Will DeLuca be expelled?

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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 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.