We laugh about it sometimes. Those of us who live in the State of New York, particularly, perhaps, those of us who have worked for it, or work on legislative issues, have watched as what passes for a government has drifted downward over so many years and it is so easy to joke about it, and there appears to be so little we can do about it, that we just laugh. And, as Gail Collins brilliantly wrote this week, there is quite a bit of comedic material there.


As prior scribblings under this name have tried to point out, none of it is really all that funny. And, for those who don't live here and just see all of this as another "failed state" there is just this warning: the blood sport in Albany, where agreement is next to impossible and the only thing that counts are campaign contributions looped back to the donors in the form of "member items" became the basis reason for the Legislature's existence a quarter century ago, and appears to be the model for the federal Congress to follow (except that what we call "member items" they call "earmarks."

Though my own occasional contacts with the Legislature did not really begin until 1984 or so, history tells us that its famed dysfunction began long ago. After Robert F. Kennedy was elected Senator in 1964 he took a look at the corrupt mess that passed for a branch of state government and decided the only way to change it was to almost create a second Democratic Party, called the Reform Democrats.

In the wake of the national sweeping out of Republicans that year, including both Senator Kennedy's election as well as President Johnson's, the New York Senate appeared to have passed into the control of a party called "the Democratic Party." (Many people keep thinking this is the national party, since it has the same name, but the similarities basically end there---I hope). Since, however, not every person calling elected as a Democrat had the the same interests and goals, they could not organize the Senate---could not even pick a majority leader---until as January, 1965 was ending the Republican Governor, a man named Rockefeller and the Mayor of the City of New York, Robert F. Wagner (the son of the famous United States Senator as in "the Wagner Act") worked out some arrangement.

Does this sound a bit like recent developments? When the current Governor was "reminded" this week of the involvement of his almost four term predecessor in resolving the 1965 stalemate his only comment was to note that drug laws he and others oppose were enacted at Governor Rockefeller's urging in 1968 and 1969. Well that takes care of that: fourteen years as Governor summed up in statutes essentially repealed in the mid 1970s and repeatedly "repealed" again every two years so that legislators can show kinship with, with, oh forget it.

We have learned not to be surprised, even after a governor elected on a clean it up platform, announces that he is in charge of both the executive and legislative branch, tells one party leader that he is a "effing steamroller" (he used the real word), tries to spy on the other and tells the Speaker of the Assembly, a member of his own political party, that notwithstanding a law which allows the Speaker to appoint a particular state official, that he would. OK, maybe we raised an eyebrow when the same Governor has to resign because he is addicted to prostitutes, and the Lieutenent Governor who replaces him spends his first day in office outing a state employee with whom he had an affair, while admitting to his own casual use of cocaine.

But this week does break new ground. Two Democrats, one under indictment for assaulting his girlfriend with a piece of glass---videotaped in part by an apartment building's security cameras producing a tape which sickened an experienced judge who saw it---and the other who does not live in the district he represents, refuses to file campaign finance disclosure forms and channels member items, which you call earmarks---to people who will hire his family members (an old Albany tradition, but still skurvy to decent people) decided to vote to re-organize the Senate so that the Republican leader would become Majority Leader and the Senator who doesn't live in his district would become President pro-tem of the Senate.

Historically the latter title has been held by the Majority Leader and is generally meaningless, except in the absence of a Lieutenant Governor---we have none now due to the resignation of the Governor addicted to prostitutes---that person would become Governor in the event of a vacancy. As a result of what's going on right now, it is unclear who holds that office right now. As a New York Times columnist wrote, the Governor should be very careful in the meantime.

The proceedings by which all of this appeared to take place were not fully recorded by the webcast facilities which normally apply to Senate business, because as things stared to go south for them, the prior majority in the Senate, which controls everything, turned the cameras and lights off (I am not joking) and, later, locked the new majority out. An Albany newspaper was able to post what appears to be a cell phone video of what happened, anyway, which, in its resemblance to countries unable to govern themselves, ought to send chills through anyone who thinks this can't happen here: That video is now missing from the newspaper's web site, but some of it has been collected here by one of the Republicans who initiated the change (which newspapers are now calling a "coup").

The Democrat who had been Majority Leader is now suing, arguing among other absurdities, that he was "elected" for a two year term, so that whether his party has the most votes or not he is still in charge of the Senate. (If this was so in the US Senate, Senator Jeffords party change would not have changed to control of the otherwise evenly divided Senate in 2001). In the meantime, the Democrat facing trial for assaulting his girlfriend, is now openly hinting that he might change his vote yet again, creating an evenly divided body. Nobody knows what happens then.

The New York Constitution provides that at least every twenty years or "at such times as the legislature may by law provide" we get to vote on whether there should be a new Constitutional Convention. The last one we had ended in 1967, but the Constitution the delegates (largely, btw, members of the Legislature) proposed was defeated mainly because of issues related to the public funding of religious schools. The Speaker of the Assembly, who also chaired the Constitutional Convention was said to have favored the funding proposal (which, as it turns out, would have violated the federal constitution anyway and could not have been applied) and to require a vote on the Constitution as a whole on the cynical view that the Catholic church's support for funding its schools, would ensure its enactment. Instead it started a campaign that pit Catholics against Jews and Protestants. Lovely, huh? That led, naturally, to a poisonous debate over legalizing abortions (in the halcyon pre-Roe days to which so many would like us to return.)

Still, a new Convention, as proposed by a prior Governor, whose son would like to be our next one, seems like the only answer. Just don't let any members of the Legislature get on it.