Culture Of Corruption-- Oklahoma, The Bronx... Transpartisan

In Sunday's NY Times Eric Lipton exposed one of the most insidious contemporary conspiracies in American politics: a secret alliance between Republican Attorney Generals and Big Oil. The chart above may summarize one of its key raisons d'être, but we'll come back and look at in in a moment. Because I want to just make it perfectly clear that I'm not trying to just demonize a bunch of Republican hacks in backward states that have one-party control over-- like Texas, Alabama and Oklahoma. Before we get to the corrupt Republicans taking big bucks from Big Oil, let's look at corrupt Democrats where they have one-party control, in this case New York. My friend Jennifer Firestone summed up in an interesting OpED, Anatomy Of A Public Betrayal, in the Riverdale Press about a crooked Bronx pol we've been writing about, Jeffrey Klein. Keep in mind that Klein is an ally not just of the conservative Democrat Andrew Cuomo but also of the purported "progressive" Democrat Bill De Blasio.

Newsflash: New Yorkers are living in an age of political corruption.

Fresh off of his Nov. 4 victory, with Democrats asking for a special legislative session to reconsider the minimum wage, what was the very first bill that our governor signed? The Craft New York Act, to support New York’s breweries and wineries.

State Sen. Co-majority Leader Jeff Klein released a quote applauding the legislation.You might have, too, if the liquor industry was one of the corporate entities instrumental in lining your campaign coffers.

The New York Post uncovered earlier this month that, in a “secret re-election ‘pact,’” Republican co-leader Dean Skelos supported Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s candidacy in exchange for Cuomo withholding support from Long Island Democrats. This deal makes sense in light of Capital New York’s revelation in early September that Cuomo was behind Klein’s Independent Democratic Conference partnering with Republicans.

Translation: Mr. Cuomo brokered the deal in which Mr. Klein’s rogue band of Democrats shared power with Republicans and assisted with Republican legislative priorities for two years-- the deal that wrested the majority leadership from the Democrats in 2012 and handed it to Republican Dean Skelos-- so that Klein could become a “co-president.”

With Mr. Klein and Mr. Skelos at the helm, New Yorkers were denied an increase in the minimum wage to $10.10; the Women’s Equality Act, the Dream Act, GENDA legislation, a moratorium on hydrofracking and campaign finance reform failed to pass; and tenants were left to fend for themselves.

There is a rotten triumvirate at the epicenter of Albany, and we have made its reappearance a self-fulfilling prophecy.

How does this happen in the Bronx? The Bronx is so Democratic that Obama beat Romney 288,378 (91%) to 26,304 (8%)-- by far Romney's worst performance in any of New York's 62 counties. Even a grotesquely corrupt conservative Democrat like Cuomo was able to kill in the Bronx this year, beating Astorino 113,369 (86.6%) to 14,414 (11.0%), Cuomo's best performance in the state and Astorino's worst.



Yes, the only band that mattered... but let's move on to Lipton and his revelations, starting in Oklahoma, where the other party has complete control-- and where the corruption is mind-boggling.

The letter to the Environmental Protection Agency from Attorney General Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma carried a blunt accusation: Federal regulators were grossly overestimating the amount of air pollution caused by energy companies drilling new natural gas wells in his state.

But Mr. Pruitt left out one critical point. The three-page letter was written by lawyers for Devon Energy, one of Oklahoma’s biggest oil and gas companies, and was delivered to him by Devon’s chief of lobbying.

“Outstanding!” William F. Whitsitt, who at the time directed government relations at the company, said in a note to Mr. Pruitt’s office. The attorney general’s staff had taken Devon’s draft, copied it onto state government stationery with only a few word changes, and sent it to Washington with the attorney general’s signature. “The timing of the letter is great, given our meeting this Friday with both E.P.A. and the White House.”

Mr. Whitsitt then added, “Please pass along Devon’s thanks to Attorney General Pruitt.”

The email exchange from October 2011, obtained through an open-records request, offers a hint of the unprecedented, secretive alliance that Mr. Pruitt and other Republican attorneys general have formed with some of the nation’s top energy producers to push back against the Obama regulatory agenda, an investigation by the New York Times has found.

Attorneys general in at least a dozen states are working with energy companies and other corporate interests, which in turn are providing them with record amounts of money for their political campaigns, including at least $16 million this year.

They share a common philosophy about the reach of the federal government, but the companies also have billions of dollars at stake. And the collaboration is likely to grow: For the first time in modern American history, Republicans in January will control a majority-- 27-- of attorneys general’s offices.

The Times reported previously how individual attorneys general have shut down investigations, changed policies or agreed to more corporate-friendly settlement terms after intervention by lobbyists and lawyers, many of whom are also campaign benefactors.

But the attorneys general are also working collectively. Democrats for more than a decade have teamed up with environmental groups such as the Sierra Club to use the court system to impose stricter regulation. But never before have attorneys general joined on this scale with corporate interests to challenge Washington and file lawsuits in federal court.

Out of public view, corporate representatives and attorneys general are coordinating legal strategy and other efforts to fight federal regulations, according to a review of thousands of emails and court documents and dozens of interviews.

“When you use a public office, pretty shamelessly, to vouch for a private party with substantial financial interest without the disclosure of the true authorship, that is a dangerous practice,” said David B. Frohnmayer, a Republican who served a decade as attorney general in Oregon. “The puppeteer behind the stage is pulling strings, and you can’t see. I don’t like that. And when it is exposed, it makes you feel used.”

For Mr. Pruitt, the benefits have been clear. Lobbyists and company officials have been notably solicitous, helping him raise his profile as president for two years of the Republican Attorneys General Association, a post he used to help start what he and allies called the Rule of Law campaign, which was intended to push back against Washington.

...And it is an emerging practice that several former attorneys general say threatens the integrity of the office.

“It is a magnificent and noble institution, the office of attorney general, as it is truly the lawyer for the people,” said Terry Goddard, a Democrat who served two terms as Arizona’s attorney general and who, like Mr. Frohnmayer, reviewed copies of the documents collected by The Times. “That independence is clearly at risk here. What is happening diminishes the reputation of individual attorneys general and the community as a group.”

Scott Pruitt (R-OK)-- the most corrupt Attorney General in America

UPDATE: When Will Malcolm Smith Go To Prison?

The NY Post brings us up-to-date on the repulsive, self-serving Republicrat-- a corrupt Democratic state senator who wanted to run for mayor on the GOP line... and was willing to pay good money for the nomination. The pointed out that he "warned dozens of top New York lobbyists that their clients would be shut out of state politics if they didn’t make large contributions, the feds say in a new filing."

“Smith told the attendees that they should treat the fundraiser as an ‘IPO’ [initial public offering] by donating early while prices were low and while there was still an opportunity to participate,” Assistant US Attorney Justin Anderson wrote Wednesday of the August 2008 gathering in upstate Kingston.

“Smith’s comments implied that those who failed to make contributions to his campaign at that time would find themselves having to pay more later or being unable to accomplish anything with the Senate under Smith’s leadership.”

Smith told the lobbyists then that the Democrats were expected to win control of the Senate in that upcoming November election and that he’d be among the key pols calling the shots for the reorganized legislative body.

Anderson filed the legal papers last week asking White Plains federal Judge Kenneth Karas to allow prosecutors to present the boast as evidence at Smith’s trial.

Linking contributions to future government actions is illegal under New York law.

...The feds want to tell jurors about the fundraiser to provide context of how Smith’s history of alleged shady solicitations stretches long before he was charged in a failed $200,000 bribery scheme to cross party lines and secure the Republican nomination in the 2013 mayoral race.

And if they do allow the new evidence against Smith to be admitted, which seems likely, does that mean they would have to subsequently call Klein in for questioning on allegations of being an "enforcer" to extortion, which he clearly has been? And, by the way, in the September primary, Queens voters rejected Smith quite decisively. His opponent Leroy Comrie, a former city councilman, won in a landslide.

Queens State Senator Malcolm Smith And A Gaggle Of Corrpt Republicans Arrested By The FBI

Queens Sen. Malcolm Smith, handcuffs not visible

How does on even explain to a non-New Yorker who and what state Senator Malcolm Smith is? It's not enough to point out that one of Congress' most corrupt members, Joe Crowley, is the Capo di tutti capi of the miserably corrupt Queens Democratic Party Machine, out of which Smith, who represents Hollis, crawled. Nor is it enough to mention that Smith has been the ultimate Democrat-Republican opportunist in the contemporary history of New York politics.

The 56 year old Smith started in politics as a senior aide, a protégé, of outrageously corrupt (and conservative) Queens Congressman Floyd Flake. Before being driven from office, under indictment for corruption, Flake, representing one of the most liberal areas in the country, worked for the election of right-wing Republicans from Ken Blackwell in Ohio to Rudy Giuliani and George Pataki in New York. Smith follows his model exactly-- both in terms of conservatism and corruption, which, of course, are inseparable anyway.

Smith was elected to the state Senate in 2000, minority leader in 2007 and Majority Leader in 2009, a post he held for around 6 months. After he was reelected last November he joined up with the Independent Democratic Conference to form a "bipartisan governing coalition" with Senate Republicans and prevent passage of any kind of progressive agenda for the state. And that brings us to him being dragged out of his Addisleigh Park home in handcuffs by FBI agents early this morning. One of his right-wing GOP cronies, as corrupt as he is and a Tea Party-backed political hack, City Councilman Dan Halloran was arrested at the same time. At the same time, FBI agents were hunting down and arresting Bronx Republican Chairman Jay Savino, Queens GOP vice chairman Vincent Tabone and several other corrupt Republicans who took bribes in a bizarre plot to make Smith the Republican candidate for NYC Mayor this year. Halloran, best known for his adherence to paganism and white supremacism, was the go-between for arranging the bribes for the Republican Party borough leaders. Times star investigative reporter William Rashbaum:

Smith has said he was considering running for mayor of New York as a Republican, and the charges contend that he made payments to Mr. Halloran in exchange for the councilman’s assistance in setting up meetings with Republican leaders as part of an effort to get on the ballot, the complaint said.

The criminal complaint in the case was brought by federal prosecutors in Manhattan and was unsealed Tuesday morning. Mr. Smith, Mr. Halloran and the others were to appear on Tuesday before a United States magistrate judge in United States District Court in White Plains.

Mr. Smith, according to the complaint, agreed with a cooperating witness and an undercover F.B.I. agent, who was masquerading as a wealthy real estate developer, to pay off leaders of Republican Party county committees in New York’s five boroughs. The bribes were to be paid to obtain specific certificates authorizing him to run for New York City mayor as a Republican even though he was a registered Democrat.

The undercover agent and the cooperating witness served as intermediaries between the senator and Councilman Halloran, the complaint said.

“Public service is not supposed to be a shortcut to self-enrichment,'’ George Venizelos, assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said in a statement. “At the very least, public officials should obey the law. As alleged, these defendants did not obey the law; they broke the law and the public trust. There is a price to pay for that kind of betrayal.”

...The complaint details a brazen scheme hatched a series of clandestine meetings in hotels parked cars, restaurants and even the senator’s Albany office. The meetings, recorded by the undercover or the cooperating witness, were mostly between the senator, the undercover and the witness, and the councilman and the two government operatives.

Most of those involved, according to the complaint, were looking for something-- cash bribes were sought by the party officials and Mr. Halloran and Mr. Smith were seeking authorization to get on the ballot in the mayor’s race. Ms. Jasmin was seeking an ownership interest in a company she believed was involved in a real estate project.

The senator at one point became impatient, asking the undercover and the cooperating witness during a meeting in his office whether the committee leaders were delaying getting his certificates because they wanted more money.

Mr. Smith, according to the complaint, instructed the two men not to pay the committee leaders any more money until they had “close[d] … the deal.” He also said that before the leaders received “even a nickel more, [he’d] have to stand on the Empire State Building and drop every person [he] endorsed and hold Malcolm up and say he’s the best thing since sliced bread. Matter of fact, he’s better than sliced bread.”

According to the complaint, Mr. Halloran set up a meeting at which the undercover agent and the witness met Joseph J. Savino, the Bronx G.O.P. chairman, and Vincent Tabone, vice chairman of the Queens Republican Party, and negotiated the amounts of the bribes for the documents. In exchange, Mr. Halloran sought and received more than $20,000 in cash for himself, prosecutors said.

Mr. Tabone and Mr. Savino were paid bribes of more than $40,000 and were promised $40,000 more, and they in turn agreed to use their official capacities with Republican county committees to obtain the documents Mr. Smith would need to run for mayor as a Republican.

Mr. Smith, in exchange for help from Mr. Savinio and Mr. Tabone, agreed to use his Senate office to help win state funds for a road project in Spring Valley that would benefit a real estate project that Senator Smith believed was being built by a company belonging to the undercover agent.

The complaint said that on Nov. 16, Mr. Smith met the undercover agent and the cooperating witness at a hotel in White Plains and asked the witness to contact a Republican Party county chairman identified in the charges only as “County Chairman #1” to try to “change him” by persuading him to support Mr. Smith rather than another mayoral candidate whom the chairman had publicly supported.

...On Tuesday, the arrests immediately reverberated through the mayor’s race. Mr. Tabone is a paid consultant to the Republican mayoral campaign of John Catsimatidis, the grocery store magnate. Records show Mr. Catsimatidis has paid Mr. Tabone $3,000 so far this year. Another Republican mayoral candidate, Joseph J. Lhota, recently welcomed the endorsement of Mr. Halloran, who was also arrested on Tuesday morning.

Late last year, Mr. Smith, who was elected Senate president in 2008 and ousted in 2010, joined a group of insurgent Democrats-- the Independent Democratic Conference-- and said around the same time that he was considering running for mayor as a Republican.

He was seen as a key recruit for the conference, a five-member faction that formed a leadership coalition with Republicans in the Senate. Before Mr. Smith joined the caucus, there was criticism that a faction of white Democrats was joining with the all-white Republican conference; the presence of Mr. Smith, an African-American and a last-minute recruit to the Independent Democratic Conference, helped blunt those concerns.

The move came with some incentives: beyond his increased influence, the New York Post reported that his staff budget increased by about two-thirds since he joined the conference.

Mr. Smith has been a subject of several criminal inquiries in recent years. One, which had apparently begun by early 2010 and was conducted by federal prosecutors from the same office that sought the indictment that led to Tuesday’s arrests, was focused on a nonprofit linked to Mr. Smith and a United States representative, Gregory J. Meeks. In that case, the prosecutors subpoenaed records from Mr. Smith’s Senate office that detailed money he had directed to community groups for a decade. Mr. Meeks has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

...Smith, along with the Senate Democratic leader then, John L. Sampson of Brooklyn, was also among those named in a scathing State Inspector General’s report in 2010 that said the Senate’s leaders had manipulated the choice of who would build New York City’s first casino.

The 308-page report, on the competition to install video slot machines at the Aqueduct racetrack in Queens, was referred to federal and state prosecutors and the Legislative Ethics Committee and said the senators had leaked information and shown favoritism to a troubled bidder that was donating to Democratic candidates and had ties to key political figures. No charges have been brought in relation to the casino contract.

The Times forgot to mention that Pagan Prince Halloran told a reporter outside his home that he "had no idea" why he was being arrested. Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District: "These six officials built a corridor of corruption and greed from Queens and The Bronx to Rockland County and all the way to Albany. After all the public corruption scandals we've charged, the sad truth may be the most powerful special interest in politics is self interest."

Catching up on the New York State Senate follies -- thanks to Governor Rod, we've got no shot at being the nation's no. 1 political laughingstock

"The members of this Conference have come a long way to consider the demands placed on the table. But frankly, we would rather wait two more years to take charge of the Senate than to simply serve the interests of the few. New York State cannot afford the type of self-serving politics being proposed and I will not be the leader to sacrifice what is right for New York for a quick political solution."

-- from a statement issued yesterday by New York State Senate Minority Leader Malcolm Smith [right], whose hopes to become leader of the Senate's new Democratic "majority" have become even murkier

by Ken

It just isn't fair. Here we New Yorkers figure we should have a lock on being the Nation's Leading Political Laughingstock with our State Senate's inability to figure out who's in charge. I mean, here it is well into December, and nobody can even hazard a guess as to who's going to be running the show come January. But darn if those rats in Illinois don't come up with that one-man carnival of political yuks, Gov. Rod Blagojevich. I mean, just the idea of a state being run by a man who's out on bail . . . how is our poor Senate Gang of Three supposed to compete with that?

You'll recall that in this election, at least nominally, Democrats took control of the State Senate for the first time since the LBJ landslide year election of 1964. As it happens, back then too hilarity ensued, as the Dems not only took control of the Senate for the first time in living memory but recaptured control of the State Assembly, and promptly found themselves hopelessly split between factions. I wrote about that last month , even as we were getting early signs that the State Senate Democrats' transition to majority status following four decades as a permanent minority might not be accomplished smoothly.

With the Democratic majority likely to wind up a razor-thin 32-30, meaning that there were no votes to spare, a "Gang of Four" Democratic senators with agendas of their own was threatening not to vote with their fellow Dems when it came to organize the Senate. That quickly metamorphosed into a Gang of Three, but if you subtract three votes from the Dems' nominal 32, that's quite enough to cause a heap of control trouble even if the three don't actually vote with the other side.

After the 1964 election, as I noted last month, once the Democrats finally managed to organize the legislature (only thanks to the intervention of Republican Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who bludgeoned Republican legislators into voting with the one of the Democratic factions, just so he could restore the legislature to functional status in order to give him whatever he asked for, which was Governor Rockefeller's idea of the legislature's function), Democratic control of the Senate lasted a breathtakingly meager one year. Because of legal complications related to state legislators' inability to produce a redistricting plan (still from the 1960 census), the 1964 election was for a one-year legislative term, with another election to follow in November 1965. In that election the Democrats promptly surrendered control of the Senate back to the GOP

At that, one year of control may be better than they manage now. For several weeks it appeared that the hopeful leader of the new Senate Democratic majority, Malcolm Smith of Brooklyn, was prepared to accommodate the Gang of Three in utterly outrageous ways, with leadership positions of outrageously high and unwarranted authority to Sen.-elect Pedro Espada Jr. (whose complaint was that Latinos were underserved in the leadership, by which he seems to have meant he should get a nice job) and to Sen. Carl Kruger (whose complaint seems to have been that the leadership wasn't doing enough for him, even though he's hardly even a Democrat -- he votes so often with the Republicans that they actually gave him a committee chairmanship during their rule!), and with an outrageous promise to Sen. Ruben Diaz, a conservative minister, that no marriage-equality bill would make it to the Senate floor.

In the end, even if the Gang of Three considered itself amply bribed (and it's not clear that they did), a lot of other Senate Democrats, especially those who had been bypassed for jobs offered to Espada and Kruger, and of course those who objected to the party's policy on marriage equality being tailored to appease the homophobic Diaz, rebelled. However belatedly, Senator Smith came to his senses. (Paul Schindler has an excellent survey of this wacky story on Gay City News. It has been of obvious interest and concern to the LGBT community.)

Of course none of this speaks well for Senator Smith's long-term leadership prospects, and already state Democrats are scrounging among the more senior members of the Senate caucus for some more hopeful prospect. The problem, of course, is that they're looking for leadership in a body where Democrats have had no real function for four decades. There are some terrific people there, but it's hard to think of one who could command support on a statewide basis.


WAS THE NYS SENATE MESS AVOIDABLE? IS THERE
A LESSON FOR THE STATE AND NATIONAL PARTIES?

All through the general election, and even more pointedly since Election Day, my colleague Debra Cooper, a veteran of much NYS Democratic trench warfare, has been hollering to anyone who'll listen that there was a good chance of just such a mess, thanks to the campaign philosophy of the national Democratic Party, or rather the Obama campaign, which became functionally one and the same thing. In New York and other important royal-blue states, down-ticket races were ignored and available political resources, financial and human, were sucked up to be devoted to politicking in other states. With New York State's electoral votes in the bag for Senator Obama, large quantities of in-state party campaign cash and labor were put to work phone-banking and otherwise toiling in the presidential race in contested states like Pennsylvania.

The price, Debra has argued, was the loss of a number of marginal legislative districts that with even a little more campaign muscle could well have been flipped. Even now the margin of reelection victory of Queens Republican Sen. Frank Padavan is so thin that it's not beyond legal challenge. Winning just that seat, which should have been within Democrats' grasp, would have remapped the Senate majority to 33-29, and we see what a difference that would have been made. Debra argues that other Senate seats might also have been winnable had a bit more of our own campaign resources been expended in-state.

Surely several more congressional districts might have been flipped as well. The same seems true for California, where we heard months of reports of enormous quantities of in-state Democratic campaign resources being devoted to the presidential contest in contested states. Some of those unbearably slimy California Republican Howie writes about so much got a free ride, or at any rate a freer one than they might have.

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Somewhere, Eliot Spitzer may be chuckling as Dems succeed in taking control of the New York State Senate -- more or less

The 2007-8 New York State Senate in all its, er, glory

by Ken

As Howie noted yesterday ("Democrats Kicked Ass In the State Legislative Races Around The Country Last Night"), the New York State Senate flipped Tuesday to Democratic control, for only the second time since before World War II -- and not often before then. (Contrary to Howie's recollection, though, it's not the first time in his lifetime. But that's another story, which we'll come back to.)

I guess this is big news.

It's certainly something that was a high priority for former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who saw gaining a Democratic majority in the Senate as a crucial element in his plan to overhaul state government and enact his ambitious legislative program. Alas, Governor Spitzer has departed the halls of government in Albany, taking with him both his overhaul and his program. If Gov. David Paterson has plans of either kind, I haven't heard about them. I'm guessing the governor is going to have his hands full scraping together enough money to pay for whatever remains of state government in the wake of the Wall Street "misfortunes."

(Both New York City and New York State are dangerously dependent on tax revenues generated by a healthy financial sector. Even now NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg -- fresh from bullying the City Council, for his and their benefit, into relaxing our term-limits law, which had been approved twice by city voters -- is sharpening his budget ax.)

And everyone around me keeps assuring me what big news this is. On The Albany Project, my esteemed colleague Phillip Anderson has a "State Senate Reaction Roundup," of which this from the Long Island newspaper Newsday is representative:

With the loss of the Senate, Republicans no longer have a seat at the power table where deals are struck between the governor and lawmakers. With Democratic control, the Island also lost its second majority leader ever, Dean Skelos of Rockville Centre.

Skelos attributed the state Senate loss to "a large landslide by Obama."

"We'll be back," he said. "In two years, the dynamics of the city and the state will be different, and once that is out of the way we'll be able to come back."

To which Phillip comments, "Not likely, Dean."

In part the hopes of the hopeful are based on the legislature's historical near-total dysfunction. Why, the New York State Legislature would need a total sweeping remake and upgrade to raise it to the level of "dysfunctional." Basically, our 62 senators and 150 assemblymen spend all that time hanging around Albany -- which they probably consider hardship enough to entitle them to the gigantic sums it costs us taxpayers for their upkeep -- simply waiting to be told by their leaders how to vote.

New York State is governed by our famous "three men in a room": the governor, the Senate majority leader, and the Assembly speaker. Meaning that, as long as the parties in power maintain control, there's not a lot for the "opposition" to do. Okay, there's nothing for the minorities (currently the Senate Democrats and the Assembly Republicans) to do. Head counts come into play only when the majority leaders can't command their caucuses, as has been happening more often in recent years.

Well, "control" in general may be the wrong word to apply to the legislature's heaving and thrashing, which has increasingly amounted to total breakdown, except as regards the lining of members' personal pockets. Most notably, for years the legislature was ritually unable to perform its basic function of adopting a budget anywhere near the April 1 statutory deadline.

During these decades of the legislature's de facto split between the parties, it has obviously always been the case that the governor -- of whichever party -- has one house controlled by his own party and one controlled by the opposition. Worse, their independent power dynamics have meant that governors often found it easier to deal with the opposition legislative leader. Governor Spitzer, for example, didn't last in office long enough to find out whether he could find a way to coexist with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver of Manhattan, who has been in the job since 1994 and doesn't yield easily to mere governors.

NOW, HOWEVER, ALL OF THAT HAS CHANGED!

Come January, thanks to Tuesday's voting, just as Governor Spitzer dared to dream, the three men in the famous room will be of the same party, and voters will finally be in a position to demand results. Or so the theory goes, anyway.

As of now, the Democrats will have only a 32-30 majority. An additional Republican seat, that of Queens Sen. Frank Padavan, is, surprisingly, in jeopardy. We may not know that outcome for weeks, but already there's a bloc of four conservative New York City Democrats declaring itself "independent," and threatening not to vote to elevate current Senate Minority Leader Malcolm Smith of Queens to be the new majority leader, apparently to prevent being railroaded into supporting Commie crap like marriage equality. [By the way, if you would like to know the "meaning" of those numbered elements in the New York State Senate Seal, visit here.]

There's a possibility that the rebels may vote with the Republicans to keep Majority Leader Skelos on the job. Even assuming Senator Smith succeeds in getting the Senate organized and himself installed as majority leader, it seems clear that he's not going to have an easy time holding his caucus together. Would it be unkind to suggest that all those years of minority-status futility haven't necessarily uniformly improved the quality of the Democratic members? Okay, forget "unkind." Would it be unfair?

As if that wasn't messy enough, the current legislature is actually being called into session again, later this month, to deal with the financial crisis. It all sounds to me like a recipe for confusion, if not chaos.

UPDATE: "GANG OF FOUR" HUDDLE WITH GOP SENATE LEADERS

The AP's Michael Gormley reports that the so-called "Gang of Four" met yesterday with leaders of the outgoing Senate GOP majority "to discuss how the four might serve the GOP and what’s in it for them should they defect, according to [Republican and Democratic] officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because leaders wouldn’t confirm the talks."

The four independent-minded Democrats -- often called the “Gang of Four” -- historically have not been afraid to break ranks and support Republicans. They also have clashed at times with Sen. Malcolm Smith of Queens, the presumptive next majority leader, and reportedly refused to attend a Democratic conference Wednesday called by Smith.

The senators are Ruben Diaz Sr. and Pedro Espada Jr., both of the Bronx; Carl Kruger of Brooklyn; and Hiram Monserrate of Queens. . . .

On the table at Wednesday’s meeting was a possible power-sharing agreement by Democrats and Republicans or a kind of hostile takeover of the Senate by Republicans using the swing Democrats to maintain control of the Senate when a majority leader is elected in January.

If Republicans kept majority power, they could then reward the four Democratic defectors with lucrative committee chairmanships.

Republicans said no deals were struck in the meetings. . . .

Meanwhile, Democrats privately said that Democratic Gov. David Paterson has intervened. They say he struck at least a tentative deal with enough of the so-called "Gang of Four" Democrats to preserve the Democratic majority for at least a year under Smith. The Democratic mavericks, however, would be free to vote their conscience on specific bills even if that is contrary to the Democratic line.

NOW, ABOUT THAT LAST TIME THAT
THE DEMS CONTROLLED THE NYS SENATE

I'm shocked that Howie doesn't remember it, because it happened during our senior year at James Madison High School in Brooklyn.

In the LBJ landslide election of 1964, the Democrats captured control of both the Assembly and the Senate, but promptly split down the middle between factions loyal to NYC Mayor Robert Wagner and to Sen. Robert Kennedy. The struggle continued for more than a month, and was resolved only through pressure from Republican Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, whose legislative plans were thwarted by the absence of a functioning legislature. (In those years, the way the legislature worked was, basically, that it was eventually strong-armed into giving Governor Rockefeller what he wanted.) A peeved Governor Rockefeller -- and the governor was not a person whom the people around him enjoyed seeing peeved -- prevailed on the Republican leaders in both houses to vote with the Wagner factions for the Democrats who had been minority leaders in the two houses, Sen. Joseph Zaretzki of Manhattan (the last Democratic Senate majority leader until, presumably, Senate Smith takes over in January) and Assemblyman Anthony Travia of Brooklyn. [Sorry, but I couldn't find a picture of Senator Zaretzki.]

Assembly Speaker Travia lasted only a few years in the job before slipping into a judgeship. Senate Majority Leader Zaretzki's reign was even shorter, not quite 11 months. Because of federal voting-rights concerns over reapportionment of the legislature, the 1964 elections covered only one year. And when new elections were held in 1965, for another one-year term, the Republicans regained control of the Senate.

That redistricting squabble, which as noted had required judicial intervention, actually laid the groundwork for the Republicans' subsequent four-decade control of the State Senate and the Democrats' simultaneous monopoly control of the Assembly. When it came time to redistrict again following the 1970 census, given that any plan required the approval of both houses, rather than cede control to the courts again the legislative leaders agreed in effect to split the place down the middle. District lines would be redrawn to more or less ensure Republican control of the Senate and Democratic control of the Assembly.

The agreement held through the reapportionments following the censuses of 1980, 1990, and 2000, and even included an unofficial agreement that the parties wouldn't challenge each other's incumbents. It didn't begin to fray until the state Republican Party itself did. Democrats saw Republican seats that looked ripe for the plucking, and Governor Spitzer used strategic government appointments to open up additional GOP seats, in addition to making clear that he planned to contest any seats he thought could be captured.

PERSONAL POSTSCRIPT

I confess that I depended heavily on reference sources to refresh my memory of details of the 1964-65 struggle for control of the legislature. But I well remember the intoxicating craziness of the time. We were in the thick of it, in fact, the day I schlepped into Manhattan from Brooklyn in a near-blizzard for my alum interview at the Harvard Club, required for my Harvard application.

Even back in those prehistoric times it was common to have one's college interview during a visit to the campus. However, I had a very strict senior English teacher who sternly disapproved of our taking school time off for frivolities like campus visits, and on-campus interviews couldn't be arranged on weekends. So I had to do the alum interview, and I lucked into the near-blizzard, tracking snow and slush into the sacred confines of the Harvard Club.

And I wound up having a grand time. I yammered on about the delicious crisis of our state government, and my interviewer seemed quite charmed. Before I headed back out into the snowstorm, he confided that while of course he couldn't speak officially, he thought my admission chances were excellent.

For the record, he was wrong.

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