Criminal Investigation Clouds House Republican Leadership Contest.

A looming federal criminal investigation threatens to upend the House Republican instinct for deference. The caucus, long seen as the least effective in the legislature, has not had a proper leadership contest since 1984. That was the last time House Republicans enjoyed a majority in the lower chamber.

Eight years of Norwalk Republican Lawrence Cafero’s double act as legislator and de facto lobbyist for the government affairs office of the Hartford law firm Brown Rudnick, for which he is a “contract partner,” has left the House Republicans in tawdry disrepute. Cafero, who strained to stage manage his departure announcement from the House earlier this year, was soiled beyond redemption when federal criminal enforcement authorities used a 2013 campaign finance trial of a Democratic operative to highlight the intersection of campaign cash and Cafero’s office refrigerator. House Republicans revealed their timid spirit by remaining silent during and after the humiliation played out in a federal courtroom.

All the errors and insults to the public interest inflicted during the eight year Cafero era are embodied in the leadership bid of his incurious enforcer and lieutenant Themis Klarides. She’s running on a ticket of sorts that includes Representative Vincent Candelora, notable for his role as head of a campaign committee implicated in campaign finance scandals. A cipher of the type contemporary politics produces in troubling numbers, Candelora represents only the sullied silence of the embarrassing past.

House Republicans became the focus of a second federal criminal investigation in February when FBI agents camped out at the Legislative Office Building and questioned caucus members about their association with a Florida campaign services firm. The high profile and extended swarm on the LOB claimed Cafero’s chief of staff, who announced he is a “person of interest” in the federal investigation.

The federal investigation continues, Daily Ructions can report. It threatens to splatter Republican leaders and others. Enough caucus members have roused themselves out of their long stupor to inaugurate a decisive break with the Cafero era and its exploitations of supine Republicans. It has fallen to Shelton state Representative Jason Perillo to take the fight for the future to the discredited acolytes of the past.

Sensate House Republicans know from observing the federal criminal investigations that have marked Connecticut politics that these ordeals never fade away. They explode, sometimes more than a year after they first come to public attention. Ask two-time loser John Rowland.

Next year’s legislative session will feature budget issues that require the full attention of the House Republicans. A federal criminal investigation that explodes over the House Republican leadership-directly or as collateral damage-will render them useless at a critical hour for the state’s imperiled future.