Amid Coronavirus, Cuomo Held New York Health Care Hostage. John Armwood is with Eugene Holley Jr. 10 mins · The real Andrew Cuomo, very intelligent and very devilish”.

“... Even as Cuomo was staging his daily crisis briefings and playfighting with his kid brother on CNN this week, where Chris is an anchor, he was also taking advantage of the pandemic to drive through a vindictive and life-threatening state budget through the legislature. It was a naked power grab unprecedented even in a state legendary for its murky and undemocratic government.

The day after Monday’s convention center press briefing, the New York State legislature was staring down a midnight deadline to pass a budget. The process was complicated by the logistical difficulties of conducting the usual debate, conference, and negotiation with most lawmakers physically absent from the state Capitol. But it was also made immeasurably more difficult by the fact that Cuomo — his calls to transcend politics notwithstanding — was insisting on jamming complicated and contentious policy initiatives into the budget negotiations, daring legislators to hold up a crisis budget if they wouldn’t get on board.

Cuomo’s wish list — what he was prepared to hold his state’s own pandemic response at gunpoint to achieve — was a budget full of perversities.
Late Tuesday afternoon, Cuomo’s top aide, Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa, tightened the screws, issuing a thinly veiled threat: If the legislature couldn’t agree on a budget by the end of the night, she said, “State government will shut down — including the Department of Health.”

The legislature didn’t quite manage to meet that deadline, but it did pass a budget Thursday night, handing the governor virtually everything he wanted. Cuomo’s wish list — what he was prepared to hold his state’s own pandemic response at gunpoint to achieve — was a budget full of perversities.

WHILE NEW York’s health system, already hobbled by years of neglect, buckled under the coronavirus outbreak, Cuomo wanted to cut $2.5 billion in state Medicaid funding, even though doing so would mean forfeiting $6.7 billion in federal aid. He wanted to slash state funding for education. As the pandemic eviscerates state revenue, he wanted to avoid any increase in taxes on the ultra-rich and instead balance the books by cutting muscle and bone from critical social services.

And like Viktor Orban on the Hudson, Cuomo wanted to use the pandemic to arrogate vast new powers to himself: the ability to further slash spending on a quarterly basis without so much as consulting the democratically elected legislature.

Lastly, and perhaps most inexplicably, Cuomo was holding the state budget hostage to his regressive criminal justice agenda. The previous year, state Democrats had taken advantage of their newfound control of both chambers of the legislature to pass landmark criminal justice reforms that went into effect in January, eliminating cash bail in most instances and ending a long-standing arrangement that allowed prosecutors to withhold their evidence against defendants virtually until the day of their trials.

Cuomo signed the legislation last year, but made it clear he didn’t like it, and set about trying to roll it back this year — threatening to put more people in jails even as they are ravaged by the novel coronavirus. Rather than asking the legislature to consider changes in open floor debate, he stuffed his criminal justice agenda into the secretive budget process, where legislators would get virtually no chance to even review the changes to the law, much less discuss them before voting on them.

In typical hardball fashion, Cuomo’s opening bid was a reformers’ worst nightmare. His draft legislation proposed to give judges the power — unprecedented in state history — to jail defendants, even people facing misdemeanor charges, on the basis of a premonition that those defendants might commit some future act of violence. The same judges who have spent decades using money bail to incarcerate New Yorkers before their trials would now be handed the power to lock people up based on their powers of divination, the reading of entrails, or the huffing of oracular vapors. The result, critics warned, was sure to be a new era of racist mass incarceration.“

Amid Coronavirus, Cuomo Held New York Health Care Hostage