Hochul Should Be Impeached If She Sues The State Senate
Or proud to have been a New Yorker. I was born and raised in New York. But that never goes away, even you do. I’m a Californian too— been living here longer than I lived in New York. The first governor I recall was Nelson Rockefeller, a Republican who served from when I was 10 until… 4 years after I moved out of the state, when he resigned to run for Vice President when I was 25. Since then New Yorker elected 6 Democrats (including two good ones) and one Republicans (3 times). The current one, Kathy Hochul, inherited the office when the worst of the lot, Andrew Cuomo, was driven from office. Hochul is a grubby conservative politician from Buffalo and she had her ass kicked but good yesterday, reminding her that she’s only sitting in the governor’s office because Cuomo picked her to run for Lt Gov and then found herself as the lesser evil in November’s general election against a Trumpist.
Oh— and she’s also in the governor’s office for one more reason: because the Supreme Court rescinded Roe v Wade. She campaigned as someone who would under all circumstances defend a women’s right to choice. Her opponent couldn’t work around the Republican knee jerk anti-Choice position. That’s why a candidate as shitty and unfit for office as Kathy Hochul is governor of the great state of New York. And what’s the first visible thing she does after the election? Nominates an anti-Choice, anti-union conservative hack to be New York’s chief justice.
Yesterday the state’s Senate Judiciary Committee told her to shove her nominee up her ass— and up Hakeem Jeffries’ ass as well. She begged for a floor vote so she could use Republican senators to save her nominee, Hector La Salle, and the Committee turned her down flat. He (and she) was defeated 10-9. It was the first time anyone remembers the New York legislature rejecting a governor’s nomination for chief judge.
Writing for the NY Times, Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Jesse McKinley reported that it was “a combative [5] hours-long hearing.” LaSalle fell flat on his face, totally unprepared and unconvincing. “The 19-member committee voted 10 to 9 against moving Justice LaSalle to a full vote on the Senate floor. All 10 who voted against the judge were Democrats; two Democrats voted in favor of Justice LaSalle, while one Democrat and all six Republicans voted in favor ‘without recommendation.’… His nomination in December was immediately opposed by several unions, reproductive rights groups and community organizations, which pointed to cases that they said revealed he was anti-union and anti-abortion.”
The move was a remarkable rebuke of Hochul, a Buffalo-area Democrat, by members of her own party, but the rejection does not necessarily mean that the LaSalle saga is over. The governor has not ruled out taking legal action to force a vote of Justice LaSalle on the full Senate floor, raising the specter of a high-stakes constitutional showdown.
… A large contingent of Democrats in the State Senate had already said they opposed him— many others raised their objections in private— with many arguing that the judge’s elevation would help perpetuate the court’s conservative tilt.
Now she’s treading on slippery constitutional ground, attempting to force a floor vote so she could work with conservative Democrats and Senate Republicans to get LaSalle confirmed. It would be more interesting if the legislature decided to impeach her now that she’s shown her true colors… These colors:
“LaSalle,” reported Ferré-Sadurní and McKinley, “appeared to receive a far warmer reception from Republicans on the committee, many of whom said that he had been treated unfairly, portraying his confirmation process as intensely politicized. State Senator Anthony H. Palumbo, a Republican from Long Island, told the judge that Justice LaSalle represented ‘the embodiment, in my opinion, of the American dream.’… Over the weekend, the governor was joined at a rally in the Bronx by a cohort of top Democrats, including Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the U.S. House minority leader, who spoke in favor of Justice LaSalle, a former prosecutor of Puerto Rican descent. Indeed, the opposition from the left has led Hochul to possibly rely on Republicans— who sit in the minority of both chambers of the New York Legislature— some of whom expressed bewilderment on Wednesday at the casting of Justice LaSalle as a right-leaning judge.”
Hochul is using taxpayer dollars to pay outside counsel to start a legal battle with the Senate now that she lost the committee vote. Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins pronounced the LaSalle nomination dead after the vote and said there would be no floor vote floor vote. “The committee has spoken, the nomination was lost,” she told reporters. Even in the face of Hochul’s potential lawsuit, she said “The Senate has rules about how things get to the floor. And our rules dictate that we go through committees, and… if the committee does not advance something, it does not go to the floor.” Hochul, sounding like a Trumpian sore loser, was already whining last night that the hearing wasn’t fair and that the “outcome was predetermined.”