Albany's Rent Reform Deal Shows Cuomo Is A Mere Mortal Now

At the climax of the 2019 legislative session, when New York’s rent laws hung in the balance, the two Democratic legislative leaders—the understated Assembly speaker, Carl Heastie, and the Senate majority leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins—came together to shut Andrew Cuomo entirely out of the room.

In past years, the governor was the chief driver of every significant negotiation in Albany. If an agreement with legislative leaders was reached, it would be Cuomo touting it to the public, with the legislative leaders as his junior partners. This time, Heastie and Stewart-Cousins huddled without him, jointly announcing an agreement to extend the rent laws indefinitely, daring Cuomo to reject the bill. He did not.

This was a remarkable acknowledgement of the demands of progressive activists, who repeatedly beseeched legislative leaders not to negotiate a renewal of the rent laws with Cuomo, who has raised millions from the real estate industry. It was also a nod to a new reality: if the two Democratic chambers want to work together, there is little need to involve the governor at all. After announcing a deal to strengthen tenant protections, the legislature sent the bill to Cuomo’s desk, where he promptly signed it.

For the first eight years of Cuomo's time in Albany, when he ruled New York like no governor since a literal Rockefeller, those with only a casual acquaintance with the state's political scene wondered why such an ambitious Democrat wouldn’t want his own party controlling the legislature. Cuomo rarely fundraised for Democrats and even joked to Senate Republicans how little he campaigned for fellow Democrats. Didn’t the governor want allies? Didn’t he want to get things done?

Of course. But anyone who has observed Cuomo or spent any significant of time with him knows he wants to accomplish political and policy goals on his own terms. He must be at the center of the press conference and the head of the parade, the power broker praised by press and politicians alike. When the mayor of New York City proposed raising the minimum wage, Cuomo, a fellow Democrat, laughed him off. Then Cuomo decided he did in fact want to do it—and named the campaign after his governor father, whipped up support from organized labor, and made sure everyone knew it was Andrew Cuomo who raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

At the heart of the Cuomo power game was the legislature. The state constitution already invests the executive branch with extraordinary powers, particularly around budget time. But Cuomo, raised in Albany, knew that if the two houses of the legislature combine their efforts, they can railroad a governor, passing bill after bill and forcing him to either sign or veto them. Cuomo is not shy about wielding the veto pen, but what about all those popular, progressive bills—the types that draw friendly press—that the governor, a triangulator disdainful of the resurgent left, would rather not deal with?

Until now, legislative gridlock could provide the excuse for not attempting to pass the Climate and Community Protection Act, a sweeping environmental bill that seeks to cut carbon emissions entirely by 2050. (The business lobby hated it and Republicans, luckily for Cuomo, would never do it.) A GOP majority could save Cuomo from allowing the Department of Motor Vehicles to issue driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants, a contentious issue that snarled one of his predecessors, Eliot Spitzer.

For eight years, the Republican-controlled State Senate was Cuomo’s salvation. In 2019, that changed, and life for New York’s most powerful figure may never be the same. Democrats, to Cuomo’s chagrin, seized control of the State Senate, and rather than plunge it into chaos, they partnered with the Democrat-controlled State Assembly to pass a startling range of legislation that spent much of Cuomo’s tenure bottled up in various committees.

Before the recent rush of legislation to Cuomo’s desk, there was his great humiliation of the new year, Amazon. In February, thanks in part to opposition from Democrats in the State Senate, Amazon backed out of a plan to land a headquarters in Queens. The collapse of the deal was Cuomo’s greatest setback as governor, as he saw his arguments for economic development lose out to activists, progressive organizations, and politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who have always loathed Cuomo’s neoliberalism. Cuomo raged against the Senate Democrats and tried, to no avail, to woo Amazon back.

The Amazon fight demonstrated to New York’s political class, many of them resentful but terrified of Cuomo’s might, that the governor was no longer impregnable. Events could transpire in New York State that were beyond his control.

None of this could have happened before 2019 because Republicans clung to control of the State Senate. Doomed by declining registration numbers and demographics, the GOP majority was always artificial: There was no popular will, in a deep blue state, for Republican rule, but State Senate districts had been gerrymandered for Republicans with Cuomo’s approval.

When Republicans finally appeared to be tossed from power after Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012, Cuomo had a new gambit. Collaborating with a dissident state senator named Jeff Klein who shared Cuomo’s allegiance to the real estate industry and charter school sector, Cuomo sanctioned a partnership between the Independent Democratic Conference and the Republicans that would make Klein co-leader of the Senate and keep Republicans in control of the Senate.

This arrangement effectively squelched until now all the legislation that has been passed in this session: tuition assistance and driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants, voter reforms, stronger tenant protections, far-reaching initiatives to combat climate change, congestion pricing, and reform of New York’s antiquated criminal justice laws. Some of these Cuomo wanted more than others, but policy outcomes were not the only point of Cuomo’s rule.

Power came first. And Cuomo understood, as any good tactician who sniffs weakness, that both Klein and the Republican majority leaders—first Dean Skelos, who went off to prison, and then John Flanagan—served at his pleasure. Neither had the numbers to dominate the Senate alone and, just as crucially, their donors were his donors. The same hedge funders and real estate moguls filling Cuomo’s campaign coffers with historic levels of cash were also top givers to Republicans and the IDC.

This meant that the legislature, inevitably, would have to bend to Cuomo’s will. Republicans, typically resistant to minimum wage hikes, agreed to $15 an hour, in part so the powerful labor unions in the state, in league with Cuomo, would not back Democrats as they tried to retake the majority. The New York State Democratic Party, another Cuomo-controlled enterprise, would avoid, at all costs, helping Senate Democrats. In turn, Republicans were happy to partner with Cuomo on other ventures, like boosting charter schools in New York and tormenting Mayor Bill de Blasio, who had to plead for humiliating one-year extensions of mayoral control of the public schools.

Donald Trump’s election permanently upended this calculus. Democratic voters began paying closer attention to local politics, new grassroots organizations like True Blue NY and No IDC NY sprung up, and the IDC was immediately targeted. Progressives in IDC districts, especially in New York City, began to ask why their representatives were caucusing with the party of Trump. At raucous town halls, IDC members, for the first time, experienced significant pushback.

Cuomo tried to cut a reunification deal to ward off primary challengers to Klein and his cohort but failed. Six out of eight IDC members were defeated and Democrats, thanks to an anti-Trump surge, swept control of the Senate. Many of the new senators did not share Cuomo’s centrist politics or feel any loyalty to him, since they won their races without his backing. Some, like Alessandra Biaggi, Jessica Ramos, and John Liu, have confronted him directly.

Cuomo still hoped, against this new current, to maintain his status quo. He assiduously courted the six new suburban Senate Democrats who were elected last fall, attempting to break them away from their progressive New York City counterparts. He mocked the State Senate publicly. He privately urged the Long Island Democrats to not support driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants, despite backing the plan publicly, and sanctioned his state party chairman to blast the proposal.

But the driver’s licenses bill still passed—Democrats had just enough votes to afford to lose all six Long Islanders—and Cuomo was left to sign it, even after threatening a veto and trying to lure the state attorney general and solicitor general into the fight. What he has learned, with the 2019 legislative session closing on Wednesday, is that divide-and-conquer politics can only work so well when everyone belongs to the same political party. The Republicans are irrelevant and there is no IDC. The legislature can finally become a co-equal branch of government.

There are still challenges ahead for both. Legislative leaders could not agree on a bill to legalize marijuana and Cuomo could play a much heavier hand in those negotiations. He is not to be underestimated. Even now, slogging through a third term beyond the control he is used to wielding, the governor remains a force. The change is in degree—he is far more ordinary, and that means he will have to know defeat like everyone else.

What is clear is that there is a roadmap for the state legislature to achieve power and accomplish policy goals without the explicit blessing of the governor. For progressives trying to tug New York further left and make up for a lost decade, the opportunity has never been greater.