Not satisfied in having two of the worst U.S. senators in Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, Connecticut has twice elected (via the timely appearance of fell-off-a-truck ballots in Bridgeport) the nation’s worst governor, Dannel Malloy, who has taken a small state of considerable wealth, natural beauty and historic inventiveness and bankrupted it. Now, having wrecked a state that, like California, one would have thought was unwreckable, the chief Nut of the Nutmeg State has decided to make it harder for the law-abiding to exercise a constitutional right:

Gun rights supporters and state Republican lawmakers are fighting huge gun permit fee increases proposed by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, saying they would price many people out of being able to exercise their Second Amendment right to bear arms. The Democratic governor wants to quadruple the five-year renewal fee for pistol permits from $70 to $300 as part of his plan to offset a budget deficit estimated at $1.7 billion in the next fiscal year. For people getting their first five-year pistol permits, the fees would increase from $140 to $370, which includes a $70 charge collected by cities and towns. The proposed fees would be among the highest in the country. Fees for background checks needed to obtain pistol permits also would increase, from $50 to $75. Malloy’s pistol permit and background check fee plan would raise nearly $12 million a year in additional revenue. The National Rifle Association called Malloy’s proposal “outrageous.”

Well, of course it is. It’s also very unlikely unconstitutional, as we’ll no doubt learn once Judge Gorsuch becomes Justice Gorsuch. To hinder the free exercise of a constitutional right is to, in effect, deny that right, and by forcing legal gun owners in Connecticut to help pay for Malloy and the Democrats’ binge years of out of control spending on favored constituencies is exactly the kind of politics that convinced the nation to vote for President Trump last fall.