Albany’s Overpaid, No-Show Dems

Public servants or public masters? The Democrats who run New York’s Legislature seem to think they’re the latter. The latest for the nation’s highest-paid state legislators, at $142,000/year: rules that will let lawmakers work remotely under “extraordinary circumstances.”

Who decides what’s “extraordinary”? In the state Senate, it’s Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, for both Democrats and Republicans. Sen. Anthony Palumbo (R-Brentwood) called the arrangement “petty and outrageous.”

“Democrats get to define what ‘extraordinary circumstances’ are and have a history of using remote session to literally mute Republican voices,” fumed state Sen. Mark Walczyk (R-North Country).

In the Assembly, Speaker Carl Heastie will handle requests from Democrats; Minority Leader Will Barclay, ones from Republicans.

Sounds more equitable, but: This comes on top of an earlier Assembly rule change that lets members who sign in to the voting system be counted as voting “yes” on all bills unless they cast a “no” vote in-person on the chamber floor.

Republicans generally vote no on Democratic bills, which are the only ones the Dem majority allows to the floor. So only the minority members have to take the trouble.

Nice trick by Speaker Heastie. Assemblyman Andrew Goodell (R-Jamestown) told the Post-Journal it amounts (for Dems, anyway) to the return of “empty seat” voting — a practice banned in 2005.

Voters expect legislators to show up for their jobs, but lawmakers plainly enjoyed their pandemic-era privileges of never having to go to work. Now the Legislature’s leaders are ensuring that Democrats can keep on working remotely from home — or Hawaii.

All this, after Dems rammed through that fat pay hike last Christmas.

Voters won’t get a chance to register their opinion of all this until the 2024 elections. Democrats plainly hope that by then the public will simply forget, so that New York’s disastrous one-party rule will continue.