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Mostly Cloudy On legislators behaving badly
This is about the good, the bad and the ugly. It isn’t fiction, as we get enough fiction from politicians these days. It deals with the New York State Legislature, the ethical crises it currently faces and the need to deal with them.
There have been a lot of headlines over the past few years about the Legislature. By last count, at least 15 legislators have been convicted of some type of crime, and in most of those cases the crimes involved their conduct in office.
The two newest headline grabbers are a state senator and a state assemblyman.
The courts will decide their guilt or innocence in the years to come, but once again the Legislature is being portrayed as some type of evil empire.
Having served in Albany for 23 years, I can attest to the fact that the vast majority of members who served then and now are hardworking, dedicated people. They give up a great deal of their personal life and privacy to serve in a job that is becoming more and more thankless. After this year’s budget cuts they’ll be even more disliked.
During all of the years that I worked in Albany, only two members got in trouble, and their crimes arose from their conduct outside their elected office. The only whispers around the state Capitol dealt with members being treated to dinners by lobbyists.
Those practices came to an end when new laws were passed making even a glass of wine an illegal gratuity.
In just the past five years, a handful of elected members, who have no respect for the institution or for the voters who sent them, have been caught taking money from legitimate community projects to employ family members or line their pockets. A number of them were sent to jail, but the Legislature they embarrassed didn’t react to those crimes in any meaningful way.
Other states have dealt with legislative misconduct in harsher ways. Some have demanded that convicted members forfeit their pensions. Others have created special categories of crimes covering every type of legislative misconduct that you could imagine. The most important thing is that crimes by legislators in other states carry harsher penalties than they do in New York.
