If the governor is toppled, expect a mad scramble for his post in 2022. Here’s who would be first in line.
If the governor is toppled, expect a mad scramble for his post in 2022. Here’s who would be first in line.
A ndrew Cuomo is in a lot of hot water. It may not be enough to topple him from his perch before his third term as governor ends in January 2023, but when Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul showed up at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on St. Patrick’s Day, Archbishop Timothy Dolan cracked, “If you want to light some candles after Mass, we’ll understand.” If Cuomo is forced out, Hochul would become the state’s first female governor, its first from outside the New York City area since Franklin Roosevelt, and its first from Buffalo since Grover Cleveland. That could make her a figure of immediate national importance, but one who will be plagued by the toxic infighting of New York’s Democratic Party.
On March 12, the speaker of the New York State Assembly announced that the Assembly’s judiciary committee was opening an impeachment investigation into Cuomo. New York magazine has counted noses:
There are currently 106 Democrats and 43 Republicans serving in the Assembly (along with one Independent). If a resolution to impeach Cuomo were to attract bipartisan support, 33 Democrats would need to join all Assembly Republicans for it to pass. . . . At least 40 Democratic Assembly members have already called for Cuomo to resign, but only a handful have said they also want to impeach him. Assembly Republicans recently drafted a resolution on their own to impeach Cuomo over the nursing-home data scandal and sexual harassment allegations, and a spokesperson for the minority told WNYC nearly all GOP members said they would support it . . .
In the State Senate, at least 20 Democrats and 20 Republicans have called for Cuomo to resign, but as in the Assembly, it’s not clear how many would also support removing him should they get the opportunity.
It seems unlikely that New York Republicans would resist the chance to take out Cuomo, although a few may be personally loyal to him for reasons owing to Albany’s swampy politics. State Senate majority leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins told WCBS reporter Marcia Kramer on March 16 that she believed there were enough votes in the Democrat-run upper chamber to convict Cuomo if the assembly impeaches him. In New York’s procedure, that could be complicated by the fact that the judges of the court of appeals (the state’s highest court) also vote on conviction, and Cuomo has appointed all seven of them. As New York magazine explains:
[In the] 63-member State Senate, . . . a Court for the Trial of Impeachments is convened, consisting of the lieutenant governor, all state senators, and the seven judges from the state’s highest court, the New York Court of Appeals. When the governor is impeached, the lieutenant governor . . . temporarily becomes the acting governor for the duration of the trial, and is excluded from participating in the trial, along with the president pro tempore of the Senate . . . since both are in the line of succession for the governor’s office. That would leave 69 members in the Court for the trial, and a two-thirds majority, or 46 votes, would be needed to convict and remove the governor from office. The same number of votes would be required to ban the governor from ever holding elected office in the state again.
The Assembly’s process was initially projected to run four to six weeks, but there are now indications that it could drag on for months, allowing the broad scope of the charges to immunize Cuomo from swift justice. And there is much more on the Assembly’s agenda than the eight sexual-harassment allegations against the governor. One topic is Cuomo’s book advance:
“We have a wide range of issues that come up, and every one of those concerns is very important,” said Assemblyman Ron Kim (D-Queens). Kim — who claims the governor bullied him over the nursing home investigation — also wants the probe to look at the governor’s book contract to see if that played a role in the administration’s decision to downplay COVID deaths in nursing homes. “I’m confident there’s some personal profit motives in the contact. For example, how much money will he receive if he makes the New York Times bestseller list? How much money would he make if he sells 50,000 books? What are the benchmarks?” Kim said.
Kyle Smith has more on the book-advance story. It goes on from there: the cover-up of how many people Cuomo killed with his order sending COVID patients back to nursing homes; the cover-up of structural failings on the new Tappan Zee Bridge (named after Cuomo’s father, which means it should declare itself personally opposed to you crossing the Hudson River); and Cuomo leaning on county vaccine-distribution officials to demand loyalty. Then there are investigations by the state attorney general and the FBI.
It is hard to imagine that Cuomo will resign unless the process is all but certain to remove him. But unlike presidents, governors are not so impossible to oust. Republican legislators drove Eric Greitens from office as Missouri governor in 2018, with then–state attorney general Josh Hawley leading the charge. Republicans did the same to Alabama governor Robert Bentley in 2017. Democrats took down their own governor in Oregon, John Kitzhaber, in 2015. Only one New York governor has been removed from office, in 1913. But it was not so long ago, in March 2008, that the authoritarian Eliot Spitzer resigned as governor of New York under a cloud of sexual scandal and was replaced by his inept lieutenant governor, David Paterson. In 2018, state attorney general Eric Schneiderman was hounded from office in a matter of hours over his reported abuse of women, bringing an abrupt end to his national prominence as a leader of the “Resistance” to Donald Trump.
Cuomo is a more formidable target: He’s a national figure with an impeccable pedigree. His father was once a Democratic presidential favorite and convention keynote speaker. He was in Bill Clinton’s cabinet as housing and urban development secretary. He married a Kennedy. His brother has a show on CNN. For a decade, he’s been the governor of the state that houses much of the national media, and was the state’s attorney general and a candidate for governor for years before that. He was touted as the dashboard saint of COVID-19 response, the walking repudiation of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.
But Cuomo, profiled by Jake Tapper in 2002 in scathing terms unfit to print here, has a lot of enemies in the state’s Democratic Party — some personal, some ideological among the restive AOC-style progressives, and some who blame him for cutting deals that kept the Republicans with an equal share of the state senate for years. Cuomo’s feud with New York City mayor Bill de Blasio is the stuff of legend. The governor reportedly had a dartboard featuring de Blasio’s face at his mansion in Albany. Throughout the lockdowns, Cuomo has gone out of his way to preemptively overrule every decision by de Blasio to open or close anything. My personal favorite story is the time an Albany paper was running nasty quotes about de Blasio attributed to a source close to Cuomo, and it turned out the “source” was the governor himself. While the dysfunction between the two undoubtedly hampered the state’s coronavirus response, Cuomo’s open loathing of de Blasio remains his best feature.
What happens if Cuomo is toppled? The 62-year-old Hochul immediately becomes governor, and a mad scramble is set off for the 2022 race. There is no guarantee that she would be able to avoid a fractious primary challenge (Paterson did not even try to hold off Cuomo in 2010). In fact, in 2018, Hochul faced a stiff progressive primary challenge of her own for the lieutenant governorship from New York City councilman Jumaane Williams. She did so with notably tepid support from Cuomo, who would have preferred that she challenge the scandal-plagued Republican Chris Collins for the Buffalo-area House seat that Collins wrested from Hochul in 2012. Hochul won the district in a 2011 special election to replace Chris Lee after a sex scandal, but lost it the following year after it was redrawn. Collins barely survived 2018 and resigned in 2019 to plead guilty to insider trading and lying to the FBI. Ain’t New York politics grand?
Nobody should mistake Kathy Hochul for a conservative or even a moderate. She is very much a Cuomo- or Schumer-style liberal, who — like Kirsten Gillibrand — found it necessary to pose as a moderate while running in a culturally conservative upstate House district. Like Schumer, Hochul is a tireless traveler, who has kept her face in the local news by trekking around the state while Cuomo ignores her. Like Cuomo, she has enough of a pragmatic streak to remain a target of progressive ire. She got her start as an aide to Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Congressman John LaFalce, and between stints in office served as vice president of government affairs at the Buffalo-based M&T Bank.
Before she went statewide, Hochul took some steps that would get her run out of the party today, but has shifted without even the pretense of a principled change of heart:
In local and county races, she regularly ran on the Conservative Party line. In 2007, when she was Erie County clerk, she gained some notoriety downstate for opposing then-Governor Eliot Spitzer’s effort to issue driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants — vowing to arrest any immigrant who tried to apply for one at county offices. In 2011, she ran for Congress as an “independent Democrat,” and earned an endorsement from the National Rifle Association.
As with other upstate Democrats, like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Hochul’s politics have shifted in statewide office. She reversed her position on driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants and backed the SAFE Act, which is one the toughest gun control laws in the country, for instance, and has been in ideological lockstep with the Cuomo administration ever since she joined it. Hochul has described her evolution, and past positions, as a matter of trying to best represent her constituents and their views.
In 2012, she skipped the Democratic convention in order to avoid being tied to Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and ran TV ads blasting foreign aid to Pakistan and supporting a balanced-budget amendment:
Don’t expect to see anything like that from Kathy Hochul if she becomes governor — but rest assured that the state’s militant progressive wing has not forgotten it.