Going behind the tabloid spin, Village Voice columnist Tom Robbins sees the rogue legislators who have shut down Albany playing a high-stakes power game funded by billionaire Tom Golisano and a team of lobbyists.The Republican coup was launched on June 8, the day before the Senate's housing committee was due to take up legislation curbing rent hikes on hundreds of thousands of apartments in New York City -- a move bitterly opposed by the landlord lobby that, until last fall, had dominated Albany for 40 years.
The State's traditional powerbrokers targeted the Democratic majority because, when they did vote together, they posed a real threat to conservative policy --as in the repeal of the infamous Rockefeller Drug Laws. Senate Republicans voted en bloc to keep the hated laws on the books.
When Democrats voted to raise the minimum public assistance grant, Republicans opposed it. When Democrats passed a measure barring the shackling of female inmates during childbirth, Republicans opposed it.
On May 29, just before the coup brought Albany to its knees, Harlem Senator Bill Perkins held a first public hearing on Forest City Ratner's Atlantic Yards Project. According to Robbins, Bay Ridge Senator Marty Golden burst into the hearing late, and backed by cheers from building trades workers, proceeded to mock Perkins and Velmanette Montgomery -- in whose district Atlantic Yards is located -- for "holding the project hostage."
Democratic efforts to reform the state's campaign finance laws, to provide wage protection for domestic workers, and to upgrade the forensic technology used to trace fired bullets were also ended by the coup. (Why, I wonder, wouldn't the NRA like technology that tracks bullets back to the gun that fired them?)
The column from the Village Voice.
