Take away my powers? That's a good one!
Apparently fed up with a beast he created, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is now trying to exterminate it. In response to an effort by renegade Democratic state senators to curb the his power to make appointments to ethics commissions, Cuomo's hand-picked official at the state Democratic Party
fired off this broadside:
"In the time it took for Senator Andrew Lanza to draft a press release, he could have taken the simple step of disclosing his source of outside income to the people of Staten Island," [Rodney] Capel said. "What exactly is he hiding, and why is he deploying every distraction tactic available to do it? Don't his constituents have a right to know who he works for?
"And to his co-sponsor Diane Savino—who has acted as a shield for Republicans working to block votes on public campaign financing and women's equality—I have two words: register Republican."
Lanza is a Republican, but it's Savino—a member of the so-called "Independent Democratic Conference" that has collaborated with the minority GOP to give them control of the Senate—that Capel's (Cuomo's, really) hottest ire is aimed at. Cuomo happily abetted the IDC when they made their dark deal with the Republicans, but now they've stupidly turned against their most powerful benefactor. Cuomo, too, may finally be looking toward 2016 and realizing that he has to start acting a bit more like a Democrat to win, you know, a Democratic primary for president.
Whatever Cuomo's motivation, it's a positive sign that Cuomo and the IDC appear to be splitting up. Cuomo could squash all four members—Savino, David Valesky, David Carlucci, and their leader, Jeff Klein—like insects if he wanted to, just by supporting primary challenges to each of them. You'd think the IDC would be quite cognizant of this and would make staying on Cuomo's good side priority number one, but seeing as they were dumb enough to side with Republicans in the first place, they probably aren't sharp enough to ensure their own survival.