, a little more reasonable. I do not think that we need to be protecting the Edgar Gomez of the world, the people who are in Connecticut, not only illegally, but who have also been convicted of serious violent crimes that have resulted in the violation of our citizens' rights, and even in the death of some of those citizens. So, I do not think that this is a political amendment. I think that this is a type of amendment, not only that makes the proposal better, but more importantly, that the vast majority of our constituents, irrespective of their political affiliation, would consider common sense, would consider a balance of those difficult questions that mw/rr 151 we discussed earlier, and that will make Connecticut a little safer than this underlying legislation. This should at least be adopted, even though I would think that the entire legislation would be better off rejected, and that the 2019 Trust Act should be either entirely reevaluated or repealed itself. This amendment will at least mitigate some of the challenges to our public safety that could arise from this policy today. And Madam President, I would ask that this amendment be subject to a roll call vote when the vote is taken. Thank you.
And we will indeed have a roll call. Will you remark further on the amendment? Senator Sampson.
Thank you very much, Madam President. I rise in strong support of the amendment that is before us. I want to just say a couple of quick words about the amendment in relation to some of the conversation that we've heard around the circle today. There were a lot of colleagues who rose expressing concern over people in our state living in fear. And I found it ironic because of the people they were referring to were folks that are living in fear as a direct result of nothing more than the highly profound level of extreme political rhetoric that is occurring, trying to extrapolate what happened in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Connecticut. We had the president of the Teachers Union, CEA, Miss Kate Diaz, make a claim in a public statement that children were being pulled from school as a direct result of the actions of federal immigration agents. That was not true. And that is exactly the type of rhetoric that is causing the fear that my colleagues are up in arms about. It's actually quite remarkable that they've mw/rr 152 created the political firestorm that is causing the very need they describe for the bill that is before us. This amendment, and I have to commend my colleague, Senator Fazio, for his effort in diplomacy here, because he's trying to, at last resort, find some element of sanity in what is a crazy bill. He's attempting to try and find some level of reason where people who are so adamantly opposed and consumed by their hatred of the president and of federal immigration authorities, that they're willing to upend our constitutional safety valves, our constitutional framework, and effectively ignore sensible policy when it comes to protecting the safety of the people we represent. This is a very, very simple amendment. It basically says, you can do all of the radical and insane things that you want to in the bill that is before us under one condition, pass this amendment that says, people that are guilty of the most significant crimes, murder, rape, and so on, those folks will still end up having to be punished. Those folks will still be able to be picked up by federal law enforcement. It seems like a pretty reasonable compromise. And in fact, I go so far as to say a vote against it is a very bad vote. I'm hoping that folks around the circle recognize just how alarming it should be to the average citizen if you vote to make sure that criminal aliens in the country illegally, who've committed murder and been convicted of it, should not end up facing the consequences of federal immigration law. That's exactly what this amendment is. That's all it is. I urge adoption. Thank you.
Thank you. Will you remark further on the amendment? Senator Winfield. mw/rr 153
Thank you, Madam President. Madam President, I rise in objection to the amendment. I recognize that there are passions and folks want to express those in whatever way they want to express it. But, as I read it, what's happening here, we're putting into place things to clarify. There's certain things that are offensive, that are criminal, should be exceptions to what we have in a bill. But if you read the bill, we're talking about civil offenses, and we clarify that those very things are not part of it. So it's unnecessary, and I rise in objection. I would ask folks to follow me in that no vote.
Thank you, Senator Winfield. Will you remark further? Senator Harding.
Thank you, Madam President. I appreciate the good chair's comments. I don't necessarily agree that this is only civil. My reading of the bill is pretty explicit in that unlike the Trust Act, which does have exceptions, in which local and state troopers can speak with immigration control or federal authorities in circumstances where individuals have been convicted of crime, none of that language appears here. So, how I read the bill is that this is just an outright ban for federal law enforcement to step onto state property. And so the problem that I have, and Senator Fazio alluded to it in him speaking, and so did Senator Sampson is, correctional facilities here in the state of Connecticut are state property. So, if you're not going to allow federal law enforcement to enter state property, you're not mw/rr 154 going to allow them to enter the prisons in which individuals have been convicted of these heinous crimes. And what I do appreciate about this amendment is the fact that it lists these crimes. We're talking about murder, rape, abuse of children. These are the most heinous crimes that you could possibly commit, the most morally reprehensible crimes. And not only are these individuals arrested for these crimes, we're saying they're convicted of this crime. I'm sorry, but if an individual is illegal and rapes, let's say, a child, the minute that individual finishes their sentence, I hope there's an immigration control officer who's standing there waiting for them to deport them from this country. And so, if we can find exception in anything and find an agreement in a bipartisan fashion on anything, it should be that individuals that commit these reprehensible crimes and are convicted of it, not accused, but convicted of these crimes, and are completing their sentence and doing their time, that the minute they step back out of that jail cell, they should be going back and deported to the country of origin. I just think we can all agree upon that. If they're committing these heinous crimes, they should be deported. And I don't know why we would be inhibiting that process, and I think this amendment addresses that particular issue. There are some issues I would agree with where I'd like to see protections for individuals that are not criminals. But frankly, how I would look at it is that by opposing the amendment, we're only protecting the individuals in this case that have committed these crimes, and I would argue that individuals that have committed these crimes, been convicted of these crimes, as heinous as they are, don't deserve any further protections. They should be deported. And I think that's what this amendment does, and that's mw/rr 155 the reason I do support it. And I urge my colleagues to do the same. Thank you, Mr. President.
Thank you. Will you remark further on the amendment? Will you remark further on the amendment? All right. Seeing no, a roll call vote will be ordered. Mr. Clerk, would you please announce a roll call vote? The machine will be open.
An immediate roll call has been ordered in the the Senate. We're voting on Senate Amendment "C". An immediate roll call has been ordered in the Senate.
Have all the Members voted? Have all the Members voted? If all Members have voted, the machine will be locked. Would the Clerk please announce the tally?
Total Number Voting 33 Total Voting Yea 10 Total Voting Nay 23 Absent and not voting 3
Amendment fails. Will you remark on the bill? Will you remark further on the bill? Senator Duff. Senator Kushner.
Thank you, Mr. President. It's good to see you up mw/rr 156 there. I rise in support of the bill. I know we've heard here about the technical aspects of the bill, the legal aspects of the bill. We've heard personal stories from people. I rise in support of the bill because it's critically important to my community, the community I've lived in for more than 30 years. During that time, I moved to Danbury, Connecticut because it was and it is a diverse city. I moved to Danbury, Connecticut because I wanted my children to have the rich experience of growing up with other kids who may have come from other countries, and whose parents came from other countries, and who grandparents came from other countries so they could learn other cultures and other histories.
Excuse me. It's a little loud in the Chambers. Could we please take conversations outside, please? So we can hear the great Senator. Senator Kushner.
Thank you, Mr. President. I wanted my children to grow up in an environment where they would learn about the world from the people around them. And I thought that was very important. I chose Danbury, Connecticut because of that. And it's been a wonderful, wonderful life for me and my family. We've been there for more than 30 years. Our friends come from so many different countries, from Ecuador, from Dominican Republic, from Puerto Rico, from Thailand, from Vietnam. These are people that are so important to me in our community that have come from other countries, and it also has an incredibly rich immigrant story. Danbury was founded by immigrants, like most of our cities in this country and many of our rural towns, but it was the hat manufacturing capital of the world, and immigrants came to work in those mw/rr 157 manufacturing plants, sometimes in really harsh conditions and exposed to chemicals that caused great illness and, in some cases, death. But they built our town, they built our community. And for me, that is such a rich experience for me and for my children that were raised there. My story goes way back before that because my grandparents were immigrants to this country and they lived to be quite old. And I did hear the story, and my story of my grandparents was not very dissimilar from Senator Lesser's story that you heard earlier, but I want to repeat it because I think it's the story of many White Americans, whose families came here as immigrants and went through great hardship to get here. My grandfather walked out of what's now called Moldova, but then was Bessarabia, at age 14 with his sister. An unaccompanied minor came across the border walking because he was leaving the country illegally and could have been shot for leaving the country. And he was told by his mother, don't turn around if somebody says halt because they won't shoot you in the back. And he was 14. And he told us this story as we were growing up, and his experience that getting on a boat separated from his sister at age 14, scared and crying until they reunited him with his sister. And he made that passage across the Atlantic Ocean with his older sister who was 16. It's really hard to put ourselves in that position, but they came to this country because of the oppression, the violence that they faced in their home country. He told stories of his mother who sold eggs and milk. Actually, I'm told his father was a fine horseman and would take the deposits from the factory to the bank in the city. Because he was a good horseman, he could outrun the robbers. And that was their existence and their experience. mw/rr 158 But his mother who managed a little store where they sold eggs and milk from the cow and the chickens they had, she told stories that the Cossacks would come in and they would steal from them. They would take things and you couldn't do anything about it because that was your experience, that was your existence. And there were pogroms and there was violence, and there was constant threat of violence. So they came to this country, and I'm lucky, they came at a time when we didn't have the harsh immigration laws that we have today that make it so difficult for people to come here legally and gain status. They came at a time when they could do that. And it took them some very short period of time to become citizens. That is not the experience people have today. In my community, there are people who have been working on citizenship for more than a decade. In my community, I know people, friends of mine, whose children have married someone from another country who came here as a child and does not have citizenship, and even after marriage and two kids can't get citizenship, is still in the process after so many years. We have very failed immigration laws, and that disturbs me greatly and the people in my community. But I don't see any of that changing anytime soon. What has changed is the persecution, the terror of the people in my community. They're facing terrorism. They are afraid to go out. They're afraid to go to the restaurants. I have a friend who owns a wonderful Ecuadorian restaurant. His business is way down because his community is afraid to come out for dinner. They're afraid to send their kids to school. Our enrollment is down, and it is down amongst the multilingual learners in our community, so we can see where this is hitting us. mw/rr 159 And I live in this community that I was so excited that my kids have grown up with kids that are undocumented, that face challenges because of that. And these are wonderful kids who gone on to, some cases, be really highly, highly successful people and kids that I've had in my house, kids that I adore, and now they're afraid, and there's something deeply wrong with that. When this all started with ICE upping its attacks on our community, and it has been like that, there are days where we get alerts that ICE is in the neighborhood. They're downtown. They're at the courthouse. They're in the parking lot of the university last week. When these reports come in, people are scared, and they look to me and they look to us to do something about it. When would we ever think it's okay for people who are in law enforcement to wear masks? When would we think it's okay for the come and grab people off the street? This isn't the United States that I grew up in. It's not the country I want to be in. I want to do something to change that. I am so proud of my colleagues, Senator Winfield, Senator Looney, Senator Duff, who have really stood up for our community, for Danbury in a way that is so very important. This bill, it's clear that we're standing with the people, with the immigrants from my community, the good people, the honest people, the majority of the Latinos in our community, we're standing with them. We're saying, we've got your back. We're not going to let them do this to you any longer. And that's what's really important to me, and I'm very proud to be a member of this Chamber. I'm very proud of my colleagues who are voting for this bill today. I urge all of you to think about it. Who are we as Americans? Who are we if we allow this to continue? That's not the America I want. That's not the Danbury I want. I want to go back to where Danbury mw/rr 160 hasn't been totally comfortable for quite a few years. But the people of Danbury, I want them to feel safe, and that's why I'm voting yes today, and I hope everyone else will as well. Thank you.
Thank you. Will you remark further? Senator Maher.
Thank you, Mr. President. Great to see you up there. I stand in support of this bill. I'd like to speak about the experience as the Chair of the Children's Committee. I'd like to speak about the experience of children, the children who are terrified, the children who don't know if they go to school, if they'll see their parents when they come home, the children who aren't being fed because they're not attending school, the children who are not getting enough to eat because their parents are too afraid to leave their apartments to even get food from a food pantry, the neighbors in community who are coming and delivering food downstairs away, so they're not identifying apartments where the parents are living. Children should not be terrified, families should not be terrified. It is not acceptable. When I was the CEO of Person to Person, every single day, we would serve families who had come from somewhere else, who'd come from somewhere else to create a new life for themselves and for their children. We would make sure that they had food and clothing and financial assistance for housing. And over the 14 years of doing that job, I saw again and again how families lifted themselves out of poverty, into the middle class, sent their children to school, sent their children to college as first generational learners. This is the country. This is the fabric of our communities and our nation that mw/rr 161 has been in place historically, and that is not what we are experiencing right now. When people live in a culture of fear, we should be doing everything in our power to make sure that children and families are not in that situation, and that's what this bill does, and that is why I am so proud to vote for it. And I thank my colleagues. I thank Senator Looney and Senator Duff and Senator Winfield and Senator Lesser for the work they have done to bring this bill to our attention and to a vote.
Thank you. Will you remark further? Will you remark further? Senator Rahman.
Thank you, Mr. President. Nice to see you out there. Mr. President, I rise in support in S.B. 397. It's amazing bill. I want to thanks to our leadership and Senator Winfield, Senator Lesser, everyone behind at these bills. It's amazing bill. Mr. President, this is the country of immigrants, and let's be honest. First attack our very best democracy, then attack our entertainment and media industry, then attack our very best universities, then dismantling our education system, on and on, on and on, then attack hardworking immigrant, separation, division, and deportation, non-stop. This is not the America I moved to 30 years ago, we are saying. When and how? Who's going to stop this? We can have debate hours and hours and hours, but we see in realities behind one man driving entire country without passengers. Mr. President, 2023 undocumented immigrant fade over $200 billion tax. I heard numerous times undocumented immigrant, they are not working, but we are looking for them in restaurants. mw/rr 162 If they are not working, why you go look for them? We are looking undocumented immigrant factories. If they are not working, why you are looking for them? But the matter of fact, hard jobs, landscaping, constructions, fine dining restaurants, all those work done by immigrants, because here, our folks talking non-stop about immigrant negatively, they deny to do those jobs. So, who's going to serve you when you go fine dining and spending $300? Hardworking immigrant. Who's going to make you back at beautiful? Hardworking immigrants. Who's making your bathroom and kitchen remodeling? Hardworking immigrants. I may pay more tax than Amazon is paying because they're using lot of loopholes. I'm immigrant. So let's talk about reality, not continue talk about, we are talking criminal. We're talking undocumented immigrant. Of course, we can have without a strong immigrant policy law in place without fearing, without separation, division, and deportations, but we are not talking about the fear solutions. Government should work of the people, by the people, and for the people. Government should be the solution of our people. Our government is the problem. It's our people. So this bill will improve, people can peacefully can work, go schools, kids can go schools, church, workplace, and this is why I think this circle support this bill. Mr. President, this is not about Democrats, Republicans, or independents. This is about our foundations. One of our president, President Reagan said, you can live in Japan, but you never became a Japanese. But you can move to American, live anywhere in this country corner, you can become American. This is why people move to America because better place, I still believe, is the best place and better place. And this is the country, the best country in the earth to live, work, and raise a family. mw/rr 163 So we'll continue fight for our rights. We'll continue fight for human rights. Immigrants, they are moving to here because the best place in the earth. They are not going Japan because our late president say, you can go there, but you never going to become a Japanese. So let's talk about not to go negative to admit some good stuff immigrant done and working hard every day serving you, serving our state, and serving our country. Mr. President, I'm proud immigrant. 30 years ago when I moved to America, I had nothing. I mentioned number of time, I came to America with $200 and backpack. I worked hard. So many people helped me. Today, I probably want to say I created thousands of jobs in the state of Connecticut. I created nonprofit organization, community center to serve our community. This is what immigrant do, like me. Paying taxes, working hard, helping our community, giving back to the community. If we continue going wrong direction, we are not going to find anyone to talk about. So thank you, Senator Winfield, our leadership, Senator Duff, Senator Looney, Senator Lesser, brought this important bill and helping reshaping. So, thank you. Thank you, Mr. President.
Thank you. Will you remark further on the bill? Will you remark further on the bill? Senator Duff.
Thank you, Mr. President. Could we stand at ease for a moment, please?
The Senate will stand at ease. mw/rr 164
Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, I rise in support of the legislation. And we've heard a lot of names that have been bandied about today of victims of crime. And certainly, we are sensitive to all those who have been victimized by any kind of crime. And we know though that our immigrant population tends to, as a group, cause less crime than American citizens. So, the notion of trying to put forth as a group of people who are dangerously violent is not actually based on facts. But two names we have not heard today are Renée Good and Alex Pretti, who were killed by federal immigration officers, who were American citizens, who were protesting under their rights under the United States Constitution, the right to peaceably assemble and to protest our government. And there is nothing more American than protesting your government. My prediction is we'll see a little bit of that probably before the end of this legislative session, because people come here all the time and they protest their government, a right to redress, to peaceably assemble when they don't agree with the things and the actions of their government. But here we are today in our state Senate advancing legislation that protects Connecticut's residents from their own federal government. This has nothing to do with whether we voted for the current occupant in the Oval Office, or we didn't vote for the occupant in the Oval Office. This has to do with upholding the rights of the United States Constitution and the Constitution of the state of Connecticut. This has to do with ensuring that the residents of this state feel safe and whether or not this legislature is going to protect their rights. the mw/rr 165 United States Constitution says very plainly that if the rights are not in their constitution, they are back, sent to the states to decide. And we're here today to stand up for those rights. We're here today to ensure that we don't have and continue to see the excesses of the federal government and its overreach on the citizens and the residents of this state. We've seen it across the country. We have seen it in cities and towns across the state of Connecticut. I've seen it in my own city of Norwalk, where we have seen people literally dragged out of their cars and their trucks and hauled away. For a crime? Necessarily. Not a violent crime. Maybe there's a paperwork staff. But we've even seen people taken away, who have been in this country for 20 years, 30 years, never caused any kind of a crime whatsoever. They have raised their kids, they have paid their taxes, they have settled, they have woven into the American culture and American fabric, and have made this country a stronger place. We have seen people who have been dragged away who have had their green cards. We've seen people dragged away who are parents of veterans. Or we've seen people dragged away who are the spouses of veterans in this country? If there is nothing more un-American than that, I don't know what is. People who are literally laying down their lives for this country, and yet their spouses, their parents, their kids are being taken away and dragged away without any due process from the immigration and customs enforcement. That is not the country I want to live in, and that is not the country we've ever had before this. This doesn't matter about who you somebody voted for. It matters about the constitution and standing up for the rights that are enumerated in the United States Constitution and the Constitution of the state of Connecticut. That's what it's all about. When we see mw/rr 166 the shredding of the Constitution of the United States by our federal government and inaction by Article 1 of the United States Constitution, it is up to this legislature. It is up to this legislature to actually do something about it, and that's what we're doing with this bill today. We have a right and we have a duty to ensure that we are standing up for the people of this state. And by not doing it means we are not doing our duty. We are not adhering to the oath of office that we took the day we got sworn in. I know many of us around this circle, our constituents have asked us, they have demanded us that we do something. And again, I never thought we'd see a day where we'd have to pass a law that would protect us from our own federal government. But, here we are. But the great thing about this American democracy and the American experiment is that we have 50 states that could write their laws, that create their own destiny, that could put, We the People first, and that we decide how we're going to control our own destiny. And that's what it's all about. We have this thing called federalism, states' rights. We've heard a lot about today that we don't have the right to do what we're doing in this bill, and I would disagree. We have the right, we have the precedent, and the laws to do this. And that's exactly what we're doing here today. Mr. President, I think we're in a time right now in our country where we have to stand up for our democracy. We have to stand up for our constitutional republic. We have to say, we are going to be on the side of what is right and what our laws are and what we think is our destiny here in the state of Connecticut. And that's why I would urge my colleagues to vote yes on this legislation. I think this is one of the most important pieces of legislation we can pass this session. When we say no to what's happening with our federal government. When we say and protest the excesses of our federal mw/rr 167 government. When we stand up as a legislature, as a state, and say no. We don't think this is the right course of action. We're going to stand up and say yes to protecting our residents. We're going to say yes to our constitutional rights, and we're going to say yes to liberty and freedom. So I urge my colleagues to vote for this bill, urge my colleagues to stand up to the excesses of our federal government, and I urge my colleagues to say yes to our state's destiny. Thank you to all those who have worked so hard on this legislation up until this point. We have Senator Looney, Senator Winfield, Senator Lesser, Senator Maroney, our great staff, our attorneys, everyone who has worked so hard to get us here today, our attorney general's office, our governor's office, and many, many others who are outside this room, who worked so hard on this bill. And if I missed anybody, I sincerely apologize. But this bill will be, one, that I believe is one of the most important bills that we can pass. And I urge my colleagues to vote yes. Thank you, Mr. President.
Thank you. Will you remark further? Will you remark further? Senator Harding.
Thank you, Mr. President. I rise today to speak about what's before us here. And one of the things I learned in the legislature pretty quickly is that it's imperative to actually read the bill and to get past the title and get past the politics and understand truly and pragmatically what's actually in the bill and how that's going to impact our constituents. And so when you do that outside of the political aspect that has encompassed this bill, has mw/rr 168 encompassed the comments, and actually look at the legalities of it from a legal perspective, and Senator Kissel, the good ranking member, started mentioning this at the beginning of the conversation we had in this bill earlier today is, we speak about the constitution. I've heard a lot today, and it's our obligation to follow it. And it's quite clear in the language of the Supremacy Clause that we do not -- despite what some people have said, we do not have the ability to regulate federal law enforcement on how they interact, how they operate. We don't. The state governments do not have the authority to tell federal government what to do. And you could quote the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution; it's a completely separate thing. The Tenth Amendment of the Constitution allows a state entity to pass laws that regulate their residents, their citizens. It doesn't allow -- nowhere in the Tenth Amendment allows the state government to regulate their policy upon federal government. It's completely antithetical, completely antithetical to the Supremacy Clause, and there is a barrel load of case law that dictates that, barrels of case law that dictates that. I think most people will tell you when they walk outside the chamber and take outside the politics of this is the far majority, if not all, of the regulations and legislation dictated in this particular bill, upon what federal law enforcement can and can't do in Connecticut, is going to be overturned. And so that's why, when I'm speaking to the pragmatic aspect of this, is actually, let's look at what this bill actually does. If that is the case, and again, there's barrels of case law that dictate exactly that, all this is a bill dictating policy and restrictions and imposing further liability on our local police and our troopers. And I've seen how that's impacted them. I was a state rep in 2020 when the defund movement was moving across the state capitol and across our mw/rr 169 country, and the defund police movement passed legislation putting further liability on our local police and troopers, stripping them of their immunities. If you speak with any trooper or any local cop throughout the state, they will tell you what that's done to their recruitment and retainment. And we've sat around in this building looking around and wondering why. Why? I wonder why no one wants to be a police officer any longer. We're the problem for that. We did that. We were part of that. And now we're passing a law that is only truly going to apply at the end of the day, legally to them, putting further liability on them, stripping them of more immunities, putting more provisions that can get them arrested for misdemeanors if they're wearing a jacket and accidentally cover their badge. This is what we're doing pragmatically at the end of the day on the bill. It's nice, and I get it, I understand, to look at the political aspects of it and pretend it's not going to be challenged, and to pretend that it's going to continue to remain law. But we have to understand the pragmatic aspects of this. And at the end of the day, all this boils down to is a bill that once again attacks our police and attacks our state troopers. Men and women that we all finally, fortunately, have realized now in 2026 are incredibly trained and incredible at doing the job they are born to do, which is to protect their local communities. We should all be thanking them, as opposed to imposing policy upon them to make their jobs more difficult, to protect us. And despite all the political footballs we can have on a bill like this, because of the reality that we live in under the confines of the constitution, all we're left with is once again another anti-cop bill from Hartford. All while recruitment is getting harder and harder, understandably so, and retainment is getting harder and harder. I thank our local police. I thank our troopers. I appreciate what they mw/rr 170 do. For one, they should get thanks from us as opposed to judgment every single time in this building. Thank you, Madam President.
Thank you so much. Will you remark further? Good evening, Senator Looney.
Good evening, Madam President. Speaking in support of the bill as amended, Madam President, this bill in no way violates the principle of the Supremacy Clause in the US Constitution, properly understood. What the bill does is uphold our principles of federalism and the Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution. And that Tenth Amendment, as we know, was part of the Bill of Rights. And the Bill of Rights were adopted after the fundamental part of the Constitution, because the nation was concerned that too much power was being given to the national government, in the unamended portion of the Constitution. And as part of the debate on ratification, supplemented by the Federalist Papers written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, the 10 Amendments that we now call the Bill of Rights were in effect, a promissory note to make people comfortable about supporting the underlying constitution. And the Tenth Amendment, the language of that is that powers that are not expressly granted to the federal government nor expressly prohibited to be exercised by the states shall be reserved to the states or to the people. So we have had a debate now since the end of the Constitution and the convention in 1787, at the beginning of our government under the new Constitution in 1789, and the adoption of the Bill of Rights a few years later, over what are the parameters of federalism? What is the proper scope of federal action and the proper scope of state action? mw/rr 171 One of the things that we have to recognize is our history leading up to that time. Our nation came out of an act of revolution, and there was a reaction against a powerful centralized government in London, so that in colonial America, the colonial legislatures were more popular and had broader-based support than the colonial governors, who were royal appointees. So there was more belief in local authority. So, that was carried on to the adoption of the Articles of Confederation, which gave virtually no power to the national government except power that was delegated to it by the states. Within a few years, that proved unworkable. We had Shays' Rebellion in Massachusetts and the inability to put down that tax revolt. And it seemed that the new nation was going to break apart because of a lack of a central strength before it was even started. So people like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington in the background as a presence, believed that the Constitution, that the Articles of Confederation had to be amended. So the initial impetus was an amendment, but when the constitution got underway, the convention got underway, it became clear that no mere amendment was going to be essential and adequate. And what happened, of course, then emerged the Constitution. Many of us think that, well, we were off and running with the Constitution. It was ratified after that convention, but the ratification battles were difficult and cliffhangers in many states. And the reason they were so difficult, there were so many cliffhangers, is that there was concern that too much power was being granted to the national government. And hence, we had protection of individual liberties, in the First Amendment in particular, and the Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments, and the protection of the rights of states to act under the Tenth Amendment. mw/rr 172 Now, Madam President, one of the things that I think was very important in the commentary made by Senator Sujata Gadkar-Wilcox earlier was the case of McCullough v. Maryland. And she pointed out there, that case ultimately upheld federal power. But initially, the determination had to be made whether the federal government had the power to create a national bank. So that was the threshold question because it was not a power listed in the Constitution. The necessary and proper clause, found by Chief Justice John Marshall, found that the power in the Constitution, the express power, regulating government finance, created the implied power to create a national bank. Hence, we had that expansion of federal authority. And seven years later, in the case of Gibbons versus Ogden in 1824, again, Justice Marshall dealt with a dispute between the State of New York and the State of New Jersey as to which state might control commerce in the Hudson River. And he said neither. That is a matter of interstate commerce. And, therefore, it is under federal authority. But as we see the line of cases throughout our history, when you have that expansion of federal power, it is generally in the context of the Commerce Clause, where federal power under the Commerce Clause needs to be upheld. In cases where the Commerce Clause is not involved, assertion of state power comes into play. And that is the case in the statute that we are proposing here in the bill that we are adopting. For instance, I think that was cited earlier in the case of United States versus Lopez that Senator Gadkar-Wilcox cited. In that case, struck down the Gun Free School Zones Act of 1990, ruling that federal regulation of gun possession near schools exceeded Congress's authority under the Commerce Clause and held that gun possession in a school zone is not an economic activity that substantially affects interstate commerce. mw/rr 173 So, while primarily the Commerce Clause case, it reinforced federalism and the Tenth Amendment. The Tenth Amendment is alive and well and needs to be, Madam President, if our dialogue of federalism is going to continue to go on. So, all of this, discussion today, that the provisions of this bill inherently violate, the Supremacy Clause, I think are beside the point, that, our traditions are, that powers that are not expressly vested in the federal government, or necessarily seen as reserved to the federal government by the Congress on the necessary and proper clause are reserved to the states. So our history is one of skepticism of federal power, not a broad-based acceptance of federal power, except in the narrow exceptions, mostly related to the Commerce Clause, whereby that power has been extended. So we've seen the pendulum swinging back. In addition, the United States versus Lopez, case of Printz versus the United States established the anti-commandeering doctrine that federal officials, and again the Brady handgun violence law, the court held that requiring local law enforcement to perform gun purchase or background checks violated the Tenth Amendment and the principle of dual sovereignty by imposing too much of a burden on state officials. And that concept of dual sovereignty has to be recognized as a fundamental constitutional principle, holding that state governments are not subordinate to the federal government and maintain independent sovereignty. Now, the words to the US Constitution, the Preamble. We the People, in order to form a more perfect union and the rest. We may think that it's only a rhetorical flourish, but that is not the case. The choice of the words We the People was in itself a conscious choice and a controversial one at the time. Because there were those who wanted the phrase, we the states or some other. But We the People was chosen because it carried with it the inherent content of saying that We the People convey authority both on the national mw/rr 174 governments and on the state governments, establishing the concept of dual sovereignty within the framework of the Constitution. That has been an uneasy balance ever since. Back and forth, there are times when the court has broadly upheld state authority and broadly -- other times, broadly upheld federal authority. We all know that in many cases, we have seen that the Lopez case was the first time in many years that the court put the brakes on federal authority and said that, that broad power is really primarily about commerce cases and not those dealing with other federal powers. So, the Prince case, again, establishing a limitation on commandeering law enforcement to act on -- to carry out a Federal mandate. The case of New York versus the United States, a few years earlier, also. In 1992, Congress ruled that Congress cannot compel states to enact or enforce federal regulatory programs, violating the Tenth Amendment. And, dealing with location of low-level radioactive waste policy amendments and said that there, the federal government attempted to, under its take title provisions, unconstitutionally commandeer the authority of state governments in that area. The more recent case, the Murphy case, regarding whether the state of New Jersey could be compelled to alter its law regarding sports betting, is another one where an attempt to deny state authority was overruled. That's a more recent case. So, Madam President, there is nothing in this legislation that interferes with the power of the federal government to frame immigration policy, to decide who may be here legitimately and who is not. But, it does recognize under our principles of federalism, dual sovereignty, and the Tenth Amendment that there is an inherent police power in the states to regulate safety issues within the states and to apply state law, and to also hold accountable federal officials who violate the Constitution by actions that they may take within a mw/rr 175 given state. Unless a state has the authority to assert that right and protect itself, our doctrine of federalism means nothing. And state laws mean nothing. Everything could be subsumed under the Supremacy Clause, and you would be able to say, well, the federal government can make laws regarding every subject and at all times, and limit state authority or deny state authority, override state authority, negate state authority. But we are saying here today that we are standing up for the principle of federalism and dual sovereignty, which has preserved our freedoms since the foundation of this government and the new constitution in replacement of the Articles of Confederation. So Madam President, I want to thank Senator Duff, I want to thank Senator Winfield, everyone who worked on this, and recognize that it is crucial. If we are going to stand up for our traditional constitutional principles of federalism, we must pass this bill this evening. Thank you, Madam President.
Thank you, Senator Looney. Will you remark further? If not, the machine is open, Mr. Clerk.
An immediate roll call vote has been ordered in the in the Senate. This is Senate Bill 397 as amended. An immediate roll call vote has been ordered in the vote has been ordered in the Senate. Senate Bill 397. We're now voting on the bill. This is Senate Bill 397 as amended. An immediate roll call vote in the Senate. An immediate roll call vote has been ordered in the Senate. We're now voting on the bill. This is the bill, SB 397, as amended. An immediate roll call vote has been ordered in the Senate on mw/rr 176 in the Senate.
Have all the senators voted? Have all the senators voted? Alright. Have all the senators voted? The machine is locked. Mr. Clerk, kindly announce the tally, please.
Total number voting 34 Total voting Yea 24 Total voting Nay 10 Absent, not voting 2
Legislation passes. And does Senator Martin, do you have a notation, sir?
Thank you, Madam President. Madam President, does the Clerk have Senate Agenda #2 on his desk?
Clerk is in possession of Senate Agenda Item 2, dated Tuesday, April 14, 2026.
Senator Duff. mw/rr 177
Thank you, Madam President. Madam President, move all items on Senate #2, dated Tuesday, April 14, 2026. We act upon as indicating that the agenda be incorporated by reference in Senate Journal and
So ordered. No. 2 REGULAR SESSION MATTER(S) RETURNED FROM COMMITTEE – to be tabled for the calendar. No New File: FINANCE, REVENUE AND BONDING COMMITTEE SB NO. 134 AN ACT ESTABLISHING AN AIRPORT DEVELOPMENT ZONE IN THE TOWN OF PLAINVILLE. FINANCE, REVENUE AND BONDING COMMITTEE SUBST. SB NO. 359 AN ACT AUTHORIZING THE DEFERRAL OF A PROPERTY REVALUATION. FINANCE, REVENUE AND BONDING COMMITTEE SB NO. 377 AN ACT ESTABLISHING A PERSONAL INCOME TAX DEDUCTION FOR MILITARY FUNERAL HONOR GUARD DETAIL COMPENSATION. FINANCE, REVENUE AND BONDING COMMITTEE SUBST. SB NO. 362 AN ACT CONCERNING REVISIONS TO STATUTES RELATING TO MUNICIPAL PROPERTY TAX ASSESSMENT. FINANCE, REVENUE AND BONDING COMMITTEE mw/rr 178 SB NO. 373 AN ACT ALLOWING A PERSONAL INCOME TAX DEDUCTION FOR STIPENDS PAID TO VOLUNTEER FIREFIGHTERS, VOLUNTEER FIRE POLICE OFFICERS AND VOLUNTEER AMBULANCE MEMBERS. FINANCE, REVENUE AND BONDING COMMITTEE SUBST. SB NO. 447 AN ACT ESTABLISHING A HOMESTEAD PROPERTY TAX EXEMPTION. APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE SUBST. SB NO. 410 AN ACT CONCERNING FIREFIGHTER CANCER. APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE SUBST. SB NO. 387 AN ACT CONCERNING ELECTION ADMINISTRATION OVERSIGHT. APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE SUBST. SB NO. 154 AN ACT REQUIRING CERTAIN AGENCIES TO REPORT COSTS ASSOCIATED WITH PROGRAMS SERVING CHILDREN AND FAMILIES. APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE SUBST. SB NO. 238 AN ACT CONCERNING EMERGENCY MEDICAL SERVICES RESPONSE TIME TRANSPARENCY. APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE SUBST. SB NO. 289 AN ACT CONCERNING FUNDING OF THE QUALITY METRICS PROGRAM FOR NURSING HOMES. APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE SUBST. SB NO. 316 AN ACT CONCERNING THE TESTING OF SOILS AT CERTAIN SOLAR FACILITIES. APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE SB NO. 329 AN ACT EXPANDING MEDICAID ELIGIBILITY FOR OLDER ADULTS WITH DISABILITIES. APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE SB NO. 350 AN ACT INCREASING THE PER DIEM RATE FOR MEMBERS OF THE STATE BOARD OF LABOR RELATIONS AND mw/rr 179 COMPENSATION FOR MEMBERS OF THE BOARD OF MEDIATION AND ARBITRATION. APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE SUBST. SB NO. 369 AN ACT ESTABLISHING VARIOUS REQUIREMENTS REGARDING ELEVATORS. APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE SB NO. 375 AN ACT CONCERNING SCHOOL MAPPING DATA SERVICES. APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE SUBST. SB NO. 380 AN ACT IMPLEMENTING THE RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE TASK FORCE TO SUPPORT PROMISE PROGRAMS IN THE STATE. (As amended by Senate Amendment Schedule "A" (LCO 3876)) APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE SUBST. SB NO. 386 AN ACT CONCERNING THE USE OF RANKED-CHOICE VOTING IN PARTY CAUCUSES, CONVENTIONS AND PRIMARIES, INCLUDING PRESIDENTIAL PREFERENCE PRIMARIES, AND IN CERTAIN MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS.
Thank you, Madam President. We have some journal notations, please.
Yes. Please proceed.
Thank you, Madam President. Senator Needleman, Senator Osten, Senator Hartley missed votes today due to business outside the chamber.
Thank you. The Journal will soon note. mw/rr 180
Thank you. I'd like to yield to Senator Martin, please.
Senator Martin, please.
Thank you, Madam President, for the journal notation. Senator Somers missed votes today due to illness.
Thank you, sir. Senator Duff.
Thank you, Madam President. Madam President, the 11:00 a.m., followed by a session around 01:00.
At around one, did you say, sir?
Around one. Yes. Tomorrow, Eastern Daylight Time.
Thank you, Madam President. Seeing no other points of personal privilege or announcement, I move that we adjourn, subject to the call of the chair. mw/rr 181
Thank you. We are adjourned. Go forth and govern. (On motion of Senator Duff of the 25th, the Senate at 7:29 p.m. adjourned subject to the call of the Chair.)