It’s Gov. Kathy Hochul’s way or the no budget way.

With no budget deal and the governor digging in, lawmakers passed a budget extender to get them through an abbreviated break for Passover until Tuesday. They were scheduled for a two-week break. 

"I don't feel we are making progress fast enough," Senate Finance Committee Chair Liz Krueger said on the Senate floor. 

Meanwhile, in her office 10 days after the budget deadline and presumably after a staff-level trip to the print shop, Hochul walked reporters line by line through a poster board-sized list of her late-budget accomplishments since taking office.

“Increasing the minimum wage and indexing it to inflation, eliminating copays on insulin, maternal health,” she listed.

Hochul argued the list is a justification for taking the state budget process into overtime to achieve her desired outcome.

“I’m not going to compromise my principles over a date. We were late once 32 days, we were late 20 days,” she said.

The governor has been fielding complaints all week from lawmakers for what they describe as unsportsmanlike conduct, including policy proposals added into the budget after the deadline, and a general unwillingness to meet in the middle, especially on the issue of pre-trial discovery.

When asked about the complaints, Hochul appeared unperturbed.

“Outside of this Capitol, people aren’t watching their clocks and their calendars on the days,” she said tapping her watch. “They want us to deliver for them. I tune all of that out.”

After sending surrogates ranging from a geographically diverse parade of district attorneys to local elected officials to speak with the media all week, the governor spoke directly with reporters for the first time since last Thursday. She was seated alongside victims of domestic violence who she argues are hit especially hard by discovery-related case dismissals.

Lawmakers say the governor has budged only minimally from her proposal centering around the standard of evidence that must be turned over and preventing dismissals when sometimes irrelevant items are missed in good faith. Hochul's proposals are widely supported within law enforcement. 

As they described their experiences, Hochul doubled down.

“I’m going to keep fighting until that is in the budget,” she said.

Lawmakers have said at least some of that fight has consisted of simply giving them the cold shoulder. Just before speaking with reporters, Hochul held her first meeting with legislative leaders all week.

“This governor is using delay as a strategy and I think that’s not helpful," said Deputy Senate Majority Leader Mike Gianaris. "Sometimes waiting around just to see if we get agitated enough to concede. That’s not going to happen.”

On the list of people not getting agitated is state Sen. James Skoufis.

“I think everyone just needs to take the temperature down a few notches, we’re about a week past April 1st, a week and a half, and it is what it is,” he said.

Skoufis said the impasse can be blamed on the sheer complexity of the issue, one most agree the average New Yorker is not specifically concerned about or familiar with, however important it may be.

“One word that’s changed could mean 10 different things to 10 different judges,” he said. “Obviously this is an issue that many lawmakers feel very strongly about on both sides of the coin.”

Despite the near-universal focus in the capitol halls on the slow slog toward a deal, Skoufis stressed that there has been movement.

“The governor has moved a little bit toward what the Senate and Assembly want to see on discovery, the Assembly has moved significantly toward where the Senate is, and we in the Senate have moved meaningfully toward the governor,” he said. “It’s not like anyone is completely unequivocally dug in.”

But Shontell Smith, partner and head of New York Practice at Tusk Strategies and former chief of staff and chief counsel to the New York state Senate Majority Conference, pointed out that the fact the Governor has only moved a little bit is unusual, even despite New York’s executive driven budget process.

“For the governor, it seems a budget will be done when she gets what she wants, and the language that she wants, when it the past it has been a cooperative endeavor where the legislature says ‘this is as far as I can go, I don’t have the votes, these are my issues,’ and they work together to figure out language.”

The governor defended digging her heels in by claiming that she’s unwilling to compromise because her proposals are popular with New Yorkers even if individual lawmakers don’t like them.

“I’ve changed the culture here,” she said. “These are all things that New Yorkers want.”