Can we at least make believe that being a violent asshole is a disqualification from serving in the New York State Senate?

New York State's 13th Senate District, in northern Queens

"This guy is a violent asshole, and it would be great to send him on his way once and for all."

-- a colleague of ours, about former NYS Sen. Hiram Monserrate

by Ken

Usually when I burden you with breaking news regarding the toxic-waste dump that is our New York State Legislature, it's because I sense that non-New Yorkers may be in need of a harmless chuckle. Lately, however, NYS pols at higher levels have horned in on the laff-whoring, as if they have no goal in life but to provide satirical material for Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me!

And today I'm afraid we have to talk seriously about a matter relating to the State Senate. I don't suppose we have a vast horde of readers in the state's 13th Senate District, in northern Queens, which was occupied by Hiram Monserrate until he was expelled by vote of his colleagues. This necessitated a special election, which is being held tomorrow, March 16, and you may be surprised to learn that the asshole is running for his old seat! Not as a Democrat, mind you, but as an independent.

The gentleman at left is Assemblyman José Peralta, who sounds good on the issues, has an outstanding record in the State Assembly, and should provide the 13th SD with excellent representation. And besides, in case I didn't mention it, he's not Hiram Monserrate.

If you jog your memory, you may remember a couple of things about our Hiram:

* He was one of the famous Gang of Four/Three/Two who first threatened not to organize with the Democrats after they took control of the Senate in the November 2008 election (but were presumably bought off, at least temporarily) and then actually defected, with another mangy character named Pedro Espada Jr., to form a "bipartisan" coaltion with the Republicans which deadlocked the Senate and briefly left the parliamentarily savvier Senate GOP leader claming actually to be in control, in the absence of a lieutenant governor to break tie votes.* And oh yes, finally first our Hiram and then his pal Pedro, with much less embarrassment than you would imagine, redefected back to the Dems, possibly having been rebought off.

* At the time our Hiram was already under indictment for slashing his girlfriend with a broken bottle, as captured -- for a jury to see, for example -- on building security tape. He was eventually convicted (even though the girlfriend tried to spin the incident in a Hiram-friendly way, the incident was on videotape, you remember), but by then the charges against him had miraculously lightened to the point where they didn't trigger an automatic resignation or mandatory exclusion, leaving the Senate to finish the job of saying, in effect, "No, there's a line below which our members really can't descend."

And then there's the thing you might remember our Hiram for not doing:

* Back when the NYS Senate took its vote on legalizing same-sex marriage, despite repeated assurances, and despite having won his office in large part thanks to strong LGBT support, the gutless weasel voted against.

Naturally, having alienated many of the supporters who helped get him elected in the first place, he has reinvented himself, according to his perception of his basically conservative district, as a "family values" guy. (I know, isn't that a hoot?) Now he's a stalwart supporter of those old-fashioned virtues thought to be important in relatively conservative Queens. Also (and here again you've got to really work to keep yourself from cracking up), he's portraying himself as some kind of victim!

Now the problem isn't that large numbers of his constituents are fooled, or have any interest in having him back as their state senator. The problem is that this is (a) a special election (and special elections historically draw minuscule turnouts) and (b) a special election for a state Senate seat, for gosh sakes. How poliically involved do you have to be to bestir yourself to vote in a special election to fill a state Senate vacancy?

Since you know that by hook or by crook a slug like our Hiram -- or rather the people who hope to return him to the Senate so he can be useful to them -- will be able to get a certain number of votes. So it becomes a matter of great urgency to make sure that more than that number of sane Democratic voters in the 13th SD show up to vote.

URGENT APPEAL TO ALL VOTERS IN THE 13TH SD

So if you live in the district (the zip codes, I'm told, are 11368, 11372, 11375, 11373, 11374, and 11369), or know anyone who does, or know someone who knows someone, it's imperative to turn out tomorrow to vote for José Peralta. Otherwise, the message is: "While there may indeed be a line below which a New York State senator cannot drop, we still don't know where it is."

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*We didn't have a lieutenant governor then because the old lieutenant governor had to take over as governor on account of the governor's resigning after getting caught overpaying for hookers. And then the new governor, the one who wasn't available to break ties in the State Senate because he wasn't lieutenant governor anymore and we have no mechanism for replacing a lost one, went on to make comedy headlines of his own. Ironically, the one really good thing he's done as governor was to appoint a new lieutentant governor, even though he has no statutory authority to do any such thing except by the most generous possible interpretation of a clause in the State Constitution. Naturally, the Republicans went to court, where successive levels of judges declined to undo it, saying basically, "Now, boys, don't expect us to get you out of these messes you get yourselves into." The upshot is that while we may not have much else going for us here in NYS, we've by gosh got a lieutenant governor! (When you've very little to work with, you learn to be grateful for not much.)

UPDATE AND CORRECTION: IT'S ALL VOTERS, NOT

JUST "REGISTERED DEMS," WHO NEED TO VOTE

Apologies. There's probably still some language in this post that reflects my confusion while I was writing. For some reason my mindset was on primary elections, where (in NYS) only registered members of a party can vote in that primary. But of course this isn't a primary, it's a special election, so everybody is eligible to vote. Which also means that former Senator Monserrate can also recruit support from all voters for his particular brand of government.

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UPDATE: Looks like Ken's Post Worked

Monserrate did better than the Republican, but Democrat José Peralta absolutely crushed him. "Tonight we put an end to dysfunction, to divisiveness, to disappointment. Our nightmare is over. A new day has begun," said Peralta during his victory speech. The NY Times says it was in the bag all along.

The victory was not unexpected given the level of organized Democratic support for Mr. Peralta, an assemblyman from Queens. Mr. Peralta also had a huge financial advantage over Mr. Monserrate, who ran as an independent and tried to persuade voters to give him another chance to represent them in Albany.

Still, the election followed a fierce, if brief, campaign in which a debate over same-sex marriage, which Mr. Peralta favors and Mr. Monserrate opposes, often overshadowed discussions on issues that are vital to many of the largely Hispanic district’s working-class and immigrant residents, like affordable health care and school overcrowding.

With 72 percent of the vote counted, unofficial returns from the overwhelmingly Democratic 13th State Senate District showed Mr. Peralta with 66 percent and Mr. Monserrate with 27 percent. The Republican candidate, Robert Beltrani, an administrative law judge, came in third with 7 percent.

By NYS Senate standards, the GOP schmuck who wandered through the Senate chamber to get coffee was doing a day's work

"It was never about power, but about empowerment -- of 62 members."

-- "Gang of One" freshman Sen. Pedro Espada Jr. (seen

above during yesterday's negotiations in the Capitol), at a

press conference after rejoining the New York State

Senate's Democratic "majority" -- as majority leader!!!

"It was quite bad enough when Eliot Spitzer was unable to keep his pants on, but that was at least a personal failing and not related to government. You guys, however, just pretty much produced a signed letter to every independent, moderate Republican, and a lot of rank and file Democrats, attesting to the fact that you intend to be just as rancidly dysfunctional as the Republicans were."

-- Adama D. Brown, site administrator of GLOWDemocrats.com

("a joint project of the Genesee, Livingston, Orleans,

and Wyoming County Demoratic committees"),

in "An open letter to my fellow Democrats"

by Ken

So, the 31-day "coalition" -- comprising the 30 New York State Senate Republicans plus Bronx "Democrat" Pedro Espada Jr. -- is no more.

Not much of a coalition, you say? Thirty Republicans plus one Democrat -- and the Democrat a fellow who must wonder every morning when he wakes up if today is the day he'll be indicted for one of the numerous swatches of shady dealing he's under investigation for. And, for that matter, a coalition that produced nothing more durable than a stalemate, 31-31, with the remainder of the new Senate "majority" created in the November election.

Credit the "coalition" leader, now-once-again Minority Leader Dean Skelos of Nassau County, with commanding enough knowledge of Senate procedure -- the Republicans' 70-year hold on the Senate was previously broken only by a brief interlude in 1965 -- to stage the famous June 8 coup, with a lot of prodding by failed gubernatorial candidate and zillionaire busybody Tom "The Golem" Golisano, that overturned the Democratic "majority," with the connivance a Gang of Two renegade Democrats (slimmed down from the briefly famous Gang of Three and Gang of Four).

That GOP parliamentary savvy was good enough to swing control to the "coalition" long enough to wrest control from the Democrats and surely enough that even when the other renegade "Democrat," Queens Sen. Hiram Monserrate (if you're keeping score, he's the one who's already under indictment, for allegedly beating up his girlfriend, with the alleged involvement of a broken bottle), returned to the fold, creating the 31-31 standoff, it was impossible for the Democratic "majority" to undo any of the stuff the "coalition" majority had done without striking some kind of deal, like the one they did yesterday, which included making Senator Espada the majority leader!

Now, normally the Senate majority leader is the person who runs the joint, but that doesn't appear quite what's envisioned in this grand "compromise." It's clear that the troubled tenure of Queens Sen. Malcolm Smith is over. Smith had been chosen as leader by the new "Democratic" majority but never really controlled the caucus, and in the wake of the "coalition" coup had already been replaced as "conference leader" by Brooklyn Sen. John Sampson (below).

I am assuming that under yesterday's deal it's "conference leader" Sampson who will be running the Democratic show, even though Malcolm Smith is to have the title of Senate "president," at least for some unspecified time. You have to figure that Senator Espada is scheduled to receive at least some of the money that would normally flow to the Senate majority leader -- and all available evidence indicates that money is very important to the senator -- but you have to assume that that's about the extent of what the reestablished Democratic "majority" plans to do for him.

There were still glitches, but as the AP reported, eventually the Senate got back to business:

While the stalemate was over, at first the standstill wasn't. Republicans decided to slow the voting process because they were furious Democrats didn't include Senate rules reforms on the agenda. Senate Republican Leader Dean Skelos, of Long Island, said the GOP objected to the Democrats' plan to pass pork barrel spending — also known as member items, money that lawmakers can take back to their districts for pet projects.

After an hour of closed-door discussion, member items were removed from the agenda and both sides developed the framework for a rules reform agreement. Both will likely be taken up next week. Both sides said the rules changes will give individual senators more power to move bills out of committees and to the floor for a vote, among other reforms.

Most of the bills passed late Thursday and early Friday were for local taxes that would keep local governments funded and running.

For more than a month, the Senate's paralysis stalled action on mayoral control of New York City's schools, taxing authority in some municipalities and economic development programs.

[Gov. David] Paterson estimated that the state's municipalities lost as much as $150 million during the conflict — most of it missed sales tax revenue — including $60 million in New York City.

A LOCAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY ACTIVIST VOICES
WHAT A LOT OF NYS DEMS ARE THINKING

This "open letter" by Adama D. Brown, site administrator of GLOWDemocrats.com, "a joint project of the Genesee, Livingston, Orleans, and Wyoming County Demoratic committees, was also posted on The Albany Project:

An open letter to my fellow Democrats.
Thursday, July 9, 2009

I've been trying for the past some odd hours to figure out something to say about the developments in the State Senate today. I could recite the basic facts: Pedro Espada has returned to the Democratic conference in the State Senate, where he'll be made Majority Leader in return for insuring a quorum.

But the raw facts lack a real feeling for the depth and breadth of this Faustian pact's unseemly qualities.

For having "won" this tussle that has been going on a year and a day, this seems an awful lot like losing. We're now saddled with a Senate majority leader who I would not trust with a shiny nickel. A man who has, quite probably, committed a federal felony or two just since he got into office.

I'm particularly apalled--even given my low opinion of them before--with the rest of the Democrats in the State Senate. Yes, I know they're my fellow party members, and as a loyal partisan I should follow Reagan's rule and not speak ill.

My response to that isn't suitable for a family friendly forum such as this.

Believe me, I've done the party loyalty thing. This goes so far beyond the acceptable boundries of that that it's pathetic. And the Democrats who went along with this deal either know it, or should. Not only have you thrown out pretty much all hope of having a substantive reform agenda passed; You've also just set Democratic party-building in greater New York State back probably, I don't know, five years or so?

Please do remember that there are some of us out here who are still trying to build operations and win elections. Most of you may have forgotten what it's like to run competitive races, or to actually deal with more than token input by the public. The rest of us haven't. We're still out here working our butts off, preparing for future races and trying to inject some fresh life into this state's government. This sort of political ipecac syrup does not help us in the least.

It was quite bad enough when Eliot Spitzer was unable to keep his pants on, but that was at least a personal failing and not related to government. You guys, however, just pretty much produced a signed letter to every independent, moderate Republican, and a lot of rank and file Democrats, attesting to the fact that you intend to be just as rancidly dysfunctional as the Republicans were.

Why then, the public will ask us, should we bother voting for Democrats when they deliver the same thing on the state level? And we're going to have a hard time answering them. If you intend to try and keep the State Senate majority, then you need to do something different than what you're doing right now. Because behavior like this is politically radioactive.

WHICH STILL LEAVES THE FATE OF THE NEW LIEUT. GOV. -- AND THE LAWSUIT OVER THE GOP COFFEE GUY

Still to be resolved, as far as I know, is the fate of newly appointed Lieut. Gov. Richard Ravitch, named Wednesday by Gov. David Paterson to fill the vacancy created way back when he, as the elected lieutenant governor, replaced the man who picked him as his running mate, resigned Gov. Eliot Spitzer. Ravitch was hastily sworn in Wednesday night in an effort to beat the Republicans' certain move for a temporary restraining order against the appointment, on the technical ground that the governor has no authority to make such an appointment. Neither the state constitution nor state law makes provision for replacing a lieutenant governor, or for otherwise breaking ties in the Senate, which you'll recall with singular foresight has an even number of members, all but assuring that eventually such a situation would arise.

Ravitch, a long-time public-private servant who's probably best known for his 1979-83 tenure as chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the New York City subways and buses as well as the Long Island and Metro-North commuter railroads and a bunch of other NYC metro-area transportation facilities, had already indicated that he would serve without salary, and had no intention of running for the position in the next election.

According to Newsday's Reid Epstein and William Murphy, "Ravitch, 76, signed the oath of office at 8:40 p.m. Wednesday and it was accepted and filed by the secretary of state at 11 p.m., less than two hours before" a Long Island judge issued the TRO, which was vacated yesterday by an appeals judge shortly after Senator Espada's latest change of heart. After the injunction was lifted, a lawyer for the governor, Kathleen Sullivan, said, "He is now the lieutenant governor. He's been the lieutenant governor." At least until the case works its way up through the Appellate Division to the state's highest court, the Court of Appeals, as seems certain to happen.

The governor's theory in stretching some statutory language to the breaking point in order to make the appointment was presumably that a new lieutenant governor would be able to break the permanent 31-31 tie in the Senate. Left unclear, however, is how this would have gotten around the problem of a quorum. One thing that's clear under NYS law is that the Senate needs 32 senators officially present in order to conduct business, which is why neither side in the 31-day deadlock has been able to convene the body.

With the exception, that is, of that giddy day, June 30, when the Democrats claimed they had a quorum. An unnamed Republican senator, apparently wandering through the Senate chamber to get coffee, was claimed by the Dems to have been recorded "present," constituting the elusive quorum. Actually, the Dems claim that the mystery senator was recorded as voting "yes" on the eight bills they proceeded to pass.

On Monday, upstate Sen. Darrel Aubertine filed a suit against the state Assembly, seeking to force the lower house to accept the eight bills as "passed," saying, These bills must be delivered to the governor. Further delay by the Assembly puts jobs, our school districts, and the state's taxpayers at risk," even though the governor has already indicated that he disagrees and won't sign the bills.

I guess the courts are going to have their say on this too. I hope the lucky judge pauses to consider that that lone GOP coffee hound came closer to doing Senate business than any of his colleagues managed to do in the last 31 days. That should count for something, especially in the crazy world of New York State government.

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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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And they said the NYS Dems' record for shortest tenure as Senate majority party (under 11 months, 1965) was one that would never be broken

Billionaire, thrice-failed gubernatorial candidate, and recent self-proclaimed tax emigrant to Florida Tom "The Golem" Golisano, seen here in an unflattering, apparently stone likeness, is just one of the hilarious players in the summer-stock production of Putsch! currently being played in that hotbed of hilarity, the New York State Senate.

"Tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight."

-- from the famous opening number of the classic Larry Gelbart-Stephen Sondheim musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (the first show for which Sondheim provided music as well as lyrics)

by Ken

With our NYS Legislature, by contrast, it's comedy 24/7!

So, who could have foreseen, right? I mean, the way a "coalition" of New York State Senate Republicans and a couple of nominal Democrats -- people you would by and large do your darnedest to avoid allowing in your home -- wrested control of the Senate from the iron grip of Majority Leader Malcolm Smith, thus ending his and the Democrats' five-month tenure as Senate majority party. Or maybe they didn't. (The Dems say the Senate was adjourned before the vote that either did or didn't take place, depending on your viewpoint, and in the best of comedy stylings, the joint is now locked tight, with the keys in the Dems' possession of either the Senate secretary or the sergeant-at-arms, like as if it was the Our Gang clubhouse, while presumably all the players are running frantically to, and trying to break down the doors of, the judges of their choice.

Quite a shocker, eh? Well, maybe not so much.

Yesterday's putsch in Albany may have been "unexpected" in the sense that nobody except the conspirators led by briefly former and apparently soon-to-be once-again Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos knew it was going to happen yesterday. After all, as the breathless local news talking heads were pointing out in their pop-eyed accounts, most everyone expected that that the Senate was going to be accomplishing its current paper-shuffling standard yesterday, which is to say zilch, as the Legislature counts down the last two weeks of the current session.

Oh, it's not that there's nothing to be done. There's a nasty list of things that need to be done by recess (but probably won't be), and then an assortment of lists of things hoped by various parties to be done (expected to suffer a similar fate). But basically where approximately where we were six or seven months ago.

So, in short, pretty much the last thing any of us were expecting was news of any sort from our beloved, gridlocked Senate. But in reality this has been staring us in the face ever since the Dems won "control" (ha!) of the Senate in November, by a tenuous 32-30 margin that's a good deal wispier than it sounds, for the first time since the LBJ presidential landslide year of 1964.

Essentially we're back where we were in December. As you may recall, barely had the election smoke cleared -- with one Senate contest, for the Queens seat being defended by incumbent GOP Sen. Frank Padavan, still undecided -- than it became clear that the Senate Democrats, after all those decades as a permanent minority, didn't face a smooth transition into the majority.

Suddenly there was a Gang of Four or Maybe Three -- Democratic state senators, including one who had only just been elected -- threatening to refuse to vote with their fellow Democrats unless, unless . . . well, it's never been clear what they wanted. It was widely assumed that the key bone of contention, or a key, was opposition to same-sex marriage, and there's no question that this is a big issue to the socially extremely conservative Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr. of the Bronx, who is an ardently anti-choice Democrat (and emphatically not to be confused with his progressive son, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr.).

But the issue doesn't seem to resonate much with the others. Pedro Espada Jr. doesn't seem to have much history on the issue. He's more known for a history of dubious financial dealings that's outsize even by forgiving Bronx-pol standards. Espada in fact was actually negotiatintg a deal with Malcolm Smith, repudiated when it became public, that among other goodies would, astonishingly, have vaulted him to the position of Senate president pro tempore -- a dream that rechristened GOP Majority Leader in fact delivered on yesterday in a flurry of post-putsch activity. The word generally heard about Espada is that he has ties (financial, one would presume) to landlord interests, which are always in play when it comes time for the Legislature to consider renewal of rent regulation laws. There's no question that a Republican-controlled Senate is a happier playing filed for landlords.

And at least on paper the just-elected Hiram Monserrate of Queens, who quickly backed down from the uprising rumblings, reducing the Gang from Four to Three. is a textbook progressive. But then, Senator Monserrate has other, er, issues, centering around an incident with a girlfriend. He was, as Wikipedia puts it, "arrested on December 19, 2008 and accused of slashing Karla Giraldo in the face with a broken drinking glass during an argument in his Jackson Heights apartment." And in fact it wasn't that long ago that the Republicans were opposing seating their future "coalition" mate Monserrate at all. Complicating matters for the senator, in March a Queens grand jury indicted him on three counts of felony assault and three counts of misdemeanor assault. Word is that his conversion to coalitionism is going to win him some much-needed funding for his defense.

Finally there's my favorite of the bunch: Carl Kruger of Brooklyn, whose sole known governing principle appears to be: What's good for Carl Kruger is good for Carl Kruger. In 2007 Kruger became the first minority-party member in NYS Senate history to be appointed chairman of a committee, and even though Kruger does not appear to have participated in yesterday's coup, it's reported that Skelos has assured our Carl that he will retain his committee chairmanship under the new "coalition" command.

From the evident ethnicity of three of the four, it's not surprising that there was talk of Hispanic resentment at disrespect from the Democratic conference leadership. One wants to be sensitive here, but what possible respect could be shown to people like this? The only discernible thread that joins these Democratic "rebels" is an especially shameless concern for the traditional NYS Leg question "What's in it for me?" But there's a way of doing it that crosses the line into tacky, like when a bribe-giver hands out bare fistfuls of cash rather than taking the trouble to stuff the loot in an envelope that slides easily into the pocket. Now there's class.

Here it's well to remember those decades of permanent-minority status Democratic senators suffered. As I've written before, there was little enough for majority senators to do, since traditionally all their thinking was done for them by their majority leader. But at least they had all those perks of the majority to occupy their attention and help instill a modicum of, um, dignity. In New York's system, there is a raging disproportion between majority and minority loot, which is how the two major parties came to carve up the Legislature after that brief experience of Democratic Senate rule in 1965. The biggest, most intractable disagreement between the parties back then was reapportionment. With each party unwilling the forego the opportunity to pamper itself and screw the opposition, the two houses had still not been able to agree on a judicially acceptable redistricting plan.

With a view to future census-driven redistrictring, the legislative leaders finally hammered out the only compromise they could think of. Knowing that both houses' approval would always be needed for any future reapportionament plan -- that is, assuming that the courts would allow the Legislature to perform the task -- they ceded one house to each party, the often Democratic Assembly to the Dems and the normally Republican Senate to the GOP. I don't know that any formal document was ever drawn, but the brazen understanding was that the parties wouldn't contest each other's sitting members.

It's this agreement that then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer threw over, choosing as part of his battle plan an active challenge to the shrinking Republican Senate majority. Of course the governor wasn't around to take advantage of the result, but then, even before his "difficulties" there was plenty of evidence that his "steamroller" approach wasn't exactly winning friends or influencing people of either party in the Legislature, and I'm not at all sure that he would have succeeded any better than his successor, Govenor Paterson, has managed to do in nurturing the new Senate majority.

Because, especially where there is no history of conference leadership or loyalty, what can you do about people like Espada and Monserrate and Kruger and Diaz? And this is where one wonders where the Senate Democrats, who declared yesterday that they're "going to the mattresses" over the Republican seizure of control of the Senate, really plan to go? Presumably they can keep the Senate shut down for a day, maybe two. But at some point, and I'm guessing some point soon, isn't control of the chamber going to depend on who's got the votes? One hears rumbling of "strategies" being applied to Espada and Monserrate, but really, what can they do? (The more immediate question for Monserrate would appear to be how long an accused felon can string out his tenure. All the way to verdict?)

Meanwhile the Republican-"led" leadership "coalition" is doing a lot of talking about ending the Senate's five-month-long gridlock and even instituting much-need reforms. It sounds crazy, but then, who knows? Maybe the state party, making what appears to be something close to a "last stand," is so bereft of ideas that it's prepared to gamble everything on the most desperate of gambits: good government.

Presumably Pedro Espada and Hiram Monserrate and maybe even Carl Kruger will vote for that.


THE GOLISANO FACTOR

I see that I've left out of my narrative the role of one of the shadier sideshow attractions in recent New York State history, Tom "The Golem" Golisano. Even back in the early days of the Gang of Four or Maybe Three, it now appears that the anti-leadership machinations were being facilitated if not actually orchestrated by one of the more repellent sideshow attractions in recent state political history. Golisano, a payroll-processing billionaire, has made three failed races for governor, though each time drawing the minimum 50,000 votes to put his so-called Independence Party on state ballots for a while. Like other extremely wealthy folk with too much time on their hands, Tom the Golem seems to have decided that he knows how to make government work.

Apparently Tom's fingerprints are all over yesterday's Senate coup. Which makes one think that he may not have been not entirely serious in his not-long-ago renunciation of the Empire State in favor of Florida (where he already had a residence), a loudly self-declared fugitive from tax policies he announced would cost him, as I recall, an additional $5 million. By creepy coincidence, Gov. David Paterson has loudly opposed even modest tax increases on the rich as a way of closing the state's terrifying budget gap, on the ground that this would cause an outward flight of the rich. Putting the two together, one wonders if the rich person the governor had in mind was Tom the Golem.


COMIC FOOTNOTE: A WORKABLE DEMOCRATIC
SENATE MAJORITY WAS ATTAINABLE IN NOVEMBER

As all of this weren't hilarious enough, to top it all off, as my colleague Debra Cooper has been pointing out since before the election, this didn't have to be. Debra and some lonely-voiced colleagues in the NYS Democratic Party could be heard -- faintly -- screaming that there were several Senate races, including the oh-so-close Padavan seat in Queens, where Democratic pickups were within relatively easy reach. Just the tiniest expenditure of party campaign money and manpower could well have brought those seats home. However, virtually all state party campaign resources were being diverted, by order of the Obama campaign, to the presidential contest in Pennsylvania and other states -- manning phone banks and such.

Yes, the presidential race was important, and NYS Dems were eager and willing to pitch in wherever asked. But it wasn't the only game in town, the only job the state party had to do. For Democrats who believe in the things that New York State Democrats do, there has been a high price to pay for the diversion of all those local campaign resources. Thanks, Team Obama!

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