| For many who watched the NY Senate's session yesterday, the relatively uneventful passing of the second-latest-ever state budget was the coda to a long, frustrating session of a government that can't seem to get its job done. As Roatti correctly pointed out, the decision to stop counting prisoners in their location of incarceration is the most momentous aspect of the budget bill...
However, the Senate did continue its very-late August session beyond the budget bill, considering some policy that had been relatively contentious during the preceding six or seven months. The way in which two issues debated-- farmworker rights and protection from unconventional gas drilling methods(commonly referred to as hydrofracking)-- were handled is particularly interesting to those of us who believe that process reform is essential if NY is to have a legislature that is able to govern effectively. The processes by which these two issues were brought forward could not have been more different. Which kind of governance works? Which kind of governance do we want?
For those who did not watch (btw, remote access to Senate floor debate is AWESOME-- NY Assembly, where are you?!?), a recap is over the jump. |
| Pedro Espada had prepped for the consideration of his pet bills by, again, threatening to boycott the event unless everyone bent to his will. Once he received assurances that his issues-- farmworker rights and housing-- would be on the agenda, he deigned to go to Albany... and sent out a press release announcing that His Majesty would appear in the Senate Chamber (well, the official title he extorted was not quite "King"... but, you get my drift). Celeste at The Daily Politics used the headline "The Pedro Has Landed."
Then, Pedro managed to have an altercation at the Men's Room with some housing advocates... which he resolved by pushing them and throwing a dollar in their general direction. You really can't make this stuff up! The incident moved Celeste past "The Pedro" headlines... to this:
CAN THE NY STATE SENATE GET ANY FREAKIER? CAN IT???
Go read the whole thing if you want to better understand just how unfit a lawmaker The Pedro is.
Once the preliminary machinations were out of the way, Espada could go uneventfully vote for the budget on a strict party-line vote.
What happened afterward was bizarre. The housing bills-- quite a few of them, but considered in tandem-- were all "laid aside." The Farmworkers Rights bill, however, was brought to the floor for debate, despite having been nearly unanimously voted down in the Agriculture Committee earlier this year. Pedro Espada carried on at length about some very general human rights goals, while numerous representatives from farm districts (mostly but not entirely Republican) rose to try to explain how provisions of this particular bill would devastate the agriculture-based economies of their regions, putting both farmers and farmworkers out of work in a recession.
Unlike the hydrofracking moratorium, which was pushed forward against the power structure of the Senate by a motley crew of grassroots activists from the Marcellus Shale area and from downstate, the "advocates" for farmworkers rights were a highly unified group under the direction of faith-based group leaders from downstate. Much of the debate on the floor of the Senate concerned unsubstantiated allegations of widespread sexual abuse of farmworker women that were brought forward in an Ag Committee hearing by a particularly dramatic "advocate." Much drama and identity politics, not a lot of fact-finding.
The hydrofracking bill's debate, following the other, was like a breath of fresh air. Although Senator Libous carried the banner for the pro-fracking minority, even he acknowledged that we wanted NY to move more carefully than Pennsylvania did, and avoid the problems they ran into. Many Minority Senators rose to explain why they would vote for the bill, and the ultimate vote was a bipartisan 48-9 in favor of the moratorium.
I have long believed that citizen activism is all that could possibly kick and slap NYS government into functioning as a real, effective government. The reasoned, fact-based debate on hydrofracking can continue, as long as we keep citizen pressure from all over the state on our legislators to act like a government should.
As for improving farmworkers lives, perhaps we can better accomplish that by working with people other than The Pedro. After all, his bill failed, although he succeeded in grabbing a lot of personal attention for himself. |
