The Albany circus has not lacked for moments out of an absurdist comedy:

• the older Republican senators, in the long wait to be counted in the run-up to the coup needing to prop up their raised rights hands with their left ones;

• a screaming match erupting between Greg Ball and Cathy Nolan over in the Assembly chamber in the middle of the debate over the farm bill on the afternoon of the coup over Ball’s joke about the Republicans seizing that chamber too;

• State Sen. Hiram Monserrate, frantically grabbing staffers and asking for impromptu legal advice amid the negotiations with Senate Democrats that brought him back into the fold;

• carts of champagne and cheese platters for the Women of Distinction event that happened to be wheeled into the Republican Conference chambers right after they finished making reporters wait for two-and-a-half hours outside the still-locked chamber doors;

• the Facebook worm that sent out a message from State Sen. Carl Marcellino shortly before the first boycotted session—“What a shame!!” the at first apt-seeming subject line read, “You pposed naked!!”;

• the forced hug between State Sen. Malcolm Smith and Monserrate at the end of that week on the stage at the Senate Puerto Rican/Latino Caucus meeting held in, of all places, the auditorium of the Church of Scientology building in Times Square.



For whatever all this was, it was not governing, not the sort of work that helped earn Smith an award for state legislative leadership from the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty and a ringing introduction from the group’s executive director, William Rapfogel.

Standing on the dais at the Roosevelt Hotel the morning before the coup during what was to be his last speech as majority leader, Smith beamed.

“Willy mentioned some things that probably many of you might say, ‘Why Malcolm?’” he said. “I still myself can’t answer the question. I can only tell you that I have been very blessed.”
Smith went on to explain why he felt he had earned this nod from above.

“I really believe I have been placed in this period of time because there’s work that I’ve been asked to do,” Smith said.

A few minutes later, State Sen. Eric Schneiderman stood in the hotel lobby considering the question of how Smith and the Senate Democrats had done in their five months since taking the majority.

“There really isn’t much to say,” Schneiderman said, passing on the idea. “So far we’ve avoided any real catastrophes.”

So much for that streak.

By then, the next day’s Coup-Coup Monday plan was already set, and the State Senate was about to be knocked from its fragile footing. Whatever else can be said about this latest chapter in non-functional Albany, one thing is clear: the days of the State Senate as a working arm of state government are at an end, and will stay that way for years to come. The Republicans can fight neither time nor demographics, experts agree, which means their only hope for a majority is more uneasy alliances with defectors. And the regional differences among the much less disciplined Democrats, which tore apart the conference during the MTA impasse and the rancorous, name-calling internal fight on Rockefeller drug law reform, might prove too great an obstacle.

The resolution of the stalemate does not matter, said Seymour Lachman, an eight-year veteran of the chamber who now teaches about state government and published a book three years ago condemning the condition of state government then. The damage has been done.

“It’s not a functioning democracy. It’s a Potemkin village. It’s a façade,” said Lachman, echoing an increasingly common view among Senate observers. “It’s unbelievable that this is the former Empire State of New York.”

What that means for governing, Lachman said, is unfortunately all too clear.

“If we get out of this, when we get out of this,” Lachman said, “we’ll be able to do much less.”


Blame Pedro Espada and Hiram Monserrate. Blame Malcolm Smith for a lack of attention to detail or ability to manage his members’ expectations, for talking up a “20/20” agenda—20 policy initiatives that were to be the Democrats’ “vision” for New York by 2020—all through the campaign season that never actually emerged. Blame the Democrats who were too hungry to be in the majority last winter to tell the Gang of Four holdouts to take their demands and shove them. Blame the majority that seized power as if it had a mandate even though its margin was razor-thin. Blame the Republicans unable to live for five months under the minority conditions they subjected Democrats to for 40 years. Blame the Republicans who created an even number of seats in the chamber by adding one in a 2002 redistricting maneuver meant to stave off their own extinction. Or blame an impossible situation, a perfect storm of government shortcomings that produced a narrowly divided State Senate, no lieutenant governor to break a tie, a Democratic conference too new to stabilize itself, a severely weakened governor, an impossible budget, a billionaire with a bone to pick, and the specter of redistricting threatening to end New York’s once-dominant party’s hopes of ever again having a foothold in power. Blame the four-day work weeks that seem to have slowly driven the entire town crazy.

There is a lot of blame to go around.

No one but those involved saw what was coming in that surprise procedural motion. The Democratic senators, who have lacked neither self-assurance nor bombast in assessing their prospects for the last few years, were on the very morning of Coup-Coup Monday beginning to brag about how they had made their way through the rockiness of the initial months and beginning to find their groove.

Nonetheless, they admitted, there were still problems. Focus was a big one. Many Democratic senators were letting themselves be pulled in different directions by all sorts of advocates, caving to pressure to say yes to them all rather than work out large-scale compromises with Republicans or even others in their own conference. The conference was beginning to break into antagonistic blocs, buckling under the weight of their own inexperience at the helm and Smith’s habit of making promises that often directly contradicted each other, and that he should have known he could not keep. They still heaped praise on him for the most part, though there was a yearning for a leader able to exert the kind of control that the Republicans had managed during their years in power. “Joe Bruno wouldn’t stand for this shit,” said one senator just hours before the chamber erupted into chaos, reflecting on Smith’s non-confrontational attitude.

Personal animosity and bitter grudges that had developed from conference showdowns over policy were also dragging them down.

“Some of the members, when they heard an opposing view, they thought someone was saying, ‘Your mother wears combat boots,’” said State Sen. Eric Adams, sitting in his office before heading over to the chamber that Monday. “The deficit reduction package was a real brawl. MTA: brawl. Tolls on bridges: brawl. Gay marriage: brawl.”

Things were starting to get better, he said that morning, but the biggest problem the Democrats faced remained “understanding that we’re supposed to argue in conference, because if we take it personally, it will destroy us.”

This is what happened to the State Senate under a confident Democratic majority.

So what happens now?

Under a power-sharing agreement or even a narrow margin, the prospects seem even worse to those who know state government and have begun to think through the aftermath of recent events. Especially with the stakes what they are, few people believe the Republicans and Democrats are suddenly going to start getting along. And as for what happens when every single member has the ability to swing control of the chamber, has the ability to throw the chamber into chaos (and now has the precedent to do so) … well, people are worried.

Not State Sen. John Bonacic, a Republican who has been pushing for major rules changes for several years, who sees opportunity in this increasingly odd moment. As long as the packet of reforms the Republicans immediately adopted after swearing in Espada and Dean Skelos are kept in place, Bonacic said, the Senate would be transformed into the bold beacon of democratic action he believes it can and should be.

“Wherever it winds up, if we have a full year of the rules actually implemented, I don’t care who the leaders are and who’s in power in 2011 and thereafter, because they won’t be able to go back,” Bonacic said. “If we could change Albany, that legacy would be much better than anything they’ve accomplished on any bill or any member item or any building that they had named after them.”

Not only will these reforms mean big changes for Senate operations, he thinks, but the proposed increased transparency measures on the Internet and a “NY-SPAN” television station could start changing the membership too.

“The public will be watching. So if you open your mouth and you’re an idiot, people will know,” he said. “They’ll be able to tell if you’re a stiff or if you can do your job.”

That kind of future for the Senate is more important than the leadership fight, Bonacic said, so while he has issued statements since the coup railing against Smith and the Democrats for blocking reform, he said they are not his main concern. Just as when he stood up to Bruno on implementing reform, he said the principles at stake should matter more to the members than who sits in which chair.

“I don’t care who the president pro tem is. I don’t care who the majority leader is. I honestly don’t. If it’s 31-31 and the rules stay in place, it doesn’t matter,” Bonacic said. “Because what you’ve done is made the members almost equal to the leaders, and the leaders—you’ve diminished them greatly.”

While that rhetoric is all well and good, said Blair Horner, legislative director for the New York Public Interest Research Group, people should not start holding their breaths for arm-in-arm cooperation to actually take place. True, there are dozens of states that have made power-sharing deals work. New York, though, has always been different.

“It’s possible what you’ll see is more decentralization and the cobbling together on an à la carte basis. But that has never happened,” Horner said. “For legislators in New York, there is no political hardwiring toward bipartisanship. It’s just not there. It’s like they’re missing a chromosome.”

And so the answer might take more than rules reform. To fix things, the state may need to go the next extreme.

“What you have here, among other things, is structural problems in the architecture and the design of both the Senate and the Assembly,” said former governor Mario Cuomo, a consistent advocate of holding a constitutional convention. “This is an ideal time to be looking at that.”

Dealing with the State Senate has never been easy, and even 15 years out of office, Cuomo—who spent four years presiding over the chamber as lieutenant governor and then three terms as governor watching his agenda halted by what was then a wide Republican majority—still seems haunted by the experience.

“They had this unshakeable ability to stop anything, and they did,” he said.

Through the constitutional convention, which Cuomo believes the latest low point in state government demands as the response, he would like to see the State Senate forced to evolve into a role similar to the one played by the United States Senate. To get New York there, he said, everything has to be put on the table—even those measures that go against his own core beliefs. Just last fall, Cuomo followed up a lifetime of opposition to term limits (and a political career that ended after an attempt to win a fourth term) by testifying on behalf of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s push for an extension, calling term limits “a desperate attempt to improve governance.”

But with the coup topping off so many years of frustration with Albany, Cuomo has begun to have his doubts. Fundamental change might require a fundamental change of heart, even from him.

“I always regarded term limits as unintelligent, but there are moments when I believe the only way to get change is term limits,” he said. “I still think it’s unintelligent—but I have my moments.”

Gerald Benjamin, a dean at SUNY New Paltz who has written and spoken for years in favor of holding a constitutional convention, concedes that this may not be fundamental change enough. Perhaps, Benjamin and other frustrated analysts think, the solution is the admittedly zero-chance option of getting rid of the State Senate entirely.

“There’s a serious question of whether we need a bicameral legislature,” Benjamin said. “That doesn’t arise out of disgust with the Senate, though I’m not jumping for joy about how it’s going. But the federal rationale doesn’t work at the state level.”

In Washington, the two chambers of Congress are elected based on population for the House and by state for the Senate, and representatives serve two-year terms while senators serve for six. Because of that and other structural differences in the duties of the two chambers, the House and Senate serve different functions. But in Albany, where state senators are just another group of legislators who are also determined by proportional representation, also serving two-year terms, Benjamin agreed that they could arguably be called redundant—especially if both chambers are controlled by the same party.

“The alleged strengths of a deliberative body are not felt in New York under the way it operates now, so the argument that there is a need for a bicameral legislature is not met,” Benjamin said.

To start, Benjamin said a rewritten State Constitution needs to do three things: create a separate reapportionment commission, entrench campaign finance laws and take election administration out of the hands of political parties. Term limits for governors would also be a good piece of a new State Constitution, as would other reasonable measures to increase competitive elections and potential party shifts, Benjamin said. And especially in light of current circumstances, an amendment to provide for replacing the lieutenant governor would be worth including.

But there is not another mandated vote on a constitutional convention until 2017, and most doubt that legislators will themselves rally to put one on the ballot earlier. And even if the vote happened immediately, there would not be a new Constitution in place for several years.

In other words, however many deals or flips or back-flips happen in the weeks and months to come, short of a particularly potent strain of swine flu zipping through the chamber (or a few convictions that might soon arrive), a lot of observers have all but given up hope on the State Senate as a functioning arm of state government, at least until after next year’s elections, when, whether or not any seats change hands, the state will at the very least get a lieutenant governor to break ties.

In the meantime, forget about governing: The stalemate itself would be enough of a problem, but then there will be both parties’ awkward jockeying for credit and blame for legislation that will probably be frozen anyway as every single moment and action becomes about the 2010 elections.

And, Benjamin noted, both parties now face a novel political problem: “How do you take credit when nobody’s in the opposition?”

So this is where we are until 2011. Or 2017. Or for much, much longer.

In the meantime, Capitol tour guides have their own problems trying to extract a civics lesson from the last few weeks. A few hours after Monserrate made his last stand with the Republicans on the floor, one leading a group of nine-year-olds past the chamber gave it his best shot.

“Did you see the closed gates that we passed?” he asked, standing right where Espada and Skelos had unlocked the doors with such pomp and turmoil a few hours earlier.

“What they’re having is an argument,” he explained.

The children stared up at him.

“Do you guys ever disagree over who should be the leader?” he said.

A few nodded. Most just kept staring.

“Then,” he said, “you can understand what’s going on in there.”

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ABOVE: Power sharing, many agree, may be even more far-fetched than it sounds. Photos by Andrew Schwartz