Standing last week before a closed-door meeting of the Assembly Democrats he has led for the better part of two decades, Sheldon Silver laid out the grim reality.
The hospitals and health care unions, the Democrats’ traditional allies in the annual budget fight, had abandoned them. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo would offer no additional money for schools and senior centers and no income tax surcharge on the wealthy. If they refused his terms, Mr. Cuomo would wield his emergency budget powers to ram through even steeper cuts. And if they forced a government shutdown, Mr. Silver explained, it would be the widely reviled Legislature — not the popular governor — that would be blamed.
Take the deal, Mr. Silver urged.
“It was like the general calling in his colonels and telling them he was going to surrender,” said one lawmaker who insisted on anonymity because caucus meetings are meant to be confidential.
For years, through Republican and Democratic governors alike, Mr. Silver has been Albany’s most enduring center of power. Understated and tenacious, politely elusive and maddeningly patient, Mr. Silver has endured the slings of good-government groups and the arrows of tabloid editorial pages to defend the interests of his members and their allies and to bend Albany to his will.
But as the Legislature prepares to vote on the state’s most austere budget in more than two decades, Mr. Silver suddenly finds himself diminished, leading a depleted Democratic caucus that is more politically isolated than at any time in years. And he has found himself in the formidable shadow of Mr. Cuomo, the freshman Democratic governor who has reinvigorated an office already vested with considerable powers.
“I don’t think you get realignments in one year,” said James R. Tallon Jr., a former Assembly majority leader who is now president of the United Hospital Fund. “But I’ve rarely seen any governmental leader in Albany play a better three-month cycle than Governor Cuomo has played.”
In years past, Mr. Silver deployed his own well-worn playbook, famous for his gnomic utterances, his refusal to commit to positions in advance and his willingness to wait out governors until they were desperate for a deal, any deal.
A close alliance with powerful labor unions, particularly teachers and health care workers, provided Assembly Democrats an effective and well-financed political communications arm in their battles with the governor. An impregnable majority — Assembly Democrats control roughly two-thirds of the chamber’s 150 seats — helped insulate them from any political tides that roiled national and state politics.
But those strengths proved less useful against a popular and aggressive governor buoyed by ever-rising public anger against Albany and constrained by the stark reality of the state’s dire finances. Wooed by Mr. Cuomo’s early invitation to partner with him on cutting Medicaid, the health care industry spent March advertising enthusiastic support for Mr. Cuomo’s budget rather than angry opposition. The governor’s threat to force even deeper cuts on the Legislature using his emergency powers, along with the low likelihood of a quick economic rebound, made delaying tactics pointless.
Meanwhile, a growing number of Assembly Democrats had begun to share Mr. Cuomo’s view that state spending had spiraled out of control. Publicly, Mr. Cuomo offered the Legislature political redemption, if it joined him to enact budget cuts. Many lawmakers seem poised to accept, with gratitude.
“Speaking for myself, I think that I work very hard and believe in the things that I work for,” said Assemblyman Kenneth Zebrowski, a Rockland County Democrat. “When the institution that you work hard in is consistently criticized as nonfunctioning — and that means people don’t believe you’re doing your job — it wears on you.”
Mr. Silver has long resisted the notion of being a legislative potentate, let alone a protector of budget bloat or a guardian of Albany’s status quo. Mr. Silver, in an interview on Monday, suggested that the budget deal, far from marking a loss for him, was a win-win outcome for his members, for the governor and for New Yorkers.
“The fact is that we acted responsibly, recognizing we lost $7 billion in federal stimulus money, that the economy did not grow significantly enough to warrant significant increases in expenditures,” Mr. Silver said. He noted that the $132.5 billion budget outlined by Mr. Cuomo on Sunday was just half a billion dollars less than the one-house budget the Assembly passed this month. And he rattled off a long list of provisions — additional school aid; the defeat of a cap on medical malpractice awards; money for community colleges, senior centers and summer programs — that Mr. Cuomo had agreed to.
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One Response
I agree with Shelly.
He got what he wanted personally which was a defeat of the cap on medical malpractice awards.
He realized that you can’t win it all and doesn’t make the Assembly look like the villian.