STALEMATE is nothing new in Albany, the capital of New York state. Last summer, for instance, the state Senate was paralysed for five weeks because a Democrat defected (temporarily, it turned out) to the Republican Party. This year is no better. The state budget is almost 80 days late. Since the fiscal year began on April 1st, lawmakers have been forced to pass weekly spending bills to keep the state government ticking along. But legislators’ patience is wearing thin; this week, the state came close to a full-scale shutdown, a first even for one of the most dysfunctional state legislatures in the country.

A shutdown would have closed state offices, sending 200,000 state workers home. Some $190m in unemployment benefits for 565,000 New Yorkers would have gone unpaid. Tolls on state roads might have gone uncollected. A terrorism hot-line might have been closed. State police and prison guards would have stayed on the job, but they might not have been paid. David Paterson, New York’s lame-duck governor, predicted “unimaginable chaos”.

E.J. McMahon, of the Empire Centre for New York State Policy, thinks the governor’s threat was hyperbole, nothing more than a “pointless diversion”. But it felt real enough to Hugh Farley, a Republican who represents the Albany area. Many of his constituents are state employees. Republicans had been uniformly voting against the recent spending bills. Last week two Democrats said they would not vote for the next one. Since the Democrats have only a majority of 32-30 in the Senate, Mr Farley feared that unless he crossed party lines to support the bill, a shutdown was likely. Although he, along with two other Republicans, supported the bill on June 14th, which averted a shutdown, he is loth to support the next spending bill. So the possibility of a shutdown remains…

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