The state budget might end up in court under some scenarios, as state lawmakers are discussing possible legal action against Governor Cuomo’s budget, and his proposal to link a number of unrelated items, like ethics reform and education changes, to the spending plan.
Cuomo’s budget includes unrelated topics like ethics reform, as well as numerous education policy changes that he’s linked to school aid increases. And the governor says he’ll hold up the budget past the due date if legislators don’t agree. All of the linkage has annoyed lawmakers so greatly that they are contemplating legal action, if things spin out of control on the April 1st budget deadline.
Senator John DeFrancisco is Finance Committee Chair.
“It could go back to court again,” DeFrancisco said.
The tensions are part of a long running institutional power struggle between the executive and legislative branches of government.
The legislature actually took the governor to court over the issue in the mid 2000’s, in the case known as Silver v Pataki. Then- Governor George Pataki won over former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and the rest of the legislature. The state’s highest court said a governor is allowed to insert language into the budget’s appropriations bills to change policies, and the Senate and Assembly are limited to just a yes or no vote on the amount of money allotted for the program.
But the court did not define just how far a governor can go, and governors since then have increasingly added unrelated items into the spending plan, including things like anti texting while driving laws, and now, ethics reforms that include greater disclosure of legislators’ outside income.
DeFrancisco, a Republican from Syracuse, says if no agreement is reached on some of the unrelated topics by the budget deadline, lawmakers will likely oppose any attempt by the governor to force through the policy changes in the form of extender bills to keep the government running.
“In conjunction with the weekly extenders, there could be litigation,” said DeFrancisco, who said he was speaking for himself, and not the rest of the Senate Republican Majority. “And we’d have to redefine what Pataki v Silver really meant”.
Governor Cuomo says he doubts it will come to that.
“I’m wagering there won’t be any lawsuit,” Cuomo said.
“That’s part of the heated rhetoric we’re having now. We will reconcile and we’ll compromise.”
Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos also downplayed the likelihood of legal action.
“Our focus isn’t on lawsuits,” Skelos said. “It’s about getting an on time budget, and I believe we’ll get there.”
Politically, it would be difficult for the legislature to go to court against Governor Cuomo’s demand for ethics reform and greater disclosure of outside income, after former Speaker Silver, who brought the lawsuit ten years ago, was arrested in late January and charged with a multi million dollar fraud scheme.
Governor Cuomo has also prided himself on getting the budget done on time for the past four years, after decades of late budgets and dysfunction. Senator DeFrancisco says he doesn’t think that in the end, Cuomo will follow through with his threats to hold the budget up
“Well, that’s what he says, but he’s been touting bi partisan government for four years,” DeFrancisco said. “To take an about- face would be , I think, something that at the very end, he’s not going to want to do.”
The spending plan is due in three and a half weeks. DeFrancisco says in state politics that’s an “eternity”.
