Maybe we were wrong to cheer Gov. Kathy Hochul’s early decision to run to keep her job in next year’s election: With an eye on the June primary, she’s pandering to the left and, in at least one regard, to Democratic insiders.
She began nicely enough, not only promising transparency but delivering by acknowledging the true number of New York’s COVID-related deaths.
But even there, she’s backsliding: Her Health Department is still stonewalling easily fulfilled Empire Center freedom-of-information requests for more COVID data, and she appeased the establishment at the expense of transparency by restoring a giant loophole in the Open Meetings law.
She did the latter after ordering a special session of the state Legislature to consider her picks to regulate legal pot and to extend the eviction moratorium — without mentioning the anti-transparency move ’til the night before the Legislature’s leaders rushed it through.
We’ll give her a pass on the pot move: Sadly, New York is going to need the money, and the Legislature and Andrew Cuomo already legalized it in March. Appointing regulators was just delayed because then-Gov. Cuomo was locked in a dispute with the Senate over his plans to overhaul the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s leadership. But why not settle the MTA questions, too? It’s far too important an agency to proceed under acting leaders.
But the evictions action was pretty extreme, extending the ban to Jan. 15. This is a pure pander to the left’s overwrought hysteria about a supposed mass wave of evictions; the result (assuming courts don’t strike it down) will be mainly to protect the few tenants who exploit the ban.
In reality, as Howard Husock pointed out in these pages, Hochul should be looking to fix the state’s impossible mechanism for distributing billions in federal grants meant to pay rents and “keep property owners afloat.” Even as other states have been doling out the cash for months, New York has sent out just $100 million of the $2.6 billion in aid.
She’s also playing into the school-masking madness. As she’d requested, the Department of Health has mandated that all students, faculty and staff mask up no matter vaccination status.
“My No. 1 priority is getting children back to school and protecting the environment so they can learn safely,” she said. But the science has shown time and again that kids aren’t at real risk of COVID and are far less likely to spread it — and that includes Delta. That’s why Britain and other advanced nations don’t require school masking, certainly not of under-12s.
Rather than making children the priority, this looks more like putting teachers-union demands first. (She could prove otherwise by getting the Legislature to raise the cap that stops new charter schools from opening in the city, but she’s been silent on that so far.)
Then there’s her pick for lieutenant governor — the far-left state Sen. Brian Benjamin, a huge fan of the “Defund the police” movement, even making it central to his failed run for city comptroller this year.
Hochul’s press secretary, Hazel Crampton-Hays, said the governor doesn’t support the movement herself. So will she push for key fixes to the no-bail law, so that judges can order clear threats to public safety to be locked up? As courts have interpreted it, it doesn’t even allow judges to order mental-health evaluations for perps who haven’t committed bail-eligible offenses.
The city needs a tough-on-crime gov pushing the Legislature to do right. Shootings this year are up 5.3 percent over the same span in 2020. The murder rates are close to last year’s figures — 299 compared to 303 — but that’s still an almost 40 percent spike from 2019, NYPD statistics show. Felony assaults have increased 5 percent.
If Gov. Hochul wants to be far better than Cuomo, she needs to stop playing the same appease-the-far-left games.