Four Political Takeaways From Albany's Historic Legislative Session

Protesters urging legislators to pass Marijuana legislation holds a signs against the senate lobby doors at the state Capitol, in Albany, N.Y.

To say the 2019 legislative session in Albany marched state government to the left is an understatement. There were substantive shifts in policies affecting the environment, criminal justice, voting process, women’s reproductive health, and immigrants and tenants' rights.

With their first robust majority in decades, Democrats quickly began working on pent-up priorities. Within weeks of the session’s start in January, they passed a Reproductive Health Act to ensure Roe v. Wade was backed by state law; allowed voting 10 days before election day; and made undocumented immigrants eligible to apply for financial aid at state universities.

There was much more to come via the budget process in March and the grand finale in June, including abolishing most cash bail; instituting congestion pricing in Manhattan; banning plastic shopping bags; reforming the rent laws; authorizing driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants; ending religious waivers for vaccines; and setting ambitious goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Despite Governor Andrew Cuomo's often tepid support for legislative initiatives and the frequent doubts he cast on the lawmaking competence of Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, he could not deny the year's accomplishments.

“This has been the most progressive session in the history of New York,” Cuomo said the morning after it was all over.

And yet for all the leftward exertions, the power of moderation also remained strong, with various intra-party forces pulling the Democrat-controlled legislature back to the center. Suburban senators on Long Island have proven to be a durable voting block, sometimes joined by moderates in Westchester and the Hudson Valley.

“A lot of these lawmakers have to balance the fact they’re Democrats sent there to pursue something of a progressive agenda, but their districts are mixed,” said Craig Burnett, a political scientist at Hofstra University’s Center for Suburban Studies. “And a lot of their people are concerned about things like taxes, but they're not necessarily as progressive as their counterparts in New York City.”

This was most visible in the push to legalize marijuana. Only a few senators publicly expressed their opposition to pot, but as many as 10 were ambivalent about it — and that head count derailed legalization efforts first during budget negotiations and then later, at the very end of session.

“If they hadn’t forced us to do [immigrant] drivers licenses, maybe we’d have pot,” said one lawmaker, whose district took issue with both measures.

Other liberal initiatives torpedoed by not-so-liberal Democrats included ones to expand prevailing wage guidelines, permit medical assistance to those with terminal illness seeking to end their lives, reform solitary confinement, allow commercial surrogacy, allow mobile sports betting, and prohibit local anti-loitering ordinances used to prosecute prostitutes.

With that said, here are the four main takeaways of the legislative session:

Say Goodbye To 'Three Men In A Room'

“We jammed the governor!” was how one Democratic lawmaker summarized the session, referring to the two legislative chambers’ passage of contentious bills over Cuomo’s objections.

The governor in New York is a constitutionally strong executive, especially at budget time. But the legislative leaders also have a lot of power, especially during the rest of the session. They generally haven’t been in a position to wield it, though, because the two chambers have mostly been held by different parties, other than 2009-2010, when Democrats also held both chambers, but chaos reigned supreme in the Senate.

Heastie and Stewart-Cousins made a point of collaborating closely to counterbalance Cuomo, and it generally worked. On rent regulation reform, he threatened to veto if excluded from negotiations, but they largely kept him out — and he acceded, anyway. On non-citizen drivers’ licenses, Cuomo worked behind the scenes to undermine the bill passage — fearing political blowback — but the chambers approved it without him.

“I think he’s trying to figure out how to deal with two African-American leaders, especially since one of them is a woman,” said one veteran lobbyist, who was not authorized by clients to speak.

Government via ‘three people in a room,’ an Albany tradition, was barely a dynamic this year, especially in the final weeks.

“I think people sent us here to change how things work, and they understand that increased transparency is a good thing,” said Senator Michael Gianaris (D-Queens), the deputy Senate Majority Leader.

Which isn’t to say Cuomo and his aides weren’t actively involved in crafting — or killing — many major pieces of legislation.

As session winded down, Senator Luis Sepulveda (D-Bronx) and Assemblyman Jeff Aubry (D-Queens) were eager to limit the use of solitary confinement in prisons and jails, but Cuomo was concerned that new transitional “rehabilitation units” would be costly to both Albany and local areas around the state. The two lawmakers, and hunger-striking advocates who supported them, wanted to pass the bills and let Cuomo veto them.

But he worked out a deal with Heastie and Stewart-Cousins to make administrative changes to the guidelines for solitary, rather than pass a law.

“Ultimately, the governor does control the power of the purse strings,” Sepulveda told Gothamist/WNYC. “We could’ve passed something, received his veto and gotten nothing, but this way we do get significant, meaningful changes, and we can come back next year and, hopefully, get more of what we wanted.”

“We were ready to pass it,” said one legislator via text. “But the leaders were chicken.”

The Activists Held Sway This Time

On any given session day, demonstrations ring through the halls of the Capitol, most often (though not exclusively) calling for liberal goals, such as criminal justice reform or more healthcare spending. Sympathetic lawmakers sometimes participate.

That’s nothing new.

But what was new was the extent to which Democratic legislators were receptive to their pleas — and those demands worked their way through hearings, bill writing, and committee and floor votes.

Members of the Start Smart pro-legalization coalition helped draft the marijuana bill. Ditto for the New York Renews coalition and the climate change bill and the Upstate Downstate Housing Alliance on rent reform. Immigrant groups were crucial to bills granting them drivers licenses and workplace wage protections for farm workers and carwash workers.

Bill after left-leaning bill had input from activists, who joined politicians at rallies and then kept the pressure on.

The influence of campaign donors and lobbyists, including those representing landlords and developers, medical marijuana, labor unions and mobile sports betting, meanwhile, was relatively weak.

“They ate our lunch,” one pot lobbyist said of the anti-drug coalition comprised of PTAs, physicians, law enforcement and ministers that helped thwart legalization.

After the legislature passed the reforms, Cuomo was at pains to explain his suddenly very secondary role in one of the session’s most impactful packages. But when asked what the overhaul said about the influence of the real estate industry’s multi-million donations on him and legislators, he said the tenants’ victory proved that political contributions don’t affect him in any way.

“I think it would dispel any premise that there’s a connection between donors and legislative outcomes,” he said during a press conference, chuckling. “It sort of upends that whole theory.”

Albany-Watchers Should Stay Tuned To The Committee Process

Many of the new laws will phase in over several years. But others are only loose outlines that defer decision-making to the future. They set goals and create committees to fill in the details.

The Climate Leadership and Protection Act calls for a 22-member council to figure out how exactly the state will meet lofty targets for reducing emissions. A campaign finance reform bill calls for a nine-person commission to figure out a possible state-wide system of matching funds for candidates, among other things. The congestion pricing law calls for a six-person “review board” to set toll levels for driving into Manhattan’s central business district.

Alex Camarda, from the watchdog group Reinvent Albany, said these blue-ribbon panels are becoming more common. He said they make sense when the public needs a politically independent body—as with redistricting or determining legislative pay. But other times, they’re just passing the buck.

“Sometimes it's a delegation of legislative authority,” Camarda said, referring to the campaign finance commission. “I don't think political impasse is a reason to create a commission — that's a reason to continue working on the issue.”

Advocates, stake-holders and journalists will be watching these committees, once they’re formed and start going to work.

“What's most important is that they conduct themselves as state agencies would, when it comes to the open meetings law and the Freedom of Information law,” Camarda said. “We've seen in the past where not all the MTA bodies have done that or done that willingly — and that's something for public input and for the deliberative process.”

All three panels are on tight timetables: the campaign finance one has to produce results by December, the congestion pricing one late next year and the climate action one has two years.

“This will be a pathway forward — but ultimately it will fall to regulatory agencies to create regulations that are legally binding, said Peter Iwanowicz, from Environmental Advocates of New York.

Look For The Return Of Marijuana And A Historic Turnout in 2020

2019’s energy came from a lively 2018 election, which gave the session a burst of Blue Wave energy — much of it from young, left-leaning first-timers. Twenty out of 39 active Democrats were either in their freshman or sophomore terms, most of them taking over long-held Republican seats. (One Democrat, Brooklyn’s Simcha Felder, continued to caucus with Republicans).

But there was another good reason for hitting the ground running: tackling controversy is always easier when it’s not an election year.

That added to the urgency of trying to legalize marijuana this year. When it was all over, one of the bill’s prime sponsors vowed to continue working to build support in the off-session and pick up the bill come January.

“This isn’t the end,” said Senator Liz Krueger (D-Manhattan). “I’m going to keep trying.”

Cuomo has declared marijuana one of his top pieces of unfinished business. Its failure this year combined with the challenges some incumbents could face at the polls next year will doubtless give him further ammunition to try to pass it his way: through the budget, when legislators vote up or down on the massive package for the state’s entire operation, without having to be held responsible for individual pieces.

“It might look like an all-Democratic state, but it’s really shades of blue, with more progressive, more conservative and more moderate areas,” Cuomo said Monday on WAMC. “Some legislators in New York City are concerned about a primary challenge from the left, but in other areas they have a dual tension: they’re afraid of getting hit from the left [in a primary] and getting hit from the right [in the general election].”

Cuomo has been sounding that warning since the very beginning of session, but activists on the left wing of the party think he’s fear-mongering.

“I think the threat of losing seats next year is overblown—it’s a dodge, not based on any kind of science or reality,” said Mia Pearlman, co-founder and co-leader of the grass-roots group True Blue New York. “You will be looking at historical turnout in 2020. There’s nothing like a presidential election race—and this one will be against the most reviled president in modern history. Every Democrat in the state will be voting.”

Fred Mogul is the Albany and politics reporter for WNYC. You can follow him on Twitter @fredmogul.