*Old County Jail Museum in semi-bucolic Tolland, Conn.*

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Chest-thumping is resounding in Connecticut's suburbs as Gov. Dannel Malloy proposes to transfer their state financial aid to the cities. The thumping may be loudest in Tolland, where at a Town Council meeting the other day Town Manager Steve Werbner pandered to a standing-room-only audience.

Werbner said: "They've taken a town like Tolland, which has done every thing right for many years, and penalized us for all that we've done."

Tolland is a great town but what it and many other suburbs have done "right" has been mainly to zone out the poor and dysfunctional by minimizing cheap apartments, figuring that this way the burden of the slob culture coddled by the welfare system could be confined to the cities forever.

Not anymore. With the governor's budget the government and welfare classes are cannibalizing the state even though taxpayers are tapped out. This cannibalizing is being done in the name of alleviating poverty, though for more than half acentury Connecticut's cities have only manufactured poverty.

The failure of state poverty policy to achieve its nominal objective has made it hard to blame the suburbs for zoning out the poor. But at last the suburbs may have to answer financially for their indifference to that failure. Maybe the suburbs now will discover that doing "everything right" requires them to start holding the poverty factories and their enablers to account.

xxx

For weeks the left, especially inConnecticut, where it is led by Governor Malloy, has been indignantly insisting that the federal government should not try to coerce states and municipalities into helping to enforce federal immigration law, as President Trump wants them to. On immigration the political left, especially in Connecticut, has taken a state's rights position and even a nullification position.

So what happened last week when the Trump administration adopted its own states' rights position, withdrawing Obama administration "guidelines" directing states to allow male students who want to be female and female students who want to be male to use whichever gender's bathroom they choose?

The left freaked out that the federal government now will leave the bathroom issue to the states, though there is no federal legislationspecifically addressing the point, as there is with immigration. Governor Malloycalled the federal action "outrageous." It seems that coercion by the government must be reserved for enforcing a liberal agenda and nobody else's.

xxx

People from 50 churches around Connecticut and New York who gathered last weekend at a synagogue in Hamden seemed to think that God wants the UnitedStates to have no immigration law. According to the New Haven Register, they discussed not only how to protect ordinary illegal immigrants against deportation but also even illegal immigrants who have been criminally convicted.

The event's organizer, Rabbi Herbert Brockman, of Hamden's Congregation Mishkan Israel, quoted Leviticus from the Old Testament: "When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him."

The event's organizer, Rabbi Herbert Brockman of Hamden's Congregation Mishkan Israel, quoted Leviticus from the Old Testament: "When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him." So is any immigration law enforcement necessarily doing wrong? Besides, just how much moral authority does Leviticus retain when its very next chapter, not quoted by the rabbi, demands the murder of homosexuals?

The immigration issue is complicated. It involves not just what to do with the estimated 11 million people who have broken into the country illegally or stayed here illegally, and their innocent children, but also preserving the country's secular and democratic culture, which some immigrants abhor and want to destroy. It also involves justice for the low-skilled native-born facing greater competition for jobs, and the value, if there is to be any, of citizenship itself. The meeting in Hamden displayed the faction in the controversy that refuses to acknowledge all these issues. In pursuit of sanctuary cities, this faction is giving the country sanctimony cities.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn., and a frequent contributor to New England Diary.

Connecticut has a failure of immigration-law enforcement just as big as the recent one in San Francisco, although its location -- Norwich -- hasn't been glamorous enough to gain similar attention, despite outstanding journalism by the local newspaper, the Bulletin.

In San Francisco an illegal alien and repeat felon who has been deported from the United States many times has been charged with shooting a young woman to death on a tourist pier. Before the murder city police were holding the illegal alien on other charges, and federal immigration authorities had asked to be informed of his release so they could collect him. But San Francisco is a "sanctuary city" whose political correctness obstructs immigration-law enforcement. So the Feds were not notified and the illegal alien was not deported again as he should have been.

In Norwich an illegal alien who had just been released from prison after serving 17 years in prison for attempted murder in that city was charged there again last month with the murder of a young woman in her apartment. While Connecticut has declared itself a "sanctuary state," its obstruction of immigration-law enforcement does not go as far as San Francisco's.

At least Connecticut will cooperate with federal immigration authorities for the deportation of felons, and the state apparently notified the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office of this illegal alien's imminent release.

But ICE did nothing about it, and the agency's explanation is contemptible. That is, ICE claims that, upon his release from prison, it couldn't deport the illegal alien now charged with the Norwich murder because he would not produce any documents associating him with his native country, Haiti. So having attempted murder once already in Norwich, this illegal alien was simply set free and ICE forgot about him. Now he is charged with murder itself.

If ICE maintains its excuse -- that illegal aliens can't be deported unless they cooperate by producing adequate documentation -- then every illegal alien in the country can gain permanent residency here simply by destroying his documents.

Norwich's U.S. representative, Joseph D. Courtney, is pressing ICE for a better explanation. He should be joined by the rest of Connecticut's congressional delegation, the state's news organizations, and all concerned citizens. Even in politically correct Connecticut an innocent life must be worth more than this.

XXX

In a recent letter to the editor a reader from Tolland scolded this writer's June 29 column for not having been impressed by the forgiveness given the racist mass murderer in Charleston by the survivors of his victims. "Powell apparently knows little about the teachings of the New Testament," the reader wrote, adding: "Radical forgiveness, even of one's worst enemies, is the way of the cross."

But one can be familiar with the New Testament and willing to let people follow "radical forgiveness" and the way of the cross i their personal lives and still maintain that these things can be contrary to national survival -- and national survival was the point of that column, national survival as sustained by the astounding loyalty of black people to their country despite centuries of abuse, abuse that continued with the mas murder in Charleston.

People can make of forgiveness whatever they will in their personal lives, as a matter of religion, as a psychology of life, or whatever. That won't harm anyone else. But a nation is infinitely bigger than that; it is a collective for which responsibility is shared, and all who are part of it will share its fate.

If one believes that this country, more than any other, aspires to uphold individual liberty within democracy and is, more than any other, the universal nation, then any subversion of it, such as an attempt to terrorize one of its components and start a race war, is the worst treason and, in the national sense, must never be forgiven.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.