Rogue Democrats’ tough spot
Surprisingly high-ranking Democrats, including Rep. Keith Ellison, deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee, have lately been badgering the party’s rival factions in New York’s state Senate to create a working majority that can control the chamber.
For years, a group of eight Democratic senators, the self-styled Independent Democratic Conference, has collaborated with Republicans to give the GOP effective control of the Senate. With control comes the crucial power to hire staff, dispense funding and advance, stall or kill legislation.
This drives the larger, main Democratic conference nuts. They have been appealing to various higher powers — including Ellison and Gov. Cuomo — to put pressure on the IDC and mainstream Dems to unite.
“New York must serve as a beacon of progressive governance for the rest of the nation and the only way that will happen is if the Senate Democrats are in the majority, where they belong,” Ellison said recently, according to The News’ statehouse bureau chief, Ken Lovett. Ellison is headlining a fundraiser for the mainline Senate Democrats this week.
Sen. Jeff Klein, the Bronx lawmaker who leads the IDC, is having none of it. “If I have anything to do with it, (GOP Majority Leader) John Flanagan is going to be the leader for a long, long time,” Klein reportedly said at a recent private dinner.
Much of this bickering is a backroom political scrum that has little effect on New Yorkers’ lives. But the fight does matter — and it falls to the rest of us to see if we can make Albany’s bitterest political rivalry work to the advantage of the public.
Even the most loyal party stalwarts must acknowledge that the IDC members had depressingly sound reasons to split from the main Democratic conference.
The feud began shortly after Dems narrowly wrested control of the Senate from the Republicans in 2009. Four senators, the self-styled amigos, concocted an outrageous scheme to cross the aisle and throw control back the GOP.
The rogue senators eventually crossed the aisle again, after demanding and receiving major leadership roles from their fellow Democrats.
The plan ended badly. It turned out that three of the amigos — ex-Sens. Carl Kruger, Pedro Espada and Hiram Monserrate — had been cheating the public. Kruger and Espada are reading this column in federal prison, convicted of various corruption charges.
Monserrate was expelled from the Senate in disgrace after video surfaced of him physically brutalizing his then-girlfriend. He later pleaded guilty to mail fraud, served nearly two years in federal prison himself, and is now attempting a political comeback by running for City Council in Queens.
The alleged goal of all this chaos — giving Dems control of the Senate — turned out to be a bust. Two of the conference’s leaders, exSens. Malcolm Smith and John Sampson, are in federal prison today, convicted of their own, unrelated crimes.
Republicans, to be sure, were far from blameless in all of this. Ex-Sen. Dean Skelos, who as majority leader was the architect and primary beneficiary of the amigos’ coup, ended up convicted of corruption charges and sentenced to five years in prison last year (he is currently free while he appeals his conviction).
All that background is important. Klein often cites the turmoil of the 2009 session to explain why he created a breakaway group, the IDC, which has openly and formally done what the amigos did as a legislative stunt: affiliate with the Republicans to negate the Dems’ numerical majority.
But Klein’s pro-reform explanation recently took a serious hit, when it came to light that several Republican and IDC senators have been receiving stipends for serving as committee chairs, even though they don’t actually hold the positions for which they’re being paid.
An investigation has begun of the noshow stipends, and it remains unclear where it will lead. Meanwhile, we should keep in mind that there might be an upside to the Democratic infighting.
Sen. Jesse Hamilton, for instance, an IDC member recently named as chair of the Banking Committee, represents an ultraliberal district in Central Brooklyn. Party activists have threatened to challenge his re-election because of his IDC membership.
Hamilton, eager to prove his progressive bona fides, has introduced a bill that would take money from banks fined for abusive subprime lending and steer it into community development banks, loan funds and credit unions.
It’s a smart bill. If IDC members are feeling pressure to show they can do a better job for needy communities than mainline Dems, then by all means: let the competition begin.