The Connecticut General Assembly has been around for nearly 400 years and in all that time, it has never expelled a member, which would indicate that either the General Assembly has been without sin or its membership has ignored misconduct time and again over the centuries.
Presumably, the Legislators acted or failed to act in all those years out of a reluctance to overturn an election or, to be less noble about it, to protect a pal.
Either motive may explain why the six Democratic and Republican senators charged with investigating Sen. Louis DeLuca are giving him every opportunity to offer alibis and rationalizations that have nothing to do with the facts.
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The six senators know DeLuca tried to take the law into his own hands, something a lawmaker, of all people, should avoid. They have him on tape arranging with indicted garbage hauler James Galante to have someone call on his granddaughter’s husband and give him a "bitch slapping" because DeLuca believed he was abusing his new wife.
There are also recordings of DeLuca meeting with a federal agent he believed to be a Galante underling, refusing, but never reporting, a $5,000 bribe and telling him he’d do anything in his power to assist Galante in the Legislature.
DeLuca has sought to rationalize his actions by tearing up and portraying himself as a loving old grandpa trying to protect his granddaughter from an abusive husband. He further claimed he was driven to seek illegal assistance because his cry for help was callously ignored by the Waterbury Police Department.
After hearing all of this, Hartford Courant capitol reporters Chris Keating and Mark Pazniokas pointed out on their Web site that not one senator questioned the relevance of DeLuca’s alibis. Do the actions or inactions of the in-law or the police chief, they wrote, "excuse the senator from dealing with a trash hauler whom he believed to be ‘on the fringes of organized crime?’"
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All this happened at a comic opera of a hearing in which DeLuca read a sworn statement under oath and then was allowed to answer about 50 of the senators’ questions without being sworn. After that, the committee sent him home to look over his answers before letting his questioners know which of them are the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and which are not. DeLuca’s lawyer had advised him not to answer questions under oath because he feared the FBI, which sent two agents to monitor the hearing, might misinterpret DeLuca’s sworn replies.
In his testimony, of both the sworn and the "we’ll get back to you" variety, DeLuca managed to place most of the emphasis on his loving grandpa role. But DeLuca’s granddaughter denies her husband beat her, as does the husband, Mark Colella. Neil O’Leary, the police chief, also denies DeLuca ever sought police assistance, which he said he would have provided. None of these witnesses has testified because under the rules of this investigation, DeLuca will be the sole witness.
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All of DeLuca’s alibis and rationalizations are interesting enough, but they have nothing to do with the investigation. There’s a strong case for expelling DeLuca, regardless of the nobility or baseness of his motives or whether the granddaughter, the husband and the chief are telling the truth.
The committee should weigh the factual evidence and nothing more in determining if he should become the first and only senator to be expelled from a General Assembly heretofore composed only of living and dead saints during the past four centuries.
The hearings resume Nov. 1, which is, appropriately, All Saints Day.
Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.
Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton’s Main Street in 1985.Provided
Fall storage crop harvests amid soil building cover crops at Adamah Farm in Falls Village. Janna Siller 
