After an All-Nighter at the CT Capitol, Senate GOP Leader Chose 6-Mile Run Over Sleep

By Dan Haar, Columnist

May 6, 2026

The Senate pulled an all-nighter Tuesday night into Wednesday and finished its last bill not long before 8 a.m.

A bleary-eyed Harding drove home to Brookfield, stopping off at his law office to drop something off first.

Now it was nearly 9 a.m.

Most people with jobs on the East Coast were clocking in.

Harding, too, had a long shift ahead of him, the final day of the 2026 Connecticut General Assembly session. Any bills not adopted by midnight would die. His small caucus of 11 Senate Republicans wanted to kill some legislation and pass some. One last day of battling, then the traditional celebration.

But for the moment, Harding had two precious hours before he needed to get going.

Run or sleep?

“I went home and I went for a run,” he told me when I called about a budget dispute late Wednesday morning. “I had to get rid of the imbalance.”

It was 6 1/2 miles, in a gym aptly named Club 24, not on the hilly roads of Western Connecticut. He runs outside for races and an occasional jaunt at Candlewood Lake.

“I balanced it in my head. I said, ‘I could go home and sleep for two hours but I’d probably be more tired when I woke up,'” Harding said. “I had energy….I try to get 6 miles in every day, so that’s what I did.”

At 38, that’s a privilege of age, I suppose, though Harding added he has a hernia so he’s not lifting weights.

One weight he had to lift, which all Republican leaders have to lift, is how long to debate bills his caucus opposes.

Connecticut tradition allows unlimited debate, so the opposition party holds a lot of power in the waning days.

Harding, like most Republicans at the Capitol Wednesday, blamed Senate leadership for the all-nighter.

“Sen. Fazio and I were talking last night and we said, ‘It’s equivalent to starting your term paper at 8 p.m. the night before it was due,'” Harding told me, referring to Sen. Ryan Fazio, R-Greenwich, another 30-something who’s running a different kind of race these days, for the party’s nomination for governor.

“They can’t blame the minority party for filibustering the last couple of days because they control the calendar,” Harding said.

Senate Democrats do indeed blame Republicans for dragging out these debates, including a string of them this week – limits on ICE agents, homeschooling rules, a gun control measure and of course, the state budget among them.

I asked House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, a runner who’s just four years older than Harding, what he would do with two hours to spare on no sleep.

“I love my runs but I would have slept,” he quipped.

Harding admitted he wasn’t wide awake for the whole all-nighter at the Capitol. “There was probably about 30 minutes when I dozed off sitting on the couch,” he said.

With that, he jumped in the shower, put on a different suit and headed back to Hartford for the final day.

https://www.ctinsider.com/news/article/stephen-harding-ct-capitol-legislature-22244936.php