Ever since New York’s Senate Judiciary Committee, rejected Hector LaSalle, the anti-Choice/anti-union conservative who Kathy Hochul and her Republican allies tried to make head of the state judiciary, the increasingly disliked governor has been whining like a petulant, spoiled child, demanding a floor vote— and threatening to waste state money with a lawsuit to force one. A sudden vote on Wednesday gave Hochul exactly what she didn’t want— a floor vote that ended in an embarrassingly decisive 39-20 defeat from her own party.
Hochul, a corporate conservative herself— and still whining about her loss— will now need to nominate a Chief Justice with a chance to be confirmed. The NY Times’ bureau chief, Luis Ferré-Sadurní, reported that “Senate Democrats had argued that the Jan. 18 vote by the Judiciary Committee amounted to a full rejection of Justice LaSalle. But Ms. Hochul insisted that the Senate was constitutionally required to hold a floor vote as well, so that all 63 senators, not just a handful of them, could weigh in on the nomination. (The Senate comprises 42 Democrats and 21 Republicans.)… On Wednesday, all Republicans present except one, State Senator Mario Mattera of Long Island, voted in favor of Justice LaSalle, while all but one Democrat, State Senator Monica Martinez of Long Island, voted against him.”
The imbroglio left Justice LaSalle’s nomination in limbo, as the governor considered whether to sue her fellow Democrats to force the vote. Instead, it was a Republican lawmaker who filed a lawsuit against Senate Democrats last week, accusing them of having violated the State Constitution by not holding the vote.
Democrats worried the lawsuit could lead to a distracting and protracted legal battle during the state’s ever-crucial budget process, and heighten the risk that a court would rule that they had acted unconstitutionally.
…Shortly after the vote on Wednesday, Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins, a Westchester Democrat and the majority leader, said she believed that lawmakers had acted constitutionally. She said, however, that the fight over Justice LaSalle had become a distracting “wedge issue” that had to be put to rest with a floor vote.
“Everybody is paying attention to who is sitting in the judiciary, who’s making these decisions,” she said, ticking off recent decisions at the federal level that had eroded abortion rights and gun control laws. “It was not inappropriate for us, with the eyes of the nation and the state on us, to look for a nominee that is able to lead the court in this really, really critical time.”
Blue states should stop electing reactionary Democrats like Hochul. All doing that does is turn people off voters to the Democratic Party and cause increasing numbers of people to just stop participating in electoral politics. There’s already a party for conservatives like her; it’s called the GOP. Remember this?
NY is stuck with hochul because voters in NY are too stupid to elect anyone better or anyone from a better party. Those "geniuses" also elected cuomo.
You elect shit, you will smell the stink and end up stinking yourself.
blue states are still conservative states by virtue of electing a majority of lying hapless worthless feckless corrupt neoliberal fascist pussies instead of progressives interested in the constitution, the republic and rule of law.
you repudiate your entire existence saying that blue states should not elect, what amounts to democraps.
either your charter is to promote democraps, be they as they are (which is true) or it is to promote progressives, which are NOT the democrap party. you just can'…