No, the fukk they didn't.
Your boy:
"At the heart of Cuomo’s backstabbing of reformers was a political deal. Cuomo wasn’t at war with all labor unions anymore—private sector heavyweights like 1199 were now allies—but he still disliked public sector employee unions. In return for drawing their own district lines, legislators
approved Cuomo’s new pension plan for most new state and local employees and raised their retirement age by a year to 63. Lawmakers also approved an expansion of the state’s DNA database to include samples from those convicted of any crime, including all misdemeanors.
Finally, Cuomo got the legislature to back a constitutional amendment that eventually allowed seven new casinos to open up in New York State. They were pitched as economic engines to revive moribund communities upstate. (They’ve
mostly failed to do so.)
The sin of letting Republicans draw their own district lines was particularly great because redistricting only occurs once a decade, following the Census. This fall, Democrats and Republicans will still be competing in State Senate districts that Skelos, now in prison on corruption charges, sketched out eight years ago. Cuomo let him do this.
Still, despite the gerrymander, Democrats won enough seats to take control of the State Senate in 2012. Badly-drawn districts couldn’t tamp down the natural advantages of Democratic candidates running in a largely Democratic state. (Normal districts, it should be said, would have made the Democratic gains much larger and probably prevented the absurdity I’m about to describe.)
A month after the election, something strange happened. Five Democratic state senators decided to create an
unprecedented governing coalition that would allow State Senate Republicans to remain in the majority. The Democrats belonged to a new group called the
Independent Democratic Conference, which has formed a year earlier. Their leader, State Senator Jeffrey Klein, had deep personal disagreements and generally more conservative politics—he was closely aligned with the real estate industry and strongly supported charter schools—than his former Senate Democratic colleagues. In many ways, his politics closely aligned with those of Cuomo’s.
Most Democratic governors would condemn such an arrangement, since Republicans would roadblock their progressive priorities. Democratic governors like Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Tony Evers in Wisconsin would probably want nothing more than to flip their state legislatures blue. Not Cuomo. “The governor will withhold judgment until he sees how the Senate functions and acts on critical issues facing the state,” a Cuomo spokesperson said in 2012.
Two years later, Politico’s Blake Zeff would
definitively report what all close watchers of New York government suspected for a long time: Cuomo actively encouraged the IDC to form a coalition to keep Republicans in power. “The governor’s interest, say knowledgeable sources, was ensuring that Republicans had control over the agenda in the Senate, so that he wouldn’t be handing over power to New York City Democrats,” Zeff reported.
Republicans would retain control of the State Senate from 2013 through 2018, despite the fact that Democrats outnumber Republicans more than 2:1 in New York. Their majority would span the Obama and Trump eras, aided by gerrymandered districts and their IDC alliance. Cuomo, meanwhile, would repeatedly refuse to actively campaign for or fund Senate Democrats. In 2014, the year he won re-election, he ended his campaign with more
than $9 million in the bank as Republicans
outspent Democrats to expand their majority. The IDC-GOP alliance would only end when progressive challengers ran primaries, unsanctioned by Cuomo who
tried desperately to ward them off, against all the IDC members, defeating most of them."
Getting to Know the #Resistance Superstar of the Moment
rosselliotbarkan.com
If you meant, "get shyt done" for the Republicans in NY State then you have a point.
www.dcpolicycenter.org
