Critical Reads: She's officially Cuomo 2.0
But lots of good news, too
Welcome to a premium Thursday evening edition of Progress Report.
It’s pouring here in New York, with howling winds swirling around the East River and whipping inland until they crash against the windows of high rises and rickety scaffolding. From what I’ve heard, we’re actually going to be spared the worst of a growing storm that seems to be threatening much of the country with a gloomy and dangerous Christmas weekend. Stay safe out there, friends, especially if you’ll be traveling in the next few days.
A quick programming note: I’ll be spending the holidays with family, so there will be no edition of the newsletter this coming Sunday. We’ll be back on schedule right after that, with news and a review of what has been a year of dismal lows and soul-affirming highs. If you need something to read this weekend, may I suggest the January 6th Committee’s final report?
New York State of Emergency
I was all set to lead this newsletter with praise for NY Gov. Kathy Hochul for finally throwing a bone to working people by signing the Warehouse Workers Protection Act, but she forced a serious re-write today by nominating the worst candidate possible to serve as the state’s most powerful judge.
To be clear, the law Hochul signed on Wednesday will be a significant help to thousands of workers toiling in sweatshop-like distribution centers operated by Amazon and other major corporations. The law stops those companies form churning and burning through workers by banning unreasonable and dangerous production quotas. It was a priority of the Amazon Labor Union, whose leaders went to Albany to lobby for it just days after their JFK8 election win in April, and it’s a big victory for State Sen. Jessica Ramos, the head of the Labor Committee.
But the law’s passage will mean far less if the state Senate winds up confirming Hector LaSalle as the Chief Justice of the New York Court of Appeals, the highest-ranking court in the state.
For context, this is the same court that tossed out a Democratic supermajority’s new redistricting maps and forced New Yorkers to endure a terrible, right-leaning House map that ultimately cost the party its Congressional majority this year. That awful decision and the GOP-friendly map it produced became known in state politics as “Cuomo’s Revenge” because it was the disgraced former governor that stocked the court with conservatives.
When an ethics scandal (shocker!) took down the court’s Chief Justice this past fall, it offered Democrats a chance to rebalance the court with the sort of progressive befitting a state that had become increasingly blue over the past decade. Hochul, who promised to do just that, had a shortlist of seven potential nominees, some of whom were infinitely better than others. A week or so before her pick was due, dozens of progressive legal experts and law professors from around the state published an open letter about those options, and urged her not to choose LaSalle. That’s part of what’s so frustrating here; LaSalle isn’t some wolf in sheep’s clothing, and Hochul knew exactly what she was doing and who it would piss off.
She undoubtedly had a clear dossier on LaSalle and the decisions he’s made over the years, which all run counter to all public promises the governor has made during her accidental time in office. Many of LaSalle’s decisons were so flagrantly out-of-step with the spirit and letter of the law that they broke long-time precedent and interfered with tbe basic work being done by elected government leaders. These two in particular stick out:
• A decade ago, the New York attorney general launched an investigation into an anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy center” accused of practicing medicine without a license. In an extraordinary decision, LaSalle voted to shield the fake clinic from the probe. The ruling barred state investigators from reviewing “advertisements and promotional literature, brochures and pamphlets that the [center] provided or disseminated to the public” on First Amendment grounds—even though these documents were critical to determining whether the clinic falsely promoted its services as genuine medical care.
• To prevent corporations from harassing unions, New York law bars management from suing unions or union leaders in their official capacity. In 2015, however, LaSalle joined a shocking opinion that carved a massive loophole into this law, allowing Cablevision to sue union leaders for criticizing the company’s management response to Hurricane Sandy. The opinion rendered labor protections toothless, giving corporations an easy workaround until the Court of Appeals shut it down.
Hochul spent her entire underwhelming re-election campaign talking incessantly about protecting abortion rights; it was the entire message of her campaign until the final few weeks in October. As GOP Rep. Lee Zeldin began to catch her in the polls, she turned to organized labor to run a major field operation to get out the vote and save her from a shocking, humiliating defeat on Election Day. To thank them for their critical support, Hochul went back on her promises and spit in the faces of the rank-and-file that held their noses and rallied her to a six-point victory.
Already, more than half a dozen Democratic state Senators have come out against the pick, and some others, including the pivotal judiciary chair Brad Hoylman, have been cautious in their responses. There will be a lot of pressure on legislative leaders to try to kill the nomination in committee, especially after allowing another awful nominee through last year. The problem is likely to be that a lot of Republicans seem to be big fans of the Democratic governor’s choice.
New York’s Democratic Party is an unmitigated disaster, and if this judicial pick doesn’t have you convinced, perhaps its failure to catch any Rep.-elect George Santos’s almost comically unhinged lies will do the trick.
OK, now let’s get to some good news and promising updates from around the country.
State Innovation
> Maryland’s Prescription Drug Affordability Board finally gets off the ground
It’s been three long years since the Maryland legislature gutted through frantic pharmaceutical lobbying and voted to establish a first-in-the-nation drug affordability board. After overcoming a veto by the outgoing Republican governor, it took a fair amount of time develop and execute the structure of the drug affordability board; now, it’s ready to take some action, even if there are some initial limitations on its purview:
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