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10/14/2020 08:30 AMDave Rubino’s approach to serving the 23rd General Assembly District might be described as broadly informed and honed to local action.
Rubino, a Democrat who lives in Old Lyme, is a father of two and is married to a public school teacher. He’s a human rights attorney who has lived and worked in countries “most people have never heard of,” he said, as well as several other U.S. states. He has never before been elected to public office but has worked with national and state governments on legislation and policy.
He is running against incumbent Devin Carney, a Republican.
“I’ve spent a lot of my career working internationally, primarily funded by the U.S. State Department...from the Bush administration, then the Obama administration, and the Trump administration, mostly in dictatorships,” he said. He spent that time “[l]iving in places with my family where people didn’t have a say, and...where they certainly loved their country, but felt helpless.”
For more than a decade, he worked “with parliaments and legislators in these countries to do things like criminal justice reform—I helped reform the criminal procedure code, for example, in the Republic of Georgia, the human trafficking code in Tajikistan...working with the host governments to draft them,” he said.
“So in terms of legislative drafting and addressing specific policy, that’s part of my professional background,” he said.
It was his experience abroad that “guided me toward the decision that when I did come back to the United States, I was going to make sure that I became very directly involved in democracy,” he said. “For me, that meant running for office.”
Priorities
In the 2021 legislative session, “the primary thing we’re going to need to deal with is the repercussions of the COVID crisis” from the standpoint of public health, the economy, and education, he said. “I think it needs to be all systems go on comprehensive policy, to address COVID.
“We’re also in the middle of the most significant racial justice movement since the Civil Rights era,” he continued. “[W]e need to address it comprehensively. Because it isn’t just about criminal justice reform, it’s also about education reform, it’s also about political reform...And it even intersects with some of the issues with regard to COVID.
“I’m a human rights lawyer,” he said. “[M]y entire career has been spent...protecting vulnerable populations, working with vulnerable populations.”
In the U.S. he’s worked on voter rights litigation nationally for a think tank and represented the NAACP in various states.
He said we’re also at a crucial time “when it comes to our climate, and when it comes to our environment...And it’s easy to backburner that because there’s so much else going on in the world right now. But we can’t. We just don’t have the time to do so.
“[W]e have to realize that this is more than just about the climate and the climate alone, because the economic impacts and the economic solutions are something we need to think about as well,” he continued.
At the vice-presidential debate on Oct. 7, “there was a dispute about the value of transitioning away from fossil fuels, to cleaner energy. And I strongly support that transition,” Rubino said.
Runbino said we should be investing in retraining workers in fossil fuel industries to “work in the new economy that will be based on clean energy.”
From National to State Level
What’s happening on the national stage will have a direct impact on Connecticut, Rubino said, and he is certain Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett will be confirmed.
“That means to me almost assuredly...that we will no longer have Roe v. Wade,” he said. “We will no longer have the Affordable Care Act. We may not even have Obergefell [v. Hodges], which is the decision which made same-sex marriage legal nationally.”
He expects further deregulation that will negatively impact environmental protections.
“Each and every one of those battles goes from the national level to the state level,” he continued. “So we have to make sure we’re shored up against all of these issues here in the state of Connecticut, because they just will have dropped down from being the law of the land to being state specific.”
Rubino said the temptation of blue states like Connecticut is to think they’re fine because they already have protections for women’s reproductive rights.
“[I]t’s easy to think...we don’t need to worry about it here. It’s just other states,” he said.
“But that’s not the case,” he continued. “Because once Roe v. Wade gets overturned, the domino effect goes like this: Other states, red states that have conservative governors and legislators, will begin passing other types of legislation that [are] now not possible, like personhood legislation saying that a fetus is a person from the moment of conception [and] is protected.”
“[T]hen we come into some issues here in Connecticut, because once that happens in other states, the moment a pregnant woman sets foot in our state, there becomes a bit of a legal argument,” he said. “What about that fetus? He was he was a citizen in the state of Virginia, one week ago, is he a citizen now and entitled to protection?
“And so we need to begin to think longer term about how we’re going to protect ourselves against these eventualities,” he continued. “Because when Roe v. Wade falls, that’s when the fight begins.”
Rubino is similarly fatalistic about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) being struck down, resulting in the removal of protections for pre-existing conditions as well as insurance for dependents up to the age of 26.
“Connecticut has some protections,” Rubino said. “Massachusetts had essentially a version of [the ACA] so states can implement similar programs to ensure that their citizens are protected.
“I believe that health care is a human right,” he said. “I’ve lived in many countries around the world, I’ve traveled to many countries around the world, I’ve seen where the health care systems can look like in other places, and how functional they are, and actually how efficient they are.
“[W]e have a real problem, and part of it is that we don’t have the bargaining power we need with the insurance companies,” he said. “And you get that bargaining power by everybody deciding together joining together [and saying] we are your customers, and this is what we will pay.
“We have to realize that we don’t operate in a vacuum,” Rubino said. “And if we treat ourselves as if we do operate in a vacuum, it will be to the detriment of our district.
“[I]f we want to solve the bigger issues, we have to start in our own backyard,” he continued. “And that’s one of the reasons why I want to run—because I think I’m well positioned to do that. I’ve been doing it my whole career. I’ve been standing up for people my whole career. And that’s what I plan to do if I get to Hartford.”
Editor's note: An earlier version of this story did not accurately refer to the Oct. 7 debate as the vice presidential debate and was instead written in a way to indicate the debate referenced was between the 23rd District candidates.