OK. So maybe we were all a little overly optimistic.
We all had such high hopes for a new spirit of governance and potential reform in Albany. But a disastrous first budget by newly elected Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been followed by a first legislative session, now in a state of suspended animation, nearly as bad.
The state Legislature adjourned last month after a six-month session and the list of pressing matters that went unfinished is depressing. Among the major items remaining undone were reform of the Wicks Law, which complicates public works projects; paid family leave; capital projects; congestion pricing for vehicle traffic in lower Manhattan; judicial pay raises; regulations for siting of new power plants; and campaign finance reform. Not to mention the scores of smaller matters - including home rule issues - left unattended through nearly six months.
Not that we needed a reminder of the dysfunction for which Albany is known and the state Legislature is primarily responsible.
THE HOPE had been that a new governor, with a clear mandate from the people to change the way Albany does business, would prove irresistible. But the Republican state Senate has dug in its heels to fight, apparently convinced it can defeat the populist governor, the statewide sentiment his historic election margin expressed, and the continued erosion of the GOP's voter enrollment statewide.
They are positively delusional. Their phony electoral lock on the Senate has dwindled to three seats. Absent some unexpected scandal on the Democratic side, it's hard to see how anything will stop the imminent loss of Republican control.
Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, R-Brunswick, seems determined to go down swinging. But, then, take Bruno and most of his dwindling caucus, dress them in gray overcoats and fedoras, stand them in a line and what have you got?
Mostly aging white men in suits, successful in their own way, but more or less comfortable at the realization they have dead-ended at a level of cynical self-perpetuation marked by overly generous pay, a lightweight work schedule and the trappings of power. They are, in short, shoulder-to-shoulder, the meanest version of the Politburo reviewing a May Day parade of missiles past the Kremlin since the fall of the Soviet Union. They are power for power's sake. Self-perpetuation as an end. And, just like the Communist Party, unabashedly dependent on phony elections to legitimate their continued rule.
For residents of the Empire State, that makes the state Legislature a perpetual non-motion machine, where even the most pressing of public business - for instance, the hopelessly broken, deservedly reviled property tax system - can go entirely unattended.
The people's business? It is to laugh.
Assembly Democrats are no better. Locked into districts packed with Democratic voters, their body is as unresponsive, autocratic, and anti-democratic as the Senate. For evidence, look no further than the shameful role of the Assembly in selecting one of their own to fill the state comptroller's seat.
THERE IS, however, a glimmer of hope.
Spitzer won't let go of campaign finance reform, which would be a step toward making state government more responsive to voters. When there are meaningful limits to how Albany's elected officials raise money, those officials will begin to listen to voters first rather than contributors.
Bruno whines that campaign finance reform is intended to make New York a one-party state. He makes it all sound so unfair.
But what he is actually saying is, take the corrupting influence of unrestrained campaign finance out of the equation, and this irrational lock the GOP has over the state Senate will collapse like the house of cards it is.
What he doesn't say is that the campaign finance system maintains the majority that maintains monopoly control over the gerrymandering of voting districts. In short, money buys the phony elections that maintain the funny business with maps that effectively disenfranchise the true expression of the will of the state. That's how a state with 5.3 million registered Democratic voters and only 3 million Republican continues to have a Senate controlled by Republicans. Phony districts make for phony elections.
In that context, neither house of the Legislature will ever be responsive to electoral pressure to get the people's business done.
The dismal performance of the state Legislature comes down, as Bruno would put it, to Spitzer's "obsession" with campaign finance reform, an issue that Bruno insists is of no interest to anyone else.
Actually, it's of primary interest to all New Yorkers.
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