Monday morning up in Albany, the ruling Democrats in the state Senate and Assembly, under state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, were getting ready to pass a really awful special election bill that would have disenfranchised three-quarters of a million New Yorkers in a upstate congressional district while the minority Republicans in both chambers could do nothing but protest. But by the afternoon the bill was put on hold at the request of Gov. Hochul. It was not the GOP protesting that stopped the bill.
As Stewart-Cousins said of Hochul, “If she’s interested in holding it, that’s fine.” A hold is better than a passage, but Hochul must now let the bill fall from her hand into the paper recycling bin.
Supposedly Hochul is using the bill, which Stewart-Cousins and Heastie introduced late Friday and that would give her the power to wait to schedule special congressional elections to fill vacancies until the November general election (this year on Nov. 4) so she could continue to negotiate the fate of congestion pricing with President Trump. Confused? Welcome to Albany.
You see, Trump has nominated North Country Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who took on Ivy League presidents in the House, to take on foreign presidents as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. After she wins certain Senate confirmation, Stefanik would resign her House seat. The vacancy would bring Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson’s current tiny 218-215 majority to an even tinier 217-215 majority. (There are two GOP-leaning vacancies in Florida that will be filled by the Sunshine State’s April 1 special election).
Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, always of Brooklyn and formerly of the Assembly, would like to keep the Republican-held Stefanik district empty as long as possible to frustrate Johnson and has pressed his old buddies in Albany for a lengthy delay. But there are nearly 800,000 New Yorkers living in that constituency who would be without a member of Congress for most of this year. Still, power is power and the Albany Dems were getting ready to pass the rotten bill.
However, Hochul asked them to wait as she is in talks with Trump over his very public desire to cancel congestion pricing and he is interested in using the levers of the U.S. Transportation Department, which he now controls, and its subsidiary, the Federal Highway Administration, which he also controls, to get the tolling program turned off.
We are all for congestion pricing, which has been up and running since Jan. 5, successfully reducing Midtown and Downtown traffic and we are all for Hochul bargaining hard with Trump. But wiping out congressional representation for so many people for so long is unfair and undemocratic and unconstitutional.
Had the Democrats passed the bill and Hochul signed it into law, the Republicans should have immediately headed to federal court. In 2015, Brooklyn Federal Judge Jack Weinstein ripped into then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo for delaying a Staten Island congressional special election for a few weeks with a stinging court order. The new bill in question would delay the upstate special election for as much as nine months. No federal judge would allow that and Hochul must not go along.
The governor must do whatever she can to save congestion pricing, but she can’t undermine American democracy to achieve it.