Man, the state could use Joe Bruno now
TTroy hough Joseph L. Bruno had been out of state politics for just 12 years when he died Tuesday, it feels in many respects like a lifetime ago. Make that two lifetimes.
When Bruno stepped down in 2008, Andrew Cuomo was not governor, Barack Obama was not yet president and no sane person would have predicted that a certain real-estate developer from Manhattan would someday call the White House home.
When Bruno retired, the Republican Party in New York was not the limp noodle it has become. Anthony Weiner had a bright political future. Many of us were logging on to check our Myspace pages.
Different times. Different times.
But despite the passage of time and its changes, the hole Bruno left in state government
remains, and he is still missed. New York could sure use guy like Joe Bruno right now.
As many of you know, the former state Senate majority leader was a larger-than-life figure and personality, a former boxer who never forgot how to throw a punch. (Literally and figuratively.) In an age when many politicians were not what they pretended, Bruno was always authentically Joe.
Bruno, 91 when he died at his home in Brunswick, didn’t talk like a lawyer. The Republican wasn’t a technocrat or an elitist. He was a blue-collar guy who remembered, always, that government could do good things for people. Having grown up poor in a Glens Falls flat with no hot water, he never forgot what it meant to go hungry.
Oh, he had flaws. He mixed his political and business interests, for one. He wasn’t alone in that, of course. In the Albany of his day, that was
often how it was done.
Bruno was also a king of pork who handed out taxpayer money like a political Santa. “He brings home the bacon!” people said. Maybe so, but it was no way to run a government or make decisions. It’s how we got an Amtrak station in Rensselaer — Bruno’s district! — instead of Albany, where it belongs.
But think of what it would mean to have the old Joe Bruno prowling the halls of the Capitol right now. Imagine how Bruno would stand up to Andrew Cuomo, the biggest bully around and a governor who increasingly rules like a king.
As my colleague Edward Mckinley reported last month, Cuomo probably has more power than any governor in the country. He’s in complete control, with hardly a check on his whims. That was true before the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s even more true now.
Republicans and Democrats alike should recognize that things are outof-whack when one man alone runs the show. Even supporters of Cuomo, or
those who think he’s doing well to guide New
York through the pandemic, should worry that New York in this moment is not what anyone would call a functioning democracy.
With the state in crisis, the Legislature has all but vanished. Poof! Its members have ducked and run for cover.
“Joe Bruno never would have given away control like that,” said John Faso, the former Republican congressman from Kind
erhook who served alongside Bruno in the Legislature. “He understood that our system doesn’t work as one-man rule.”
I think that’s right. Bruno would have wanted the Legislature involved in handling the crisis. He wouldn’t have run from responsibility or accepted that a governor alone should rule.
And he wouldn’t have rolled over during more normal times, as former Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan did prior
to Democrats taking over in 2019 — thereby giving voters little reason to keep Republicans in control. Bruno wouldn’t have been bullied.
“We’re not going to be steamrolled,” Bruno once warned former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, the self-proclaimed Steamroller-inChief. “We’re not going to be stampeded. We’re not going to be run over.”
Does anybody stand up to Andrew Cuomo that way? Joe Bruno would have.
He also, of course, would have continued to be what he always was: A voice for upstate.
That’s sorely lacking now in state government, with the governor, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-cousins all hailing from the teeming megalopolis to the south. To that trio, Glens Falls might as well be in Quebec.
Bruno knew Glens
Falls. And he knew the region between Hoosick Falls and Niagara Falls has needs and concerns that don’t match those of Manhattan and Queens. He was a voice for those of us who live in this big, beautiful but often declining place, and it may be a long time before somebody with power speaks for us so forcefully again.
That helps explain why many people held Bruno in such regard, despite his flaws. Bruno cared about upstate, this part of it in particular. And upstate, this part of it in particular, loved him for it.