Back in September 2006, I published an analysis of the Republican primary in the 24th Senate District, which said, in part:
“The retiring incumbent is named John Marchi, and he was a giant. Marchi was elected to the Senate in 1956, before most of us were born; he was the Republican mayoral candidate in 1969 (beating a sitting Mayor in the primary), and again in 1973. In the late seventies, as the Chair of the Senate’s Finance Committee, he helped save the City from bankruptcy. Although I'm pro-choice, I admire Marchi as practically the only genuine right-to-lifer in the NYS legislature: he opposes both abortion AND capital punishment (hardly a popular stance on his island, and one which nearly lost him re-election in 1978). Whether you agree with him or not (and I don't), his opposition to the McBride Principles was courageous in an area with so many Irish-Americans, especially since it conveyed him no political advantage whatsoever. The same holds true with his public pronouncements against the Italian-American Civil Rights League for its mob connections. Once the Island spread into a second seat, Marchi was always generously helpful to whichever Democrat represented the North Shore, and Marchi usually had the decency to distance himself from the worst of the mobsters (some in every sense of the word) running the local Republican Party.”
Those who watched John Marchi during the City’s fiscal crisis would have a hard time picturing him joining Andrew Lanza, Marty Golden and Frank Padavan, and the other members of their conference fiddling as the MTA burned. Though a principled, if iconoclastic, conservative, Marchi believed it was the function of government to serve the public rather than to take cheap political shots or to sit on the sidelines laughing.
I would normally say that John Marchi WILL be missed, but that would be inaccurate. He has been missed for a very long time.