A Senate ethics hearing that had been canceled over open-meetings law concerns a few weeks ago has been rescheduled for this Wednesday.
State Sen. Alessandra Biaggi, chair of the Senate Ethics and Internal Governance Committee, told Capital Tonight that the purpose of the hearing is to bring attention to systemic flaws in New York state government that have allowed many actors to operate within an opaque system.
“This is very timely since Andrew Cuomo is resigning later this evening due to unlawful and unethical behavior, but the reality is… New York has been long-plagued by corruption," she said.
If you include Andrew Cuomo, three of the last three governors have left office because of scandal or under a cloud of corruption.
At the center of the state’s poor ethics track record is JCOPE, the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, which many believe was used to protect Cuomo. For example, the ethics body voted not to investigate sexual harassment allegations against the governor. Meanwhile, the report released by Attorney General Letitia James was so damning that it forced the governor to leave office.
“There’s no question that JCOPE was essentially created as a veneer to give the illusion to New Yorkers that New York cares about ethics, when in reality JCOPE, in the way it was created and constructed…it was set up to fail,” Biaggi said.
The commission has 14 members made up of appointees of the governor and legislative leaders. It only takes two of the governor’s appointed commissioners to block an investigation.
Some good government groups are pushing Hochul to replace JCOPE, but it doesn’t appear the commission is going anywhere just yet.
According to the Albany Times Union, the board is scheduled to hold a special meeting Thursday to decide two motions: whether to revoke the permission that JCOPE staffers gave to Andrew Cuomo to write his book about the pandemic, and whether to seek a “criminal investigation by the state attorney general's office into the apparent 2019 leak of confidential JCOPE information to Cuomo.”
Biaggi told Capital Tonight that this effort shows that JCOPE “is set up in such a way that people are afraid to do their jobs.”