| It turns out that Wednesday's revolt by the Assembly in the Comptroller fiasco wasn't so much a matter of constitutional prerogatives, or even a showdown between Eliot Spitzer's new politics and Albany's old politics, but a simple question of honor. As Nicholas Confessore in the The New York Times writes, the Members feel unjustly maligned by an inexplicably hostile public, and therefore decided to remind everyone that they are not (or so they claim) a bunch of piteous hack benchwarmers. In short, they want props.
Legislators are well qualified to be comptrollers, said Assemblyman Charles D. Lavine, a Nassau County Democrat who ran for office last year on a fix-Albany platform. "After all," he said, "we've been good enough to be Congressional representatives, senators and even presidents of the United States."
Not to be gratuitously unkind, but these promotions happened in a long-vanished time when the legislature was not a staple of late-night comedy. Sir.
"I'm very proud of the Assembly, Democrats and Republicans," Anthony S. Seminerio, a Queens Democrat, said on Tuesday. "We come from all walks of life, but in our own way, we have an intelligentsia. We have a system for solving problems. No one comes in knowing everything."
It's awfully tempting to read that as 'In our own special way, we're plenty smart'. |
"We've been very effectively Swift-boated as dysfunctional, ineffective and corrupt," [Assemblyman Brodsky] said. "And it's our fault. We have never gotten the message out in a coherent way of what we do well and right."
Um, no. The Brennan Center - the fine people that ranked you dead last out of fifty state legislatures - are not in the business of swiftboating. The problem of the Assembly and the Senate is not bad PR - its that they really are not deliberative bodies at all in any meaningful sense of the word. As the New York Post put it:
Hah! Silver's members don't think.
They don't so much as blink their eyes without permission from the speaker.
Legislators don't get any respect because they're not really legislators in the way the term is commonly understood. New Yorkers have no reason whatsoever to afford the Members the mad props they seem to be demanding. Sure, the Assembly contains fine individuals (including Brodsky), but they're utterly devoid of any real power. That's the root cause of what the Members seem to think is merely a press and image problem.
So here's a thought: why not fake it? If the sense among Members that they're held in contempt is going to be such a hurdle to reform, you, gentle reader, can do something about it. Send them cookies, pretty cards, maybe a gift certificate ($75 or less, please). Reassure them of your affection. Positive reinforcement.
And who knows, maybe one day, the Assembly will cast off the chains of the strong-leader system, and start acting like a real legislature, with floor fights, actual debates, contested votes, that kind of stuff. You know, what legislatures do. |
