“The blame for this disaster lies with state Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith, who lacked the vision and leadership to usher a viable rescue plan through his house.
The blame lies with Brooklyn Sen. Carl Kruger, who led the charge against tolling the East River and Harlem River bridges as a crucial source of funding.
The blame lies with Sens. Pedro Espada, Ruben Diaz, Kevin Parker and other city members who joined Kruger in putting the interests of a few hundred thousand drivers over those of millions of straphangers.
The blame lies with suburban Sens. Craig Johnson, Brian Foley, Suzi Oppenheimer and Andrea Stewart-Cousins, who raised last-minute objections to a small payroll tax in the rescue….
…Smith, Kruger and the rest of the Senate Democrats are sending riders to hell.”
—- New York Daily News Editorial 4/2/09
There is nothing particularly wrong with any of the observations above; frankly, Smith is a weak leader, and as I’ve noted before, I am always delighted whenever anyone takes the opportunity to expose Kruger, Diaz and Espada for the posturing phonies that they are, but the whole sorry tale of the Daily News’ coordinated confusion between its “news” and editorial pages, manifested this week by a multipart series using any weapon at hand to decry the perfidy of Albany’s Democrats, including a daily sidebar composed of angry uninformed bile from readers who agree with the editors’ slant, is most clearly revealed in this editorial by the “Waiting for Godot” like absence of perhaps the one key player in this sorry Albany tale:
Senate Minority Leader Dean “The Dog” Skelos.
Yes, Malcolm Smith has failed grievously to muster 32 out of the 32 available votes in his conference for any sort of MTA rescue plan. Smith is not a strong leader, but wasn’t it only Monday that the News was whining about a “legislative process …almost entirely controlled by the leaders…Other states make it easier for rank-and-file members to move legislation forward…the disproportionate power wielded by the party leaders, most especially the leader of the majority.”?
Last year, Michael Goodwin, who along with Bill Hammond shows no daylight between his columns and the opinions wielded on the News editorial page, said “Divided government works best because it is more balanced between competing constituents and leaders,” but this year, when the Senate Democratic Conference is openly reflective of those competing constituencies, with suburbanites actually impacting the flow of legislation (as the News feared they would be unable to do), the News suddenly finds this problematic.
The gyrations by the News to blame the Democrats and only the Democrats no matter what the issue has resulted in acrobatic feats combining the skills of Olga Korbut, Nureyev and Buster Keaton.
In part one of its series on Sodom on the Hudson, the News bemoans how the failure of Democrats to agree meant failure to pass Rockefeller Drug Law Reform, but when that agreement came, both the News Editorial page and Hammond condemned it as a sellout to criminals and foreigners.
Last year, Goodwin said “Without being able to use the excuse that Republicans were blocking them, Democrats would face the impossible task of saying no to organized advocates….Albany would go completely off the rails if the Dems' far-left wing called all the shots.” But this year, when Senate Democrats failed to move changes in the State’s rent laws championed by the tenant advocates who helped to elect them, the News, never previously supportive of repealing vacancy decontrol, suddenly found this an example of kowtowing to special interests, rather than an example of resisting them. Strangely, though, when Democrats passed a budget which reflected the concerns of those who elected them, the News suddenly got its groove back and condemned the Democrats for kowtowing to the sort of folks the News previously condemned the Democrats for refusing to kowtow to.
The next day, the News’ Albany dysfunction of the day was the State’s stupid fault-based divorce laws, another cause the News had never shown much interest in previously. The articles about the divorce laws got so many little facts wrong that they verged being almost as ridiculous as the laws themselves. They told a tale of a couple who were allegedly forced into a grounds trial neither wanted, implying that the law forced this, when, in reality, all this couple had to do to avoid such a trial was to agree that one of them would testify to the facts of a ground they could read from a script (provided by the Court) while the other remained silent. The article also strongly implied that the law hadn’t changes because it benefited lawyers financially, an absurd assertion when, in fact, nearly every bar group with an opinion on the matter supports no-fault divorce.
The major reason divorce reform hasn’t passed is that Joe Bruno didn’t want it to (why offend the Bishops?). No reform bill could even find a Republican Senate sponsor under his reign (and a bill sponsored by a Democrat was going nowhere). The divided government the News is so fond of is exactly why no bill has seen the light of day–a Democratic legislature is far more likely than a divided one to pass such a bill (the only time the Senate passed divorce reform in the past 30 years was the year the late Mike Tully of Nassau wanted a divorce without moving to Vegas, which wasn’t in his district), provided that papers like the News actually try to make it a cause celebre rather than a club to beat them up with.
But the Editorial blaming the Senate Dems for the MTA’s woes surely wins the prize and reveals the News‘ outrage for the partisan sham that it is. Through this entire fight, the Senate Republicans have remained silent. They will not support, or lend even one vote to any rescue proposal of any kind, no matter what the source of the revenue, and they will not put forth a proposal of their own. Last fall, when he still controlled the Senate, Skelos similarly refused to support any of the Governor’s budget cuts, and now he refuses to support any revenue enhancements. Perhaps the Democratic approach on the budget, as articulated by Shelly Silver, is a bad idea. But in a crisis, a bad idea is almost always better than no idea at all, and Dean Skelos not only can’t (or more likely, won’t) come up with any of his own , but he refuses to support anyone else’s.
Call it “Rope-a-Dope,” but we’re the ones taking the punches.
Right now, as Malcolm Smith has proven, Dean Skelos controls more votes in the Senate than anyone else; it is looking more and more likely that no MTA rescue bill can be passed without his acquiescence. I’m not saying he deserves all of the blame here, or even most of it–but how about giving him his rightful share (a little under half)?
The News doth protest too much that their complaint about Albany is all about process–and surely, the Democrats in Albany deserve their fair share of blame for the legislature’s glaring process inadequacies, but, as becomes clearer and clearer, day after day, the News’ real problem is that they don’t like the Democrats’ policies, and hide their true agenda behind the process issues they had little concern with back when the repugnant Joe Bruno (who Goodwin gushed over with undisguised nostalgia) was holding the reins of power.