Legislature just watches
Democrats abandon even the pretense that state legislators craft budgets
If we were absolutely sure that no one was going to read this editorial, then maybe we wouldn’t bother to write it. But, so as not to be so obvious as to leave a big empty space, we might do something like run yesterday’s editorial over again. Or just type out “The quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog” 55 times.
Save time. Save energy. Who’d know? There is an argument to be made that the New York Assembly and Senate have been doing just that for many years now when they pass their annual budgets. And now, rather than bother to write out a budget that won’t really matter anyway, the new Democratic leaders of the Senate are about to give up the whole ruse and abandon their responsibility to draft a budget at all.
Understandable. But not helpful. And, quite arguably, not legal.
The rule is that each chamber passes its own budget document, voted out after some semblance of a legislative process, that sets each body’s priorities for spending and tolerance for taxes. Officially, each budget goes to a conference committee made up of a handful of Assembly and Senate members, who do their best to merge the documents into a spending plan that is acceptable to majorities in both bodies.
But, in truth, the official conference committee process doesn’t matter a damn. Both budget documents quickly disappear into the black hole long known as “Three men in a room.”
The state’s real budget is created, in secret, by the governor, the speaker of the Assembly and the majority leader of the Senate. Any give-and-take, priority-setting, sacrificing, saving and investing that really gets done happens in that process, away from the press, the public and the vast majority of our elected lawmakers.
Rather than stand against such a woeful tradition, and show the state’s voters that there was something to be gained by handing his Democrats control of the State Senate for the first time in a generation, Majority Leader Malcolm Smith said last week that he expected the Senate would just forget about drafting its own budget and go empty-handed to both the Potemkin conference committee and the real secret budget talks with Gov. David A. Paterson and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.
Hey, he says, we’re all Democrats here. We’ll work it out. Of course they will. But nothing is to be gained by abandoning even the form
of a legislative process. Smith’s plan does away with the whole process—bills, hearings, debates, amendments and, most important of all for constituents who want to monitor their elected officials’ behavior, roll-call votes.
But, then, what’s the use? The quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog.
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