GOP-allied Dems will cost Cuomo
As two of the millions of New Yorkers who voted against President Trump, we were reassured by Gov. Cuomo’s promises to protect New York’s immigrants, women and progressive values. The federal government might be going to hell — but in New York, at least, we were safe.
Like many, we didn’t pay enough attention to state politics to know about the Independent Democratic Conference until after the election. We took for granted that a “Democrat” on the ballot was a Democrat in practice. We assumed that since New York overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton and many of our elected officials are Democrats, we would be insulated from the Trump agenda.
When we learned about the IDC, our blue bubble burst.
A primer for those still in the bubble: The IDC is a group of eight breakaway Democrats in the state Senate who formed a “powersharing agreement” with Republicans and Brooklyn Sen. Simcha Felder five years ago.
For helping maintain an effective Republican majority in the state Senate, IDC members get additional funds for their campaigns, as well as lucrative committee chairmanships.
We discovered the IDC through our efforts to support progressive legislation. Energized after the election, we started calling our state senators and Cuomo about sanctuary state legislation, about climate change, about protecting public schools. But then we were told that none of these bills would ever come to the floor for a vote — and that this was by design.
We had been betrayed — by IDC members who are listed as “Democrat” on the ballot, and by Cuomo, whose tacit support enables the IDC and who has denied responsibility for the issue in a now-familiar pattern.
The result is a Republican majority in the Senate, even though Democrats hold a numerical majority with 32 of 63 seats. (Felder has said he will caucus with Democrats if the IDC disbands.) Thanks to this arrangement, Republican Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan decides which bills can come out of committee — and countless progressive bills never even make it to a vote.
As we learned through conversations with state senators, activists and journalists, the one person who has the power and influence to bring the IDC back into the fold is the most powerful Democrat in New York.
It is Cuomo who supported the IDC’s establishment and who benefits from the resulting Republican majority. With the Democrats sidelined, Cuomo is able to set Albany’s agenda and avoid confronting overly progressive legislation that would compromise him in the eyes of donors and centrist supporters.
But in the Trump era, the IDC is a major liability for Cuomo’s ambitions. The sense of betrayal and frustration we experienced when we learned about the IDC is spreading. Federal elected officials including U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Reps. Keith Ellison, Hakeem Jeffries and Nydia Velazquez have called on the IDC to rejoin the mainline Democratic Conference.
Activist groups in our local Indivisible network, part of a surging national movement resisting Trump, are united in their aim to take down the IDC. Many are recruiting candidates to run against IDC members and Cuomo himself in 2018. Thousands of newly engaged activists like us will be going door to door, raising money, and leafleting in the 2018 elections.
Every time we do state-focused outreach, we watch fellow New Yorkers realize New York is not really blue. We aren’t a sanctuary state. Reproductive health care, undocumented students and transgender New Yorkers are not sufficiently protected. Black lives still don’t matter.
We can’t pass legislation to tackle climate change. That safe harbor we were counting on doesn’t exist.
No one likes to feel tricked. The longer Cuomo waits to publicly and aggressively intervene, the more people will view him as an accomplice to the IDC’s betrayal. At worst, he appears disingenuous in his professed support for progressive causes. At best, he seems ineffective in his failure to unite the party.
There is only one way forward for Cuomo to preserve his legacy and his career — and more importantly, to truly protect New Yorkers from the Trump agenda: force the dissolution of the IDC and restore the state Senate’s legitimate Democratic majority.