Jun
16
A day after mocking the state of Illinois, I couldn’t pass without comment the absurdity of the situation in my former home state. (h/t: Dan Riehl)
Warring state lawmakers want a judge to decide the fate of the state Senate today after they failed to reach a power-sharing deal.
“We need judicial intervention,” turncoat Sen. Pedro Espada said Monday after a fruitless, hour-long negotiating session with Democratic senators.
Espada, a Bronx Democrat, and GOP lawmakers want Supreme Court Justice Thomas McNamara to rule that last week’s coup – which installed Espada as Senate president and Sen. Dean Skelos (R-L.I.) as majority leader – was on the up and up. The Republicans’ call for judicial intervention was an about-face from their earlier stance arguing the matter should be left to legislators to decide.
Democrats, who insist the mutiny was illegal, said Espada and the Republicans care only about the leadership titles and not resolving the stalemate.
I’ll get to the turncoat comment in a second.
And there’s more to this delicious story as Captain Ed reports:
Unfortunately, though, there seems to be few ways out of a 31-31 impasse. Normally, the lieutenant governor would simply preside over the state senate and cast tie-breaking votes, which in this case would give Democrats control. However, New York does not have a lieutenant governor. When David Paterson replaced the disgraced Eliot Spitzer as governor, New York did not require him to appoint a replacement for his own office, and the legislature didn’t provide for one, either. Paterson himself has no official power to compel the state senate to do anything, and with his approval ratings somewhere below that of George Bush, he has no political clout, either.
This is one of those situations where no-one comes out looking good. In order to switch control of the New York Senate the GOP had to turn to two corrupt Democrats. Meanwhile, the Democrats acted like spoiled children whose parents had taken away their favorite toy.
The best part of all this: this is not exactly something new to New York politics. In fact, New York has been this way since roughly the time George III was starting to get all goofy. As Ed says, it’s somewhat more palatable because it involves incompetence more than corruption, though it’s got a bit of the later as well.
This is how bad New York is: Al D’Amato was a crass individual who got into trouble more than a few times for making inappropriate ethnic slurs, and yet he was probably the best Senator the state has had in half a century or more. This is a state with several million registered Democrats but which had to import Hillary Clinton in order to run for the Senate. And the other Senator – the less said the better.
For 12 years the state was run by a “Republican” governor who decided to stop doing anything meaningful roughly halfway through his second term. He was replaced by a guy who evidently couldn’t find a good hooker in the third most populous state in the country, and he was in turn replaced by a guy who I am not entirely sure is aware that he is in fact the governor. Meanwhile. the city of New York is run by an egomaniac bent on nannying the residents of the city, yet there’s probably not a viable candidate who would be even remotely half as good at doing the job. Amazingly, in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by something like 7 million to my mother (I exaggerate slightly) the city will have been in non-Democratic hands for two entire decades by the end of the third Bloomberg term.
Yes folks, this is New York. Now you can understand why the Mets are run so incompetently: it’s sort of a tradition in the state.
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Ah yes, the “turncoat” comment from above. Keep in mind this was a straight news story and not an opinion piece. Does anybody else think that’s rather a loaded term to be using in such a story? Yes, it’s technically accurate, but harsh nonetheless. Then again, this is the New York Daily News, a tabloid that makes the people at the New York Post shake their heads in disbelief.
Comments
4 Comments so far
Though I generally agree with your comment about D’Amato, one somewhat-recent superior New York Senator did immediately spring to mind:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_L._Buckley
Ah, you are correct sir. Can’t believe I forgot about Buckley. And I guess Moynihan wasn’t bad for a Democrat.
But at least all of the chaos means that the state government isn’t actually DOING anything. Sadly, it’s reached the point where I have to consider inaction as always the preferable option given the parties involved.
Bonus Fun Fact: Hiram Monserrate, the other turncoat, has his district office located directly across the street from my childhood home (and where my parents still reside).
I am not sure what you have against Kenneth Keating, Charles Goodell, or Jacob Javits. One may disagree with someone’s policy preferences without suggesting they are in inferior public servant to the likes of Alphonse d’Amato, who coarsened public life with his vulgarity, corrupted public policy with ceaseless pork-barrelling, and had a history of running shakedown schemes during his time as Supervisor of Hempstead. Once upon a time, New York’s political parties ran class acts for marquee races. The scandal is that the man who could depose d’Amato is notable for viciousness and an absence of scruple.