Three bills were introduced last night that all take aim at Cuomo:
Senate GOP pushes back on ethics: New bill would require financial disclosure by members of Cuomo's economic councils http://t.co/Bdi1q8YtwW
— Thomas Kaplan (@thomaskaplan) February 27, 2015
Another new ethics bill from Senate GOP: State agencies would be required to post travel expenses online http://t.co/iHnX7WMWun
— Thomas Kaplan (@thomaskaplan) February 27, 2015
New ethics proposal by Senate GOP would require Cuomo's girlfriend, Sandra Lee, to disclose her finances: http://t.co/4mhbHuFWdD
— Thomas Kaplan (@thomaskaplan) February 27, 2015
These bills come on top of the beating Cuomo's IT shill took yesterday over the Cuomo policy of deleting all government email older than 90 days:
ALBANY—Maggie Miller, the state's chief information officer, faced a barrage of questions from lawmakers at a budget hearing Thursday afternoon about the Cuomo administration policy of automatically deleting emails of state workers that are more than 90 days old.
...
Asked again if she had any concerns that the email deletion policy would decrease transparency, Miller said, “I fully support the policy.”
“I think if the New York Assembly announced tomorrow they were going to pick up this policy, [U.S. Attorney] Preet Bharara would be at the court door making sure it did not,” Assemblyman Danny O'Donnell said, to nervous laugher from lawmakers and members of the crowd.
Also yesterday, Cuomo ratcheted up his efforts to privatize the public school system in New York State by releasing a report that ties "failing" schools to individual lawmakers:
Gov. Andrew Cuomo dropped a political bomb on state lawmakers Thursday — linking their names to chronically failing public schools in their districts in a provocative move to win support for his education reforms.
The governor issued a 200-page report outlining the performance of 178 low-performing schools around the state, including 91 in New York City.
The list includes the names of the state senator and Assembly member who represent each school in an implicit challenge: What are you going to do about it?
I'm not sure how effective this confrontational strategy Cuomo is pursuing on mutliple fronts is going to be.
He's shoved lots of policy proposals into 30 day budget amendments, forcing the legislature to either agree to the proposals or strip them from the budget, he's taking a "My Way Or The Highway" approach to ethics reforms that will only affect the legislature while leaving statewide pols like himself alone and now he's trying to publicly embarrass individual lawmakers by connecting them to his "failing" school list (a list that mirrors the one devised by Families For Excellent Schools, the hedge fund-backed pro-charter group, btw.)
He's pissing a lot of people off and he's got few friends to begin with - adding to his enemies list seems like a short-sighted strategy to me.
More and more Cuomo is coming to resemble Richard Nixon - nearly friendless, besieged on all sides, barricaded in his office and lashing out at everyone and everything.
It would be one thing if Cuomo was just taking on the teachers and the teachers union and cozying up to everybody else.
But that's not what he's doing.
He's made nice with a couple of private sector unions and of course he's very close with his hedge fundie/charter school friends, but other than that, can you think of any other groups that he isn't at war with?
I mean, can you think of another time when 15 different towns began pursuing a secession strategy for leaving New York and joining Pennsylvania?
No wonder Cuomo's going to Cuba.
They don't know him there yet.
Back here in New York, he may win some of these battles, so short-term, this strategy may work.
But there's four more years in his second term, barring something unforeseen, and I can't imagine things are going to get much better for him in the next couple of years after starting out the first year of the second term balls to the wall like this.
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