PlanetAlbany

A letter from Rep. Chris Gibson (NY-20)

February 25, 2011 Dear ROBERT: Thank you for contacting me regarding Title X funding. It is good to hear from you. Recently, the House of Representatives approved H.R. 1, a continuing resolution (CR) to fund the federal government for the remainder of the fiscal year. I supported the continuing resolution because our nation is facing a fiscal emergency and this bill cut more than $100 billion in discretionary spending for the remainder of the FY11 fiscal year. While I was encouraged by the dollar amount that was cut, I took issue with the manner in which it carried out. In an effort to achieve $100 billion in savings, House appropriators combed the federal budget and significantly reduced some programs, while completely eliminating other programs. Family planning funds through Title X, which I support, was included in a long list of eliminated programs. I recognize that these funds go to health centers that provide important health services for woman. For these reasons, I believe the decision to eliminate this program was the wrong approach. Both parties were responsible for growing our national debt, and righting our fiscal house, will require sacrifice from all Americans. I have tried to lead by example, by suspending my family's military pension after 26 years in the Army. In an effort to make the cuts more proportional, I offered a substitute amendment that proposed an across-the-board cut to all programs within each agency. This amendment cut more than $100 billion and all programs, including defense were on the table. Importantly, it would not have eliminated any programs. While Congress has tough decision to make about each program in the upcoming budget process, I believed it was necessary for all Americans to share the sacrifice for the first major cut. While my amendment failed, I will continue to advocate for a proportional approach to our budget debate as the discussion with the Senate and the President advances. While painful at times, these cuts should be felt by all Americans. As you may know, Title X funding prohibits the use of funds for abortion procedures. Included in the continuing resolution was an amendment, which I supported, to eliminate federal funding to the organization Planned Parenthood. While this organization provides a wide variety of valuable health services for women, according to the latest data available, Planned Parenthood received more than $363 million in federal tax dollars. Additionally, reports indicate that they perform hundreds of thousands of abortions in a given a year. In line with the intent of current law, I do not support the use of tax dollars for abortion. While not every Planned Parenthood performs abortions, the umbrella organization has long blurred the lines and has proven undeserving of tax dollars. I believe we need to develop a better mechanism to ensure women have access to low cost health services, while ensuring tax dollars do not flow to abortion providers. This is an important distinction, and one that I will continue to make when discussing this difficult issue. I recognize that abortion is a divisive and deeply emotional issue for many New Yorkers. I will do my best to advocate issues, like adoption reform, that will attempt to find middle ground on this contentious issue. Thank you, again, for contacting me with your thoughts. Please don't hesitate to inform me of your concerns in the future through my website http://gibson.house.gov or over the phone at (202) 225-5614.

Sincerely, Chris Gibson Member of Congress

--That's the letter, which seems to me considerably better than the routine PR response one might expect from a congressional office. And Gibson's vote against funding for Planned Parenthood is reason enough to celebrate his defeat of Scott Murphy last November.

Hubbard batting one for two

Albany Bishop Howard Hubbard's homily in response to the Mercure verdict is not exactly a mea culpa (which would have been a good idea), but does include these powerful rhetorical questions cutting to the heart of the matter: "How could men of God be doing the work of the devil? How could bishops be more concerned about avoiding scandal and preserving the image of the Church than protecting children?"

On his dealings with Gov. Andrew Cuomo, however, Hubbard has been made to look foolish and feckless by a canon lawyer. While the bishop has mounted a defense, the strikes against his position include multiple provocations -- not just the governor's disinclination to marry housemate Sandra Lee (who says: "We don't even think about it, and nobody says anything") and support of gay marriage but, crucially, Cuomo's absolutist positions in favor of unrestricted abortion and embryonic stem cell research. It may be nice to have a governor and his lady strolling over occasionally from the Executive Mansion to the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, a politician who when he was attorney general kept a portrait of Thomas More (the Holbein print) in his Capitol office. Yet as More put it in Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons": "It profits a man nothing to trade his soul for the whole world, but for Wales ..." And as another Catholic Thomas, Archbishop Becket, said in T.S. Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral":

... For every life and every act
Consequence of good and evil can be shown.
And as in time results of many deeds are blended
So good and evil in the end become confounded.

Lincoln in Albany, 150 years ago today

Albany gets an entry in Disunion, the splendid New York Times blog about the onset of the Civil War. There is (at least I think it's still there) a small exhibit at the Capitol about Lincoln in New York, at the foot of the Senate staircase.

Tone-deaf in Senate

It's not just the majority leader sounding clueless about ethics reform, it's also the leader of the New York State Senate Ethics Committee, who was quoted recently as saying: "The people who I represent, they want something done about the economy, their jobs and about taxes. Yes, they want to have their faith restored in government, and we're going to get there -- but it's not on the top of [the list]." Also the deputy majority leader, the guy actually negotiating the bill, who says: “I don’t think there’s any hold-up on the Senate side. I think there’s hold-up on negotiating different points among the three parties. There’s issues involving who polices who, who gets appointments, that sort of thing, the same issues that have come up in the Capitol for the last 100 years.”

If these Republican Senate leaders -- Dean Skelos, Andrew Lanza and Tom Libous -- mean their statements to be reassuring, they are wildly off the mark. It's astonishing that they are letting Democratic Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a pillar of the Albany status quo throughout his long career, look like a reformer in contrast. (And Republicans in the Assembly have let the issue get away from them.)

There is a cynical but defensible case to be made for the Senate deep-sixing redistricting reform, perhaps by tying it to a demand for a reversal of last year's law which stops upstate districts from including prisoners as residents. There is even a cynical case to be made for Long Island senators trying to protect their school districts from budget cuts.

But there is no case at all for the current state of affairs in Albany in which legislators -- including the most powerful ones like Skelos and Silver -- can and do conceal their private-sector clients and income (which likely dwarfs what they are paid by the taxpayers). It is a recipe for conflict of interest and corruption, as the felony conviction of the prior Republican Senate leader, Joe Bruno, demonstrates.

There have been many other cases of corruption among members of both parties, and vast amounts of hypocrisy on both sides. The Senate Democrats, for example, now calling for ethics and redistricting reform, failed to enact it when they were in power, when their leader, Malcolm Smith, said: "With the Democrats in control of the State Senate, we are going to draw the lines so that Republicans will be in oblivion in the state of New York for the next 20 years."

The Republicans can only afford so much cynicism. Blocking full disclosure of legislators' private incomes and clients would be a bridge too far, not just bad public policy but a defense of corruption that would be impossible to explain to the public.

The Mercure verdict

Gary Mercure, a former Roman Catholic priest in the Diocese of Albany, was convicted today of raping two altar boys in the late 1980s. The trial was held in Massachusetts, where Mercure had taken the boys on trips. There is evidence that he committed many more rapes in the state of New York, where he was protected by the statute of limitations.

I related some personal history with Mercure and a couple of his fellow offenders more than two years ago, and have since recalled another detail, how my son was once up on the altar with him during Mass with other children in the early-to-mid 1990s (before Mercure suddenly left the parish without explanation), in some kind of dress-up event. My son was wearing a coat of many colors like Joseph from the Old Testament, which caused Mercure a moment of good-natured confusion with the New Testament Joseph. It is chilling to consider how close to danger was my son, and infuriating that some Catholic priests continue to minimize and deny the disastrous nature of this scandal, thereby continuing the damage.

That old blog item was somewhat critical of Albany Bishop Howard Hubbard, so it is only fair to note that the bishop and the church have learned something. Warren County DA Kate Hogan, who tipped off authorities in Massachusetts about Mercure, testified at his trial about how she herself had been tipped off by the Diocese of Albany. The diocese issued a statement today noting how it now has a policy of advising law enforcement about complaints of sexual abuse. It conducted its own investigation in 2008, and as a result permanently barred Mercure from ministry. Today's statement said "Gary Mercure’s attacks on children were sinful, criminal and reprehensible." I don't know if Mercure believes in the existence of sin anymore. I do.

How not to cut

The problem with the Cuomo administration's initial vagueness on the budget, and lack of vigorous mandate relief, is that spending will tend to get reduced in the wrong places. So instead of reforming and downsizing special education, or having teachers make contributions again to their future pensions, or restraining administrators' pay (which the governor has only hinted at), you get the proposed closure of two elementary schools in Schenectady County -- to the potential great damage of the small communities they anchor.

The superintendent of the Schalmont School District blames the prospect of state budget-cutting and a property tax cap for the upcoming decision to close the Mariaville and Woestina elementary schools. The Daily Gazette editorializes in favor (no link; paywall), reversing its stand of a decade ago. Back then, the district's main focus was on closing Woestina in Rotterdam Junction. When the school board decided not to do that, it instead tore down the existing school in the middle of the hamlet and built a brand new one -- which the superintendent now proposes to leave empty. This isn't even cost-effective decision making.

Court spending out of control

Literally, that is, given the judiciary's status as a separate branch of government, which judges from Judith Kaye down have defined as providing constitutional arguments for judicial pay raises. Even E.J. McMahon, a genuine fiscal conservative, now proposes a compromise whereby the court system agrees to trim the fat in exchange for judges getting a pay hike. Trouble is, more than a trim is needed, as anyone who's hung around courtrooms can attest. New York's judiciary has been arrogantly overspending forever, sometimes in harmful ways like forcing the closure of stately old courthouses (e.g. Washington County's in Hudson Falls) and mandating new ones. And given all the cutting on the table for most New Yorker, I still don't buy the argument that judges (or politicians) should get a bigger slice of the pie.