Albany's balance of power tilts back to the governor - Politico

Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Gov. Andrew Cuomo at a meeting. | AP Photo/Tim Roske

ALBANY — As Gov. Andrew Cuomo raised his national profile through his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, he also reaffirmed his position as New York’s dominant figure on questions of policy and governance.

And that will have an impact on the power dynamics in Albany in the near future. Since Democrats took over the state Senate in January of last year, legislative leaders gained an unusual amount of attention as they set out an ambitious, progressive agenda that sometimes clashed with Cuomo's priorities. But now they will have to take a back seat to Cuomo, and they actually had a hand in it. Every major bill legislators have passed this session increased the powers of New York’s governor, an office that political scientists already considered to be one of the country’s most powerful.

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Now, with the budget done and Cuomo still dominating the national stage with his daily briefings, Albany is left to wonder: Will legislators reconvene this year, or will the governor continue to have unimpeded control over the state’s response to the crisis?

Both houses of the Legislature passed resolutions last week that will let them convene session remotely. But it’s an open question when or how often they’ll use this new ability.

“Is the session effectively over?” Cuomo asked on Saturday. “It’s up to the Legislature, but I think it’s fair to say it’s effectively over. They have a number of people who are infected, and they did a phenomenal job working through all those policy issues.”

“As always, the Assembly stands ready to protect and provide for the well-being of all New Yorkers,” Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie said in a statement hours after Cuomo’s remarks. “Last week we established a system for remote voting and we are on call to perform our constitutional duties as a co-equal branch of government. The Assembly is in recess (session is not over) at the call of the Speaker.”

Still, being “on call” is far from being firmly committed to returning to pick up where lawmakers left off. The lack of any public plans to meet means that the question of whether they’ll have any unscheduled gatherings, the focus of Albany gossip every December, will now be a motif for the remaining nine months of the year.

And if they don’t return, virtually or otherwise, it’ll be clear that power has shifted away from them just months after the Legislature’s most significant session in decades.

Last year's session boiled down to three phases. When lawmakers came to town in January with the most solid Democratic majority in modern history, they dealt with a lot of “low-hanging fruit” — liberal priorities on topics like abortion rights and gun control that never passed when the Senate was under Republican control. Cuomo was a supporter of all of this, but for the first time in his tenure, he was not the principal engineer on a fast train of policy activity.

Then came budget season. Governors have significant power over the policy-laden spending plan, and the newly emerged left wing of the Democratic Party found itself completely incapable of making the document much different than it was when Republicans ran the Senate.

As the session drew to a close, the Legislature reasserted itself. While renewing rent control, they passed the most sweeping tenants' rights package in decades as Cuomo largely sat on the sidelines talking about how they were unlikely to pass such a bill. When it looked likely that legislators would approve a measure letting undocumented immigrants obtain driver’s licenses, Cuomo began to vacillate on a topic he had long claimed to support. They passed it anyway and forced him to sign it.

Heading into 2020, one of the big questions involved just how the Legislature would fare with the low-hanging fruit already harvested. Would they continue to drive the agenda on policy items, and would they stand up against Cuomo’s powers over the budget, either by threatening to hold it up or approving a constitutional amendment to reduce them?

Legislators did not rush out of the tunnel with a productive January as they did in 2019. The first major piece of legislation they approved was in early March, when they gave Cuomo the power to unilaterally change state laws during the looming emergency, a power the governor has not hesitated to use.

The global pandemic gave legislators even less control over the budget than normal. If they refused to pass it until certain demands were meant, then a governor who has suddenly become a national icon would have simply accused them of playing politics and shutting down government during a crisis.

The end product came pretty close to what Cuomo had sought right from the get-go, reducing health care spending, not increasing taxes, and including a wide variety of his policy priorities. It also gave him the ability to change it mid-year if funding falls short, an action that could only be blocked if legislators manage to quickly arrange special sessions in which they would have to take the responsibility and blame for any cuts.

It’s fair to say that legislators, particularly those on the left, were not enthused with the final product.

“We are asked to respond to decades of shortfall by cutting more, even as we know that the needs will be greater than ever before,” Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou (D-Manhattan) said.

“We must take a stand for the people and not allow the powers that be to use this dramatic, drastic pandemic crisis to pass a budget that is devastating to the people of this state,” Assemblyman Charles Barron (D-Brooklyn) wrote in a letter to his colleagues. “There is over $35 billion in revenue we could have raised from people who could afford to pay it. To not even raise half that amount is a shame and irresponsible.”

“I think despite all the back and forth, we can all agree that the budget we are passing is not the budget we hoped to pass at the beginning of session,” Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins said during her concluding remarks. “It’s not even the budget we envisioned a month ago.”

The Assembly passed the budget’s omnibus bill at 3 a.m. on Friday by a margin of 76-66. The 150-member chamber usually passes well over 1,000 bills each year; this was the first one to receive the absolute slimmest possible majority of 76 since 2008 legislation that banned the hunting of caged animals, but which critics said might have incidentally made commercial meat illegal.

So yes, this year has undoubtedly been a step backwards for the Legislature in the eternal struggle to tilt the balance of power with the executive. Whether or not lawmakers have any hope of gaining back ground will likely rest on the question of whether members do wind up voting again before January.

There are plenty of long-term policy items they could discuss. But, advocates say, they should also take a larger role in steering the state’s response to the current crisis.

“The Legislature proved last year that they could do a lot of good things over the opposition of Andrew Cuomo,” said TenantsPAC treasurer Mike McKee, who spoke of the new challenges faced by people who need to pay rent. “It’s incumbent on our friends in the Legislature to do the right thing on a number of these issues. I don’t think Andrew Cuomo could be trusted to do what’s needed to protect tenants.”

“We need to have diverse voices heard in these policy decisions,” said Common Cause New York’s Susan Lerner. “Our representative system is geographically based, with the idea that different communities have different needs and therefore are individually represented with elected officials who can best articulate what their community needs.”

Cuomo certainly has staff and advisers from throughout the state who are helping him shape the changes to law that he’s now making unilaterally. What’s the advantage of having the Legislature get involved, rather than having him continue to issue decrees with the force of law?

“What is the advantage to a democratic system of representation as opposed to a monarchy?” Lerner asked in reply.

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