The NYS Senate mess revisited: In "reform" GOP-style, 30 lockstep partisans + 1 jail-bound Dem = "bipartisanship"

Future Jailbirds of the New York State Senate (FJBNYSS) Pedro "El Presidente" Espada Jr. (left, under investigation for all manner of fiscal chicanery, not to mention not living in the Bronx district he represents, or in the Bronx at all) and freshman Hiram Monserrate, under indictment for slashing his girlfriend with a broken bottle, the Gang of Two who defected from the Senate Democratic conference on June 8, have parted company. Monserrate's return to the Democratic conference (explaining that he'd understood other Democrats would be joining the new "bipartisan coalition") has left the Senate deadlocked at 31-31.

"New Yorkers are running out of ways to describe Albany as a political version of clown school. Perhaps it is time, then, that they examine what the state of the state says about them. If one believes that people in a democracy get the government they deserve, then we in New York should be unable to look in the mirror without cringing."

-- Clyde Haberman, in his Monday NYT "NYC" column, "From Halls of Montezuma to Floors of Albany, Something Went Awry"

by Ken

I expect the last thing you want to hear about is the latest installment of the silly saga of the State Senate That Couldn't. Trust me, we here in the Empire State feel the same way. Except for the awkward matter of the session's worth of business left mostly unfinished when, with two weeks left in the current session, the toothless new Democratic majority was rudely overthrown, on June 8, as the Senate entered the final two weeks of the current session, by a self-styled "reform coalition" comprising the 30 GOP senators plus a Gang of Two turncoat Dems, who had been part of the original Gang of Four that in the aftermath of the historic 2008 election, which turned control of the Senate over to the Dems, threatened to vote with the Republicans.

Since we last peeked in, as noted above, one of the two renegade Dems whose defection set the stage for the Rs' putsch, Sen. Hiram Monserrate of Queens, has returned to the fold, and the Dems have discreetly dumped Malcolm Smith as their leader, even though he remains, quite awkwardly, their nominal claimant as majority leader, since of course the Dem conference has no way of electing a new majority leader, and Senator Smith is having to coexist with the de facto new conference leader, Sen. John Sampson of Brooklyn. Otherwise not much has changed since June 8, when such rudimentary work as the Senate had been doing ground to a halt.

A 31-31 DEADLOCK? GEE, THAT SEEMS UNUSUAL

It doesn't come up often, but the possibility of such a split is of course why virtually all legislative bodies have an odd number of members. And this isn't the only eventuality the state constitution fails to provide for. While in theory the state's lieutenant governor would be available to break a tie, we haven't had one of them since Lieut. Gov. David Paterson replaced departed Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

One thing we do have, in deference to the ambitions of Senator Espada, generally considered one of the least accomplished members of a body known to contain more than its fair share of human sludge, during the one rump session that the Republican-plus-Pedro "majority" managed to hold in the hours following its coup (since then, with the deposed Democrats boycotting, the Republicans have been unable to muster the 32 warm bodies needed for a quorum), it installed him as president pro tempore. Espada, nothing if not a creative constitutionalist, has advanced the novel theory that in his capacity as "El Presidente" (as his "coalition" partner, Senate Republican leader Dean Skelos called him) the state constitution entitles him to a second vote, thereby making him available both to provide the 32-member quorum and to break the 31-31 deadlock.

With the courts understandably reluctant to get involved, and the June 22 adjournment date looming, the parties are left to find a way out of the mess. The Republicans, however, so far show no inclination to compromise -- their attitude apparently being, "We stole the Senate fair and square, and we'll be damned if we're going to give it up." (Howie's had some notes yesterday on some of the sleazy machinators, notably right-wing moneybags Tom "The Golem" Golisano and sleaze-merchant GOP consultant Roger Stone, who engineered the putsch.)

Basically, the two sides' view of compromise is, as longtime Albany watcher Phillip Anderson (just recently snatched away from hisstate-politics blog TheAlbanyProject.com by the Senate Democratic leadership to spearhead an ambitious new-media operation) explained in a DailyKos post yesterday:

• The Democrats are proposing that there be a Presiding Officer and a Floor Leader, of opposite parties, alternating daily, and an evenly split six-member Conference Committee would "determine which bills and resolutions will reach the floor," with a majority vote required.

* The Republicans are offering, well, nothing. The Senate is to be controlled by the now-familiar "bipartisan" team of Dem turncoat Espada, who was installed as president pro tempore in the GOP putsch, and the GOP Senate leader, or rather majority leader, Dean Skelos. The only visible concession to either the Democratic half of the Senate or to reality is the omission of any mention of a second vote for Senator "El Presidente" Espada.

To compound the hilarity, while the Dems' proposal is designed to get the Senate functioning again on a power-sharing basis for the rest of 2009, the Republicans see their "plan" as solving the problem of Senate operations for the rest of this legislative term, through 2010. (Not much discussed in this is the traditionally huge disparity in financial and other perks between those in the majority and those in the minority in the NYS Senate. One presumes that under the GOP proposal, "coalition" members stand ready to shoulder the burden of all that extra loot.)

Of course the first impulse is to laugh at the children at play. But my favorite curmudgeon, Times metro columnist Clyde Haberman, happens to have returned to this nonsense from a visit to the D-Day landing beaches of Normandy, and as you'll notice from the start of the column reproduced above, he's not so amused. It is, not surprisingly, a fine outing from Clyde, enthusiastically commended to your attention.

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