While some major issues were left undone at the end of this legislative session including the Adult Survivors Act, the Climate and Community Investment Act, the New York Health Act and the Clean Slate bill, lawmakers passed many other items on a progressive wish list which spanned a range of concerns from criminal justice reform to taxation.
“We’ve been seeing, since 2019, when we took the majority, when we get together with our colleagues in the Assembly and drive legislation forward, we have a huge impact in setting the agenda,” Deputy Senate Majority Leader Michael Gianaris told Capital Tonight.
In 2021, the Democrats came to Albany with supermajorities in both chambers, which may have helped lead to passage of recreational marijuana, as well as several budget successes: tax hikes on the wealthy; record-setting funding for schools; and satisfying a long-standing legal requirement set by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) lawsuit.
“(CFE) was 15 years in the making, but it took the dual supermajorities in the legislature to finally get it done,” he said.
It also helped the legislature that Governor Cuomo is facing multiple scandals, and may have been more willing this year to cut deals than he has been in the past.
But, the deputy majority leader conceded, the last few days of the session were a letdown.
“The end of session, I think, could have been more productive,” he said. “There’s 213 members of the legislature…and we fell a little short at the end.”
One high profile bill left undone was the Adult Survivors Act which didn’t simply fall short – it didn’t receive a vote in the Assembly after the Senate passed it unanimously.
The bill (A.648 Rosenthal/S.66 Hoylman) would have opened a civil lookback window to time-barred sexual assault survivors who were over 18 at the time of their abuse.
In spite of well-known advocates working on behalf of passage, and multiple editorial boards penning their support for the bill, it went nowhere.
Rita Pasarell, co-founder of the Sexual Harassment Working Group (SHWG) sent an emailed statement to Capital Tonight that read in part:
In 2021, Assembly leadership picked politics over people. We are deeply concerned and confused as to why Assembly leadership has chosen to keep workers and survivors less safe, despite the Senate's passage of these common-sense reforms."
On the final day of the legislative session, in what appeared to be a response to critics angry over a lack of action on the ASA, Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples Stokes issued a statement, saying the Assembly Majority had taken steps to address sexual harassment in past years.
“Last month Speaker Heastie announced the continuation of the Assembly Workgroup on Sexual Harassment and added new members to the group,” her statement read, in part. “We support victims of harassment, and we are committed to getting this right, which means this must be a deliberative and thorough process.”
Gianaris said he could only comment on the Senate’s position.
“We were happy to get it done,” he said of the bill. “I was a big supporter of that effort. The Assembly is working through their process.”
The Adult Survivors Act wasn’t the only bill with substantial support among Democrats that failed to get a vote in both houses.
Another bill would have overhauled the Joint Commission on Public Ethics (JCOPE), which had infuriated lawmakers of both parties after it came to light that the body had approved Cuomo’s $5 million book deal, and never released details to the public.
In response, the Senate passed a constitutional amendment to reform the troubled agency.
The Assembly did not take up the issue.
When Speaker Heastie was asked by Capital Tonight why the issue wasn’t brought to a vote, he said that the Senate hadn’t engaged the Assembly on the bill.
The lack of action by the Assembly on two bills that, tangentially, touch upon the governor’s scandals has not gone unnoticed by at least one good government group.
“It makes you wonder how well the partnership between Heastie and Stewart-Cousins is working at the moment, given what happened in the session,” said John Kaehny, executive director of Reinvent Albany.
Senator Gianaris dismissed the notion, saying that the end of a legislative session is too narrow a frame of reference to analyze.
“You go back to the budget and the things we did, that was a legislative budget,” he said. “The priorities were ours. The governor has been fighting against taxing the wealthy since he’s been governor. We got that through working with the Assembly.”
“I think we’re a little bit spoiled by our own success,” Gianaris continued.
On the relationship between the legislative leaders, both Senate spokesman Mike Murphy and Assembly spokesman Michael Whyland insisted to Capital Tonight that the two are as tight as they ever were.
“Together (the Senate and Assembly) have passed almost 900 same-as bills, one of the highest totals in decades,” Murphy said. “None of this would have been possible without both houses working together.”
“Do we take divergent paths on some issues? Of course, and that has always been the case, but in the end, we always come together,” Whyland said. “The speaker and the majority leader have long had a great relationship and so do our staffs.”
But Kaehny compared Albany to the proverbial frog in boiling water.
“Here again, even by Albany standards, we have historic scandals involving the governor and yet not one piece of ethics reform, anti-corruption legislation passed this session,” he added.
Gianaris sees things from a different perspective.
“This has been, I dare say, the most productive three sessions, since we got the majority in the Senate, that the state has ever seen, and we certainly want to continue that,” he said.
While the governor was less of a presence than he usually is during the end of the legislative session, he nevertheless may have seen an opportunity to achieve a substantial goal when the Clean Slate bill (S1553B/A6399A) was found to have technical issues.
The bill would have automatically sealed the records of certain convictions.
In an apparent deal, the governor wanted lawmakers to approve two of his nominees to the Metropolitan Transportation Association in exchange for a Message of Necessity, a move that would waive the mandatory three-day-waiting period to vote on a bill.
“The governor at the 11th hour presented a bill to restructure the MTA’s top echelon, which is a very significant change,” Gianaris said. “One of the two positions that he proposed would not be subject to Senate confirmation, which would be a huge change from the current situation.”
Gianaris said the conference had a number of concerns with the governor’s bill.
“We were not comfortable moving forward with one or two days’ notice to do something that significant,” he explained. “There was also some question about the specific nominees he was putting forward.”
When asked if the Senate would return in a few weeks to take up the governor’s proposal, Gianaris said maybe.
“I think we’re going to consider the governor’s proposal,” he said. “We’re going to discuss it as a conference. We’re going to talk to stakeholders – the kinds of things we’re supposed to do when we legislate as opposed to just getting something thrown at us at the 11th hour, and if that concludes with us deciding to come back and support passage of that change, then we’ll do that.”
As for any linkage between Cuomo’s MTA confirmations and the Clean Slate bill, Gianaris said the bill in question ran into some difficulty getting passed, so any deal that may have been in the works fell apart.
“There were amendments being made (to the Clean Slate bill), and those amendments were being made in a way that the aging period for bills was running out, in terms of getting it done before we adjourned, and so there were some conversations with the governor about sending us the Message of Necessity that allows us to consider it more quickly,” Gianaris said.
But, Gianaris pointed out, the Clean Slate negotiations never reached that point.
“So, it wasn’t even a point where a deal, even if, in theory it was being discussed, came to fruition because the elements of the bills didn’t come together,” he said. “Everything just ended up not getting done.”