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The Young Turks
The new, fresh-faced legislators burrow into their coats in the early morning cold and hurry to the train north to Albany.
Lobbyists, well-wishers and other attention-seekers stop by their seats—some resting their hands on the well-worn red Amtrak upholstery, some dipping in for a few minutes to the open spots.
Everyone in the train car, nearly, has business in Albany. Every one of them knows about Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D) and the reformer ideology he has been trumpeting around the state, and about the public pressure to change the way business is done in the state capital.
When the hangers-on are not talking to the new legislators, they are talking to their more experienced colleagues, or dealing connections and cracking jokes with each other.
“I’m going to straighten out Albany,” one says to another with a laugh on a recent Tuesday, before the first train pulls out of Penn Station.
The other snickers.
“I’ll follow you,” he says, pivoting and heading to his seat a few rows back.
Reform. A lot of people read a lot of things into the Legislature’s election of Thomas DiNapoli as the new state comptroller. One thing few noticed: when DiNapoli’s seat is filled—along with the others scheduled for special elections March 27—76 of the Assembly’s 150 members will have first arrived in Albany only since the year 2000. More people will have first come to the Assembly after the dawn of the 21st Century than before it.
An arbitrary statistic, perhaps. For a Legislature routinely attacked as needing term limits to flush out the entrenched interests and encrusted legislators, though, the 50 percent turnover has come as a slow and rarely-remarked upon surprise. On the other side of the Capitol, nearly a third of state senators—20 of 62—are new with the millennium.
Most of the new legislators campaigned their way into the Legislature precisely on promises to change Albany’s status quo, which has for years been targeted by good government groups across the state and across the nation.
To some extent, they have been successful in making changes. Both the Assembly and State Senate adopted rules reforms in January 2005. Assembly committee hearings are now more frequent, with committee membership decreased in both bodies to stop attention from being spread too thin and increase attendance. Conference committees open to members outside the leadership are still rare, but when bills reach the floor, members need to be in their seats to vote on them. Before, members were automatically recorded as voting yes on everything, unless they entered the chamber specifically to vote no. Few did then, or at other times.
Reform, said Assembly Member Charles Lavine (D-Nassau), is “much like pornography and beauty: it’s in the eye of the beholder.”
“There’s no question that there’s been a change because there’s new blood, particularly in the Assembly,” said Lawrence Norden, counsel at New York University law school’s Brennan Center.
Norden co-authored last year’s “Unfinished Business: New York State Legislative Reform 2006 Update.” The report examined the extent to which the 2004 proposals of the public policy institute have been implemented, and to what effect.
These days, from what he reads and from the conversations he has with legislators, Norden speaks of both a new energy and new atmosphere within the two chambers of state lawmakers, echoing a common sentiment about Albany in 2007. With that, and Spitzer as the new, reform-minded governor after 12 years under his predecessor, the state is at the brink of what Brennan Center executive director Michael Waldman has called a “once-a-generation opportunity to renew government and politics in New York.”
Norden and Waldman are among those watching expectantly for those who charged to the capital as reformers to tear the status quo apart. Whether after a few months or years on the job, these reform-minded politicians will be doing so with quite the same ferocity they promised and springs in their steps still remains unclear.
To Richard Gottfried (D), Manhattan’s Upper West Side Assembly member whose 36 years in office make him the longest-serving Albany lawmaker (first elected before several of his current colleagues were born), that has a lot to do with false expectations.
Gottfried contended that the openness of the political process in Albany and the ability to influence debates at every level is surprising for newcomers and would be “eye-opening for their constituents,” whom he knows are pessimistic about state government.
When Democrats “dramatically rewrote the rules” after first taking the Assembly majority in 1975, Gottfried said, they oversaw a necessary transformation of the chamber. Those changes forced bills to be sent to committees, eliminated proxy voting within committees, and enabled bill sponsors to force votes on legislation within committees. Gottfried is fast to point out that the State Senate did not adopt those changes then, or since.
Gottfried still is not satisfied—he speaks ardently about the need to create a public campaign finance system as a way of making competitive elections more frequent, and thereby, forcing incumbents to be more accountable to their constituents. But he feels the need for more rules reform in the chamber is not as dire as outsiders think.
The man who sits at Gottfried’s right on the Assembly floor, Charles Lavine (D-Nassau), is one of those people who says he has experienced a perspective shift.
Lavine defeated six-term incumbent David Sidikman in the 2004 Democratic primary as the first candidate backed by Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi’s (d) Fix Albany campaign. That movement was based on the argument that Albany dysfunction was corroding municipalities through reckless spending and “unfunded mandates” for programs like Medicaid.
After two years of experience, Lavine said, he now realizes that what he “used to read in the papers is not quite the way things really happen,” adding, “the reality is of course what I knew it would be, which is infinitely more complex.”
The Fix Albany campaign has itself gone mostly dormant, with even its website recently going off-line.
Lavine is still after structural tweaks, like enabling bills passed but not signed into law by the end of a calendar year within one session to be debated without being reintroduced (“we probably spend close to a month, give or take, sitting and passing the same darn bills that we had passed a year before,” he said). He also wants to make the Legislature meet year round.
He admits that his ideas may not match exactly with those of all the others who have helped make “reform” the most popular word for stump speeches and campaign mailers in contemporary New York politics.
Reform, he said, is “much like pornography and beauty: it’s in the eye of the beholder.”
But whatever changes do come, Lavine said, he now realizes they will come slowly. Even with a “critical mass” of new, reform-minded legislators growing in the Assembly, he said, they first must put in their time, “establishing credibility and then being able to stand up for change.”
“I don’t think there’s any question: the longer that you’re there, the more the way it works makes sense,” said Lawrence Norden, counsel at the Brennan Center.
With its gold-etched committee room walls reaching up to high, carved ceilings hung with ornate lamps, the Capitol can be an imposing place. First-time visitors regularly get lost, confusing one red stone internal staircase for another. Even those with a few more trips to Albany under their belts can occasionally be seen doing laps around the corridors, searching for room numbers not always so apparent from the posted signs.
Within that imposing, imperial design is another reality, perhaps best represented by the dorm room-issue wooden tables crowded into the historically restored rooms for committee hearings. Hearings easily give way to newer legislators eager to make their statements for the record or question those testifying before them. For those who seek to, quickly establishing a presence among 150 members of the Assembly or 62 state senators is not difficult.
Becoming involved in floor proceedings is not much harder. Unlike in the United States Senate, there is no tradition of waiting for several months, or even years, before speaking on the floor.
Forcing legislators to be in their seats to listen to these speeches has led to some more colorful and substantive debate. [See sidebar.] But Albany insiders are divided as to the efficacy of these reforms.
“There’s perception and there’s reality in Albany,” said State Sen. Kevin Parker (D-Brooklyn), the minority whip, who first arrived in 2003. “There are some things that seem intuitively right, but they really at the end have a different kind of result.”
Eliminating empty seat voting, many felt, was an absolutely necessary change that would improve the functioning of state government. Parker said that this failed to fully consider the competing priorities of busy legislators.
“You have committee meetings going on, you have session going on, you’re meeting with constituents,” he said. “Eliminating empty seat voting has now put us in the position where we’re now stuck on the floor, paying attention sometimes to debates that have no real impact on your district.”
Parker also criticized the intensity of the push to further restrict lobbyist donations to $75 meals, especially in contrast to the recently increased legal limit of $15,000 cumulative between primary and general elections for individual contributions to legislators.
Moreover, he argued that no elected official could really have their opinions swayed by having a lobbyist buy them dinner, and that restricting these meals impedes the political process, which is built on these relationships. These, Parker said, are some of the dangers to the rhetoric of reform which people soon come to realize after a little time in office.
This is the kind of talk which gets reform advocates anxious. The Assembly already opted against several rules resolutions sponsored by Minority Leader James Tedisco (R-Saratoga) earlier this month. These would have eased the process for members outside the leadership to force hearings and bring bills more rapidly to the floor, institutionalized conference committees and given Republicans in the chamber more money for resources and staff.
Though the State Senate has remained quiet on this topic, the Assembly’s majority leader, Ron Canestrari (D-Rensselaer), indicated that there may be more institutional reforms on the docket for the Assembly this year. The Brennan Center’s Norden is skeptical these will come, or that they will be significant if they do.
“It will be small steps,” Norden said. “That’s what they did in 2005. My guess is that they’ll take a couple more.”
And those, Norden insisted, will not nearly be the “dramatic change” he feels the Legislature requires.
Norden is among those who say that if more reforms are not adopted early in the session, they may not be adopted in the session at all. As time passes and the chamber’s leather seats become ever more comfortable, he fears that the reformers willing to take up the cause will lose their nerve.
“I don’t think there’s any question: the longer that you’re there, the more the way it works makes sense,” he said.