David Valesky
Last month, the renegade Democrats who've conspired to hand control of New York's state Senate to the GOP announced with great fanfare that they'd reached a "deal" to rejoin their mainstream colleagues and return to the fold. Most of the media, a lot of labor unions, and even supposed progressive exponents like New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio bought into the hype, but there were plenty of reasons from the get-go to mistrust the Independent Democratic Conference, and now we have full proof of their bad faith.
On Tuesday, IDC member David Valesky complained bitterly about the fact that two Democratic senators, Gustavo Rivera and Liz Krueger, were still supporting Oliver Koppell, who is challenging IDC chief Jeff Klein in September's Democratic primary. But that's not all. Valesky also made up a whole bunch of bullshit about what exactly the IDC's non-deal entailed:
"It's hard to comprehend why there's been a blatant violation" by members of the regular Democratic Conference when their leadership pledged that no one would support Koppell, Valesky said.
Oh yes? When exactly did mainstream Democrats promise that no members would support Koppell? One of the IDC's biggest complaints is that, allegedly, Senate Democrats are dysfunctional, so is Valesky seriously expecting lockstep martial adherence to this purported pledge? Even Darth Vader couldn't successfully perform a Jedi mind trick on
Ruben Diaz, Sr. (though he might want to Force-choke him).
But like Vader, Valesky is trying to alter the deal. This "deal," though, was exactly one sentence long:
"Therefore all IDC members are united and agree to work together to form a new majority coalition between the Independent Democratic Conference and the Senate Democratic Conference after the November elections in order to deliver the results that working families across this state still need and deserve."
And as we noted at a time—and this is why I keep putting the word "deal" in scare quotes—this "deal" only involves the members of the IDC
agreeing to work amongst themselves to reunite with the mainstream Democrats. It does not involve an actual agreement
between the IDC and the Democrats. So not only is Valesky adding ridiculous, impossible, and unenforceable terms to the deal, there was no real deal in the first place!
That makes it pretty easy for the IDC to walk away from this fake deal, and Valesky's already laying the groundwork to do so. Why is he doing so? Any answers would only be speculative. But we do know that Jeff Klein is an utter snake, and Valesky just one segment of his long tail. If the IDC winds up not rejoining the Democrats next year, no one will have any reason to be surprised.