Hartford, Ct. – Rather than negotiating a state budget in good faith, House Republican leader Themis Klarides spent her Saturday engaging with internet trolls and lying about the Republican budget.

Let’s review the record. Despite Klarides’s false claim that Democrats “don’t have the courage to override” Governor Malloy’s veto of the disastrous GOP budget, House Democrats convened a special session to give Klarides and her GOP colleagues the opportunity to vote on an override. Instead of taking that opportunity and voting, Klarides and all of her GOP colleagues refused to even put forward the motion to override.

Beyond lying about the process, Themis Klarides and her Republican colleagues have spent months lying about the content of her budget. They promised a ‘no-tax-increase budget,’ but their actual proposal contained nearly $1 billion of new taxes. They promised structural changes, but not only does their proposal increase the deficit in coming years, it resorts to many of the Rowland-era gimmicks that got Connecticut into this mess in the first place. And they promised to hold communities harmless, but their proposal strips education funding from less affluent cities like Waterbury while increasing funding to the wealthiest communities in the state. Put simply, the Republican budget was chock full of false promises.

“Our advice to Themis Klarides is simple: Stop misleading the public if you are claiming to work in good faith to resolve the budget crisis that you’ve helped create,” said Connecticut Democratic Party Executive Director Michael Mandell. “There are serious challenges, and we need serious leaders.”