A funny thing happened in Albany the other week.
Gov. Cuomo picked what could have been a major constitutional showdown with the Legislature by stuffing his budget bills with highly controversial policy changes — including tuition aid for undocumented immigrants, a tax credit for private-school scholarships, tougher teacher evaluations and stronger anti-corruption measures for the lawmakers themselves.
Cuomo was forcing members of the Assembly and Senate to choose between passing laws they might otherwise oppose and shutting down parts of government — an aggressive move that stretched gubernatorial authority to the limit and arguably beyond.
Yet legislative leaders fired back by . . . fuming in near-silence.
Days went by before new Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie allowed, in answer to a question, that Cuomo’s tactics “kind of tied the Legislature’s hands.”
Otherwise, the only sign of resistance is that the Assembly and Senate have so far held off on formally introducing Cuomo’s budget amendments, while declining to clearly explain why.
Well, if members of the Legislature aren’t going to stick up for their constitutional prerogatives, I guess I’ll have to do it for them.
To be clear, I support nearly all of the initiatives that Cuomo included in his so-called 30-day budget amendments. I further appreciate that the Legislature might never clean up its act unless Cuomo plays hardball.
But he’s invoking his sweeping budgetary authority in a heavy-handed way that sets a dangerous precedent — and could easily be abused by future governors whose intentions are not so benign.
Since 1927, the state Constitution has given the governor primacy over budgetary matters for the very good reason that, without an executive to take charge of balancing the books, lawmakers would spend the state into bankruptcy.
Under the system adopted then, the governor has sole authority to draft the dollars-and-cents appropriation bills, and the Legislature can edit them in only certain ways. For each itemized expenditure, it can approve the dollar amount as is, reduce it, or add to it — with any additions subject to line-item veto.
The state’s highest court reaffirmed this balance of power in 2004 — but warned that governors should not abuse their authority by mushing too much policy into spending bills.
The court said, for example, that it was OK for a governor to rewrite the school-aid formula in an appropriation bill, but maybe not to raise the retirement age for firefighters.
That’s a fuzzy line, to be sure, but Cuomo has clearly crossed it, according to political scientist Gerald Benjamin of the State University of New York at New Paltz.
“No reasonable concept of executive budgeting . . . would include putting substantive legislation on an up-or-down basis in the budget,” Benjamin says.
As you might expect, Cuomo and his aides strongly disagree — insisting that the governor is acting well within his rights.
But even if he is — and only the Court of Appeals could say for sure — the strategy comes with big downsides.
By resorting to this ultimate weapon so early in the fight, Cuomo plays into the narrative that he’s a bully, which allows the forces who oppose reform to portray themselves as courageously standing up to him.
And by stuffing so many substantive decisions into budget bills — which he and the legislative leaders will inevitably hash out as Albany’s infamous three men in a room — Cuomo is enabling the Assembly and Senate’s bad habit of never allowing rank-and-file members to act like real legislators.
“It comes down to how you feel about the ends justifying the means,” says Albany watchdog E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center for Public Policy. “Think of the worst thing you can think of a governor trying to do, then picture him trying to do it through an appropriation bill.”
© 2015 New York Daily News