PlanetAlbany

"Stampede of rinos" (updated)

That's the assessment of one prominent opponent of same-sex marriage regarding the Senate Republican conference, which is well into its third hour of a closed-door conference on the issue. (This guy cites other issues including abortion-related ones where Senate Republicans have deserted social conservatives in recent years, and says he's hearing from people who will switch their registration from the GOP if this bill goes through, and he will likely be one of them. He agreed that the desertion has gone on back to the day of GOP Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, under whom abortion was legalized in New York before Roe vs. Wade). The prominent gay marriage opponent is pessimistic about his chances of blocking the Marriage Equality Act (and he wasn't pessimistic a few weeks ago), so the "stampede of rinos" would have to include more than the two Republicans so far (Jim Alesi and Roy McDonald) who have said they are switching their votes from 2009 and now support Gov. Andrew Cuomo's bill. (RINO being an acronym for Republican in name only.) A colleague of this guy was more optimistic, seeing the length of the Republican conference as a potentially positive sign.

Update: Majority Leader Sen. Dean Skelos eventually came out to announce no decision -- more conferencing to come (tomorrow, presumably). Sen. Andrew Lanza says he wants a stronger religious exemption. But Gov. Andrew Cuomo has sent a "message of necessity," further short-circuiting the legislative process, and allowing the Assembly to take up his bill this afternoon.

Safer streets

This bill to make the state more pedestrian (and biker and public transit user) friendly is one piece of progressive-sounding legislation where the Senate seems ahead of the Assembly, although it may pass both houses.

A narrow exemption

Well the governor finally released his Marriage Equality Act today, and the religious exemption is predictably narrow -- not that any exemption would have have satisfied opponents. Nothing in the bill, for example, to protect Catholic adoption agencies if they refuse to place children with gay couples. The Catholic Conference guy in that last link notes that "there won’t be public hearings to discuss the implications, there won’t be time for legal experts to figure out all the ramifications, and there won’t be time to coolly reflect on what it all means. The governor will try to push it through the legislature in the next few days." Albany business as usual.

Now they tell us

The New York Times today reports that Albany money flows to clients of firms employing legislators. Says the lede: "Over the past five years, New York State has awarded more than $7.4 billion in contracts to clients of law firms that employ state legislators, according to a review of court filings and other records." The new ethics bill (passed by both houses yesterday) will make such reporting easier, and should provide challengers with some anti-incumbent ammunition.

On the other hand, the Times story by Thomas Kaplan notes that for the most part, "the bill will not require lawyer-lawmakers to disclose clients represented by others at their firms. But public records show that the most common form of potential conflict for legislators with law practices occurs in just that undisclosed category: when legislators have law partners who represent businesses with a stake in bills, contracting decisions or regulatory actions."

Ethical means and ends

If this editorial and this other one from the NY News are right -- and they probably are -- there are more than quibbles the matter with last week's ethics bill, which could be passed as soon as today. Given the abysmal state of existing law it'll still be a great improvement, giving Andrew Cuomo, Dean Skelos, Sheldon Silver, all the legislators who vote for it and all the goo-goos and pundits some legitimate bragging rights. But its flaws are far from a surprise, given that this bill, like almost everything important in Albany, was the product of secret, three-men-in-a-room negotiations, not the open committee hearings and opportunities for debate and amendments that would be part of a functional legislative process. It would never have gotten done that way, its proponents will tell you. But the flawed means inevitably produce flawed ends -- unless you take a more cynical perspective, from which the ends look just fine for the parties involved, and the issue goes on forever.

Assembly to pass moratorium on hydrofracking

They are debating it now, and Speaker Sheldon Silver and Environmental Conservation Committee Chairman Bob Sweeney just held a news conference tying hydraulic fracturing to all sorts of issues, from the BP oil spill and the Japanese nuclear plant meltdown (Silver) to earthquakes and cancer (Sweeney). Behind the podium at the news conference were about 22 people, members and environmentalists. Unusually for an Assembly event, everyone was white.

Why not just wait for the DEC report? Because, Silver and Sweeney said, the Assembly wants a chance to review and respond to it, and it will probably come out later this year when the Legislature will not be in session. The moratorium would apply to this method of natural gas extraction until next June 1. The gas, Silver pointed out, "isn't going anywhere. We're not going to lose it." He said he has not discussed it with the governor, and Sweeney said he has not pressed the DEC commissioner on the issue because of the department's ongoing review.

Ethics deal is "historic," Cuomo says, but no independents need apply

They distributed an ethics bill memo at this afternoon's Red Room news conference, but there is still no agreed-upon bill -- or at least they haven't released one. Gov. Andrew Cuomo said one may emerge from the drafting process tomorrow, and in response to my question implied they are further along than with the property tax cap issue, on which the leaders held a conceptual agreement news conference a couple of weeks ago but no bill has emerged.

The ethics deal does look pretty good, although people are coming up with quibbles here and there. Here's one: The bill memo says "The bipartisan Joint Commission shall have 14 members, six appointed by the governor and lieutenant governor [sic] at least three of whom shall be enrolled members of the major political party that is not that of the governor, and eight appointed by the legislative leaders (four from each major political party)." At the news conference, someone asked Cuomo about the apparent exclusion from consideration of independents and minor party members, and he responded smiling "They don't exist," adding sarcastically (I assume) "We're going to go back to drafting and put that in" as he walked away from the podium and ended the news conference. It seems like a legitimate objection to me, and Lise Bang-Jensen of the state Bar Association agreed when I put it to her (although the Bar Association put out a statement saying the deal "will go a long way toward restoring public trust in government" -- which is what the pols said, too.)

Spitzer, Weiner, Paterson, Cuomo

In March 2010, the Albany press corps was expecting the imminent resignation of Gov. David Paterson, who was enmeshed in a scandal involving his top aide's domestic abuse case and another less serious one about accepting free tickets to Yankee Stadium. Had Paterson accepted the almost universal advice of pundits that he step down, he would not have been around to force budget cuts through the Legislature in extender bills, and it's unlikely his debt-supporting lieutenant governor, Dick Ravitch, would have pursued that course. Paterson's tactic paved the way for Gov. Cuomo's on-time budget cutting in 2011, just as his veto of last year's ethics bill paved the way for Cuomo's better bill with a three-way deal announced yesterday. And even last year's vetoed bill was much better than the disastrous 2007 ethics "reform" under Gov. Eliot Spitzer. Cuomo's successes are built on Paterson's foundations. Prosecutors, meanwhile, have decided not to charge the former governor -- which came as a relief to me.

Spitzer, who did resign when hit by scandal in 2008, has resurfaced as a successful CNN pundit. Which brings us to NYC U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner, whose old friend Jon Stewart addressed him thus -- in absentia -- on Thursday: "If you're sending pictures of your penis as bait to young women who follow you on Twitter, you gotta go." But he would only really gotta go if, say, he got federal authorities involved and lied to them, which is a crime. Looking like a lying sleazebag isn't.

Assembly passes bills to limit drug evidence, bar income discrimination

A2063-B, sponsored by Assemblyman Richard Gottfried, D-Manhattan, "provides limitations on use of evidence obtained in connection with a person seeking or receiving health care for a drug overdose." The idea, Gottfried said on the floor, is that you don't want to encourage drug users to flee the scene of an overdose for fear of prosecution. So would this protect drug dealers? asked GOP Assemblyman Tony Jordan. It might, Gottfried replied, although most overdoses don't take place at a dealer's HQ. Gottfried also noted that the bill's Senate version is co-sponsored by Marty Golden, a Republican conservative ex-cop. He's right about that, and the prime sponsor in that house is another Republican, John DeFrancisco. The bill passed the Assembly this afternoon, I think by 78-50.

Also this afternoon, the Assembly passed A1121-B, which aims "to prevent housing discrimination based upon the source of income of individuals," and is justified because now "landlords often reject tenants with rental subsidies, such as Section 8." A Republican opponent said in passing that the bill was vetoed last year, when David paterson was governor.

Lanza: One last hurdle for ethics bill

I just interviewed Sen. Andrew Lanza, chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee, on the Senate floor, and he said composition of a new public ethics commission is "sort of the last of the matters of substance" that needs to be ironed out before there's a three-way deal on a new ethics bill. Lanza said he and two other Republican senators, John Flanagan and Kemp Hannon, have met several times with Gov. Andrew Cuomo to negotiate an ethics bill, and staffers were meeting on it late last night. He and his colleagues, Lanza said, want to make sure that the commission is composed in such a way that it will be fair and nonpartisan, and is not liable to be used "for political witch hunts," e.g. targeting a legislator for the purpose of winning or defending a legislative majority.