Reforming Albany: Why Term Limits Are Worth Fighting For

After two years of scandals in our state government that have ranged from the embarrasing to the bizarre, I have concluded that the only way to really reform the New York State legislature is to impose term limits on our Assemblymembers and State Senators. That’s why I’m asking you to join me in signing up to the Facebook fan page “Citizens for Term Limits in Albany” and spreading the word about how we as citizens can act to clean up the corruption that has made “dysfunctionalism” synonymous with our state government.

I do not propose this remedy to the great problems New York faces without deep deliberation. Fundamentally, like many of you, I am opposed to term limits. Philosophically, I believe that we should have the right as citizens to elect whoever we want to govern us for as long as we want them to serve.

But what upends my basic opposition to term limits in the case of our Assemblymembers and State Senators, is the fact that our electoral system in New York State demonstrably and egregiously favor incumbents, to the degree that 98% of our legislators get reelected, despite the fact that a significant majority of New Yorkers disapprove of the job they’re doing and don’t think their local legislator deserves to stay in office.

Those who understand the mechanics of Albany rightfully point out that passing term limits is a near impossibility since it would require our State Senators and Assemblymembers to vote against their own self-interest. Certainly, the likelihood of this occurring is slim. As former New York City Parks Commissioner and good government guru Henry Stern puts it, expecting Albany to police itself is like asking Wall Street to draw up the rules that govern the financial industry. The fact is our State legislators have run roughshod over any checks to their power for so long that they wouldn’t know how to change direction even if they magically developed the will to do so.

But just because the road to term limits is uphill, let us not be deterred from walking it. All of the greatest reforms in history seemed improbable at best. How many people in this country believed even three years ago that it was truly possible for the United States to elect an African-American President? How many Americans believed at the dawn of our great civil rights movements, be they on behalf of women, blacks, immigrants, or gays, that they would ever have a chance of succeeding? It is only through the determination of the masses and the collective belief that injustices should never stand that we triumph in making our city, our state, and our country a better place to live.

Perhaps it shocks you that I conflate electoral reform with our proud civil rights movements, but it shouldn’t. Electoral reform was, and is, central to all of our battles for fairness. If the people are denied the fundamental right to elect who we want to represent us and our vote is manipulated so as not to count as it should, then the democracy and the republic that we hold so dear to our hearts as Americans exists only in rhetoric.

In New York, our electoral law was written deliberately to take power out of the hands of the people and place it squarely in the control of our elected officials. Nowhere in the 50 states is it more difficult for a candidate to get on the ballot to oppose an incumbent than in New York. An arcane and deliberately complex system of petitioning derails most would-be reformers from getting on the ballot. The rest get caught up in court challenges, presided over by judges who owe their careers to the incumbents, and financial hurdles that trip up anyone without a Bloomberg size bankroll.

On top of these challenges, our state legislators draw the lines of electoral districts to favor their reelection bids. Our tax dollars pay for our legislators to send out free campaign literature under the guise of newsletters – a particularly insidious practice called “franking”. And our incumbents insure that they have far superior name recognition – often the deciding factor in local races – by plastering their names across our garbage cans, public building projects, and anything else to which they can attach themselves. Add in the advantages of uneven media coverage and the millions of dollars in discretionary funds our state legislators give out to buy the loyalties of local institutions and it becomes clear why the odds of dethroning our Assemblymembers and State Senators is next to nil, even when their girlfriends' faces are slashed, they have journalists beaten up for investigating them, or they plunder the coffers of Little Leagues – all of which our state legislators have done in the past few years alone.

Enough is enough. The recent promise by our State legislators to reform themselves is nothing more than a smokescreen plotted to dull the mounting anger of the people. We cannot let ourselves be fooled by these cynical machinations. Nor can we dupe ourselves into thinking that the gross systemic failures of our government can be fixed in tangential baby steps. We must stand together and insist on bold action.

The internet has given us an extraordinary and unprecedented tool of grassroots organizing and education. Blogs and social networking sites have empowered us with the resource to make our voice heard at a decibel so loud it cannot be silenced, no matter how much the powers that be try. In less than a month, 100,000 New Yorkers have rallied together in a Facebook fan page to oppose the elimination of student fare Metrocards. This may not seem like such a great number in a City of 8 million people, but when you consider that only 125,000 people voted for John Liu in the recent election for New York City Comptroller – the second highest office in the Big Apple! – and only 225,000 overall, you begin to get a sense of how the people can regain their say in government by banding together. If those 100,000 New Yorkers all vote as a bloc and get their loved ones to join them, they will decide virtually every election in the City the way they want.

Above all our State legislators are in power because of the ignorance and apathy of the people. When we don’t vote, they win. That’s why it is the responsibility of all of us proud New Yorkers who love our State and want it to be a model for the rest of the country to follow to share our knowledge of how it can be improved with our friends, family, and anyone else who will listen.

So, please join me right now in logging on to Facebook and joining the “Citizens for Term Limits in Albany” fan page. As members, we will be able to communicate, organize, and empower each other to take back our government and insist that our elected officials represent our interests, instead of their own.

McLaughlin, Monserrate and Seminerio: Where's the Outrage?

This morning I read a quote in the union newspaper The Chief that made me mad:

"Brian McLaughlin was a colleague and a close friend," said United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, "and this is a sad day for him, his family, and the labor movement."

For those of you who don't know Brian McLaughlin, he is the former Queens Assemblyman and New York City AFL-CIO Central Labor Council President, who plead guilty on March 7th to federal racketeering charges, so that instead of facing 30+ years in prison, he'll likely only end up with 8 to 10.

McLaughlin's crimes were particularly despicable. He ripped off $2.2 million from union members and City taxpayers to spend on stuff like a luxury house on Long Island, a Mercedes Benz, and country club fees. He even plundered money from a Little League set up for the children of union members. To quote the same Chief article, when McLaughlin learned that one of his corrupt confederates had spent $2,800 on equipment for the kids rather than stealing it all, McLaughlin lashed out: "[A]ll that fucking money he's fucking spending on other stuff, that ain't his money ... that's mine."

Nice guy, huh?

You'd think so from the tone of Randi Weingarten's aforementioned quote in The Chief. Weingarten makes it sound like McLaughlin was a good person who somehow lost his way and carelessly fell into bilking Little Leaguers. I wonder if she would publicly express the same messianic compassion for Bernard Madoff.

Now, the intention of this post is not to criticize Weingarten. She is merely representative of a political power structure that hardly ever breaks rank to criticize its members, even when they are deserving of our utmost scorn and contempt.

How bad does an elected official have to be to provoke criticism from their colleagues? These days it seems like that there's no crime a politician can commit that is so heinous that their party's leaders bother to condemn them.

Take Congressman Joe Crowley, the head of the Queens Democratic Party. Crowley was one of the Congressmen who expressed moral outrage last week at A.I.G. execs for receiving millions in bonuses. Surely, if Crowley could muster so much anger over legal bonuses, he must have blown his top when he learned his longtime friend Brian McLaughlin had admitted to stealing over two million bucks from innocent people.

What was Crowley's comment on McLaughlin's crimes? Over two weeks after McLaughlin's guilty plea, he still hasn't made one. (And why hasn't the press demanded one?)

But then again, neither has any other elected official from Queens. Or any Citywide politician, for that matter. What about the candidates for Mayor, Comptroller, or the ombudsman of the people, Public Advocate? Not a word.

Sadly, this is an all-too-familiar silence. Not one politician stood up to condemn disgraced Queens Assemblyman Anthony Seminerio either when he was arrested last September for allegedly using a dummy consulting firm to take $500,000 in payoffs from people seeking his favor in Albany. According to the indictment, Seminerio, a 30-year incumbent, was caught on tape explaining the rationale for his scheme: “I was doing favors for these sons-of-bitches there, you know, they were—they were making thousands. ‘Screw you, from now on, you know, I’m a consultant.’”

Even State Senator Hiram Monserrate has escaped public reproach from his colleagues. Monserrate, who recently leapt from the City Council to the Senate, made the front page of every paper in the city in December when he was arrested for allegedly slashing his girlfriend with a broken glass during a fight. The incident wasn't the first blow to the beleaguered State Senator from Queens. Monserrate was already embroiled in an investigation into a highly dubious nonprofit he directed $250,000 in City money to called Libre, which was run by Julissa Ferreras, his former chief of staff and successor to his Council seat.

How did Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith punish Monserrate, who was indicted this morning on felony assault charges? By throwing him a fundraiser last week!

What did the Working Families Party do to chastise Ferreras for her role in Libre? They endorsed her bid for City Council.

The fact that our politicians, for one reason or another, have collectively decided that it is either inappropriate or, worse, inexpedient to denounce their colleagues-turned-criminals is morally repugnant. When politicians ignore the profound injury done to society when the public trust is violated, they minimize this most serious of crimes in the eyes of the people and send a tacit message to other corrupt elected officials not to worry because their party will be behind them no matter what.

They also perpetuate an environment where district attorneys feel no pressure to investigate their fellow electeds. The whole system becomes a polite détente, governed by the cynical principle that one hand whitewashes the other.

This system works just fine for party insiders and our elected officials, but it damns the rest of us to endure a government stripped of accountability, transparency, and courage.