Revenge is poor policy
Q: What’s the proper way for an elected official — or anyone, really — to respond to someone who announces publicly that they plan to investigate your actions or those of your underlings?
A: Thanks for asking and here you go: “While I’m confident that I and my office/administration carry out our public duties with the utmost probity and attention to detail, I welcome — nay,
embrace — fair, independent oversight, which, done properly, is a boon to taxpayers and a vital element of quality control for our operations. In short: Bring it!”
Go ahead and deploy this template, and don’t feel the need to give credit. Tweak it if you want to — maybe you think “probity” is too highfalutin. But you get the general idea.
For an example of another approach, consider what Gov. Andrew Cuomo told WAMC’S Alan Chartock last week in response to a question about what the public radio host characterized as the possible “widening chasm” between the governor and Democratic legislative leaders. Chartock referred to recent stories one how the new chairs of the Senate and Assembly oversight committees have promised robust investigations of government operations, including Cuomo’s executive agencies.
“Look, you can always get into an investigations battle, right? They have oversight committees; I have every state contract, every member item contract; every grant that the Legislature does goes through my government, so I could investigate every one of those,” the governor said in the breezy tone of a teenager talking to a candy store owner about the potentially deleterious effects a brick can have on a shop window.
First off: If the governor suspects there’s something fishy in any of those contracts and grants, why isn’t he investigating them right now? The last time he mounted that kind of an investigation, it was in 2013 under the provisions of the Moreland Act. It did not end well.
As if jolted by the memory of that imbroglio, Cuomo quickly noted that such an executivelegislative probe war “would be counterproductive and a waste. That’s what’s going to happen in Washington now, where you’re going to have a Democratic Congress that is going to use its oversight powers to frustrate the president. Why? Because they want to frustrate the president.”
Whether Cuomo recognized it or not, this was precisely the analysis that his putative nemesis, President Donald J. Trump, expressed when asked about the new House majority’s plans to mount investigations of Trump that they believe have been ignored or botched under GOP leadership: “If that happens, then we’re going to do the same thing, and government comes to a halt,” Trump said just after November’s midterm elections.
Chartock, slightly taken
aback, asked Cuomo if he was really suggesting the House Democrats’ efforts were “a waste.”
“No,” said Cuomo. “But that is their job, the Democratic Congress — No. 1 on their job is slow down this president from doing bad things.”
But here in New York, Cuomo went on to say, “We have the reverse.” The newly Democratic state Senate, he asserted, needs to take as its first order of business passing the progressive agenda they and Cuomo have been promising — to “show we can function.”
Cuomo proceeded to propose that the Senate Democrats ran the risk of cracking along internal ideological lines. For the Assembly Democrats, in contrast, “It’s easy because they have more votes than they need and they tend to represent more urban interests,” he said. (The Senate Democratic conference now holds seven more votes than they’ll need to pass legislation in the 63-seat chamber.)
“But the Senate is going to be tricky, because their election is right around the corner, and they have the Republicans already coming for them,” he said. (The Senate and Assembly are elected on the same schedule.)
Cuomo, who called the Senate Democrats “a fractious ideological bunch,” never returned to the tit-for-tat investigations.
That was probably for the best. As noted previously in this space, the governor has for decades displayed a deep-seated antipathy to investigations that he can’t control. That’s why so many of the state’s watchdogs, including the inspector general’s office and the state Joint Commission on Public Ethics, are far too hobbled to do their jobs seriously.
Cuomo’s call for a more independent JCOPE in his only debate with Republican opponent Marc Molinaro was tantamount to Captain Ahab admonishing the crew of the Pequod to pump the brakes on all this whalehunting stuff and take time to stop and smell the roses.
We should all look forward to hearing his ideas to restructure JCOPE, which recently had to be ordered by a judge to actually take a vote on whether to investigate allegations that a former top aide, Joe Percoco, used taxpayer resources to benefit Cuomo’s 2014 re-election campaign.
The inspector general’s office ended up with significant egg on its face last year when officials at the state Division of Criminal Justice Services ignored its conclusion that a forensics director was guilty of sexual harassment and two other senior leaders had mishandled complaints against him. Instead, DCJS used recorded interviews from the IG’S investigation to allegedly punish two female witnesses.
I’m SURE both of these offices are champing at the bit to mount reprisal investigations against the Legislature.