Twilight of the Idcers
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A few weeks after the 2016 general election, I got a call from a woman in Queens who wanted to tip me off to the fact that her state senator, Tony Avella, was a member of a breakaway legislative cabal called the Independent Democratic Conference that had been partnering with the chamber’s Republicans.
I told her that I had heard similar rumblings — and had been hearing it, and writing stories about it, throughout the almost six years since the IDC had been formed, including the nearly three years since Avella had abandoned the mainline Democratic conference to join the breakaway faction.
First elected to the Senate in 2010, Avella joined the IDC in February 2014, midway through the two-year period when the conference was at the zenith of its heavily leveraged power. After a majority of Democrats were elected in November 2012, the IDC under the leadership of Jeff Klein decided to ally itself with the minority Republicans, forming a “Majority Coalition” with Klein and then-gop leader Dean Skelos as co-leaders. The campaign dollars and nice office assignments flowed like fake syrup at Waffle House, and Klein got to sit at the high table in negotiations with Skelos, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.
Where had my caller been for the past several years? Living in a country not led by Donald J. Trump, whose election had on many citizens the tonic effect of a sharp slap across the kisser or bucket of ice water administered in the middle of a deep sleep.
For the IDC, the consequences of that wakeup call ultimately led to their April decision to disband and rejoin the main body of the Democratic conference — a shotgun wedding with Cuomo reading the vows, which included making Klein the deputy Democratic leader and obliged both sides to agree to a non-aggression pact.
The insufficiency of that rickety alliance was agonizingly clear on Thursday, when Democratic primary voters served up an old-school whupping to the IDC alumni. Six of them were denied their party’s nomination: Avella and Klein as well as Jose Peralta, Jesse Hamilton, Marisol Alcantara and David Valesky. Only charter IDC members David Carlucci and Diane Savino escaped the carnage. While it’s possible that the defeated could forge ahead with third-party runs, it’s unlikely they’ll succeed.
Speaking for myself and other fans of low comedy, Avella will be missed. His combination of cloying self-righteousness and lowwattage intellect made for great copy. Such as the time he submitted a bill that was so poorly punctuated that it legalized the practice (using a parking lane to pass on the right) that it sought to outlaw. Or the time he crafted legislation that would have
prevented downstate residents from having to subsidize upstate power plants without defining where upstate ended and downstate began. Or the time he expressed ignorance about the fact that an executive with the real estate giant Glenwood Management — a generous Avella donor, though far more so to Skelos and Cuomo — had struck a deal with federal prosecutors, despite the fact that it had been in the news for months, and Avella and the flipped executive had testified at Skelos’ corruption trial on the same day.
I could go on and on, but newsprint is expensive.
Lawmakers of Avella’s level of quality — and the IDC included a lot of back-benchers — are usually able to malinger in the Legislature largely due to a system that is designed to keep the electorate sleepy and incumbents in power. Ridiculous voting and party registration laws combined with laughable campaign finance enforcement are two major components of this status quo machine.
Last week’s primaries demonstrated that things could be trending in the other direction: Turnout almost tripled from September 2014, and young candidates scored remarkable victories: Klein, for example, was defeated by Alessandra Biaggi, a former Cuomo staffer who is roughly the same age as the legislative aide who in January accused Klein of forcibly kissing her outside a Lark Street bar. Klein denies the charge; an investigation of the matter appears to have disappeared into the bowels of the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, another element of the incumbency-protection machine.
Almost all of these anti-idc primaries were in comfortably Democratic districts, which means that most if not all of the insurgents are as good as elected. Whether these new additions will be part of a Democratic takeover of the chamber after November remains to be seen, but based on those turnout numbers it is not a good weekend to be Senate GOP leader John Flanagan.
And then there is the further question of whether the newly constituted Democratic conference will comport itself with less agita than we saw in 2009 and 2010, the last time the party controlled the majority. But this is a very low bar.
The real test will come when Democratic leader Andrea Stewart-cousins is confronted by a member of her conference who wants something very badly, and threatens to jump ship if he or she doesn’t receive it.
It will be up to Stewart-cousins to point out to this person that, based on the outcome of last week’s primaries, the figurative weapon they’re holding isn’t a gun but a suicide vest.