Washington, D.C., may be a swamp, but it has nothing on Albany.
New York’s Democrats are the gifts that keep on giving — unless you live here.
Democrat-appointed judges at the New York Court of Appeals, the seven-member highest court in the state, have held a majority on the court since 2015, and the last Republican appointee, Eugene Pigott Jr., retired in 2016 upon reaching the mandatory retirement age of 70. The court now comprises five judges appointed by Andrew Cuomo, one appointed in 2022 by Kathy Hochul, and one vacancy that Hochul is trying to fill. Two of the Cuomo appointees, Anthony Cannataro (a career jurist) and Madeline Singas (a former prosecutor), both Democrats, were appointed to the court in the spring of 2021 at a time when Cuomo was already facing impeachment — and they would have sat as jurors judging Cuomo under the state constitutional process for impeachment trials. Cuomo rammed them through the state senate, ignoring the statutory deadline for submitting his nominations.
Given that it consists entirely of Democratic appointees, the court is quite liberal, but it enraged Democrats in April 2022 when it struck down the heavily gerrymandered maps of the state’s congressional and state senate districts. The court ruled 5–2 that the state legislature had violated the state constitutional process for drawing the maps by taking it out of the hands of a (predictably dysfunctional) bipartisan commission. It also ruled 4–3 that the maps themselves represented partisan gerrymander that violated the state constitution. The opinion was written by Chief Judge Janet DiFiore, a former prosecutor (she succeeded Jeanine Pirro as Westchester County district attorney) and former Republican who switched parties in 2007 and was appointed to the high court by Andrew Cuomo. She was joined by Cannataro, Singas, and Michael Garcia (a Republican former prosecutor appointed by Cuomo). Hochul’s appointee, Shirley Troutman, voted with the majority on the process issue but contended that there was no basis for the court to throw out the map.
The redistricting ruling had a dramatic impact, immediately scrambling the congressional races. Congressman Anthony Delgado abandoned his reelection bid to become lieutenant governor. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Sean Patrick Maloney jumped into the district of progressive congressman Mondaire Jones, pushed Jones to run and lose a primary in another district, then lost the election. Democrats’ majority shrunk from 19–8 to 15–11 in the House, a decisive factor in Republicans’ taking the House. Republicans gained three previously Democratic House seats, electing George Santos and Anthony D’Esposito on Long Island and Mike Lawler in Maloney’s new district. The GOP also shored up people such as Nicole Malliotakis on Staten Island who might have been endangered under the Democrats’ map, and split two extremely competitive Upstate districts that partly covered Delgado’s old district. (Republican Marc Molinaro lost a special election to Democrat Pat Ryan in August to replace Delgado; Molinaro and Ryan ended up running in different districts, each winning by less than two points.)
Knives have been out ever since. DiFiore, who was once appointed by Cuomo to head the New York Joint Commission on Public Ethics, was herself subject to a disciplinary probe filed in August 2021 that resulted from a lengthy feud:
Dennis Quirk, the president of the New York State Court Officers Association . . . filed a complaint against DiFiore in August 2021. The complaint was the culmination of a long saga of agitation between DiFiore and Quirk that ran on for years. Quirk and DiFiore frequently sparred during her time as chief judge, which began in 2016. The union president has often been a spirited critic of the former judge, particularly around her handling of the court system during the COVID-19 pandemic — he specifically opposed the court’s vaccination mandate, which court officers failed to comply with at a higher rate than other court staff. The fighting led to Quirk’s suspension and eventual retirement as a court officer after he posted both of the chief judges’ addresses online to encourage his members to picket her homes over the court system’s vaccine mandate. . . . In the summer of 2020, DiFiore accused Quirk of perpetuating racist and biased behavior among his court officers, according to reporting by the New York Post. The accusations of racism came prior to Secretary Jeh Johnson’s report on racism and bias in the court system — the report ultimately described a “culture of toxicity” among court officers statewide.
DiFiore resigned in July, leaving Cannataro as the acting chief judge, but legal journal Law360 says that her troubles aren’t done:
Resigned New York Chief Judge Janet DiFiore and acting Chief Judge Anthony Cannataro appear to have underreported their compensation to state tax authorities by failing to declare any personal use of their full-time chauffeured cars in 2022, a Law360 investigation has found. Both DiFiore and Judge Cannataro benefited from a state-funded court officer detail last year, but did not report any personal use to state finance officials to add the value of that perk to their annual tax statements, records show. Commuting mileage always counts toward personal taxable income, experts told Law360, and both judges were regularly picked up and dropped off at their homes. . . . DiFiore’s court officer detail continued even after she resigned in August while facing unrelated ethics charges, apparently in violation of state court policies barring personal use of state vehicles and outraging Albany lawmakers, who have vowed to look into the expense. Past chief judges did not receive such perks after they left.
This has been an issue for New York politicians (mostly Democrats) before:
“There is a history in Albany of political leaders and government officials misusing drivers and security details for personal purposes,” said Howard Master, . . . a former federal prosecutor who helped win the conviction of former state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver for bribery. Master also cited the case of Alan Hevesi, a state comptroller who tasked his taxpayer-funded chauffeur with driving his wife around. An inquiry found there was no security justification for the detail. Hevesi pled guilty to felony fraud in 2006 and resigned. The New York attorney general calculated that he owed the state $206,000. Former U.S. Surgeon General and state Health Commissioner Antonia Novello pled guilty in 2009 to a felony charge for using her staff as chauffeurs and making them run personal errands. Prosecutors said she cost taxpayers $48,000. On the flip side, in New York City, despite a finding by the Department of Investigation that former Mayor Bill de Blasio abused his New York Police Department protective detail by ordering them to drive his children around, no criminal charges or penalties were ever levied.
Hochul, meanwhile, nominated Hector LaSalle to replace DiFiore. Hochul leaned hard into the fact that LaSalle would be the first Hispanic chief judge of the state, and Hispanic politicians rallied to his support. However, the state senate judiciary committee in January rejected the nomination by a 10–9 vote, motivated heavily by a ruling in which LaSalle had sided with crisis pregnancy centers and against a politically charged investigation by since-disgraced woman-abusing state attorney general Eric Schneiderman. Hochul has been publicly mulling a lawsuit to force a floor vote on the nomination in the Democrat-controlled state senate, but may not have the votes to win it. She appears not to be speaking to state senate majority leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins about the impasse, which is widely seen in Albany not only as a battle between moderates and progressives, but as a test of strength between Hochul and Stewart-Cousins. In the meantime, the court is shorthanded.
Washington, D.C., may be a swamp, but it has nothing on Albany.
CORRECTION: This article initially stated that Mondaire Jones lost a primary to Sean Patrick Maloney. He lost a primary after switching districts.