There was one reason to look the other way when multiple governors abused the state-budget process over the past two decades to enact major policy changes: It worked.
Now Gov. Kathy Hochul, in her first proposed budget as elected leader, has somehow both overreached and underreached — stuffed too much into her budget and (so far) failed to get it done.
You may remember how New York’s legislative process is supposed to work.
For everything but the budget, laws should originate in the Legislature. Once a law passes both houses, the governor can sign it or not.
Not the spending plan. The governor proposes the budget; the Legislature submits suggestions to the governor; the governor amends her budget and sends it back to the Legislature.
Other than approving or rejecting a budget outright, lawmakers have little power to change it.
And what little power the Legislature once had has shrunk in the past two decades, as governors, starting with George Pataki in the early 2000s, hit on the idea of folding major policies into the budget — giving the governor, rather than the Legislature, control over all new laws, even if they have nothing to do with taxes or spending.
Five years ago, the late Assemblyman Richard Brodsky called this “a system that Vladimir Putin or Xi [Jinping] would recognize and approve. The governor is a budget dictator.”
For a long time, few people complained because the dictator got stuff done, and getting stuff done seemed better than paralysis.
Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo got bail “reform” and congestion pricing, among other things, done by ramming them through the state budget.
Except: It has become clear, even before this year’s budget went way past its March 31 due date, this isn’t the best way to do things.
Bail reform and its cousin, discovery reform, have had massive unintended public-safety effects on New Yorkers — but both passed in the budget four years ago without one public hearing, a hearing at which experts might have warned lawmakers on some provisions.
Likewise, lawmakers passed congestion pricing, also in 2019’s budget season, without weighing in on key issues, from whether to exempt public employees driving to work to how to treat Uber and Lyft.
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This is not a good way to make laws — or to create public support for them.
This year, Hochul tried to be a mini-Cuomo, using the budget to do two important things that have nothing to do with spending: reform bail “reform” to give judges more discretion in keeping suspects in jail and force suburbs to build more housing, taking away local governments’ zoning powers.
On that latter, it’s obvious she’s failed.
Lawmakers aren’t going to let Hochul use the budget to coerce them into coercing towns to do something they don’t want to do.
For now, the state is running on temporary extensions to last year’s budget, but Hochul could refuse to offer another such “extender” without the housing and bail changes she wants, thus forcing a shutdown if the Legislature doesn’t cave.
On housing, lawmakers would win the ensuing public-opinion battle, as New Yorkers would grasp that building housing has nothing to do with the budget and tying the two together isn’t fair play.
So the big live issue is bail “reform” reform.
In a government shutdown over this, Hochul would win the public-opinion battle; she almost lost last year’s election over it.
But people who want the bail laws reformed and want governors to stop abusing the budget process may not have to agonize over whether the end is worth the means, in this case, anyway.
Good-government or bad-government practices aside, this governor is just not good at dealing with the Legislature — as proven by the fact that just months ago, she signed into law a near-30% raise for lawmakers, bringing their salaries to $142,000, while asking nothing in return.
If she’s too weak to even try to force the Legislature to shut down the state government over bail reform, people rightly worried about public safety can’t wait another year to try again.
They’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way, by pressuring the people they elected to represent them in making laws — you know, the lawmakers. That may not be such a bad thing.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
