The dust hasn\u2019t completely settled yet, but the 2015 legislative session is in the books and New Yorkers can draw some conclusions about the activity of their representatives.<\/p>\n
A recent review of the 2015 session identified some surprises.\u00a0 For example, while there has been considerable discussion over the session\u2019s failures, an overview of the legislative activity tells a different story.\u00a0 The 2015session saw the highest<\/em> number of bills passed compared to the previous six years.\u00a0 Of course, passing more bills does not necessarily mean that the bills were consequential.<\/p>\n However, while the 2015 session saw a hike in the number of bills that passed both houses, the total is still much lower than the overall historical trend.\u00a0 The four years that saw the fewest bills pass both houses are 2009, 2012, 2013 and 2014.\u00a0 Looking at the trend over a longer period shows that the number of bills approved by the Legislature has been in steady decline.\u00a0 Since 1920 through the mid-1970s, state lawmakers had approved increasing numbers of bills, peaking during the Administrations of Governors Rockefeller and Wilson.\u00a0 Starting with the Carey Administration, the numbers began to decline, with the least legislative activity during the current Administration.<\/p>\n The analysis also showed that Governor Cuomo has been less likely to abuse his power to issue messages of necessity.\u00a0 Under New York\u2019s constitution, bills cannot be voted on for three days after they have made their way to the floor of the legislature.\u00a0 This rule makes perfect sense: it allows lawmakers time to review bills before voting on them.<\/p>\n However, the constitution also allows the governor to circumvent that rule by allowing bills to be voted on immediately in times when there is some \u201cnecessity,\u201d at least in the governor\u2019s view.\u00a0 In the five years of Governor Cuomo\u2019s tenure, an average of about 13 bills have passed both houses per year with a message of necessity.\u00a0 The current governor\u2019s record compares favorably to his immediate predecessors, the Spitzer\/Paterson Administrations, which on average annually issued 41 messages of necessity and the Pataki Administration, which issued on average a whopping 90 messages per year.<\/p>\n There has been little change in the number of bills approved by the governor, and his actions track those of his most recent predecessors.\u00a0 However, there has been an increase in the number of bills vetoed by Governor Cuomo.\u00a0 This is one area in which we do not know how the governor will react to the 2015 session: many of the bills passed are in the flurry of June, 2015 activity and the vast majority of those bills have not yet been acted upon by the governor.<\/p>\n The analysis showed that legislative activity increased each month that lawmakers were in session, culminating with huge number of bills being approved in June.\u00a0 Also, the analysis showed that Albany-based campaign fundraising peaked in March, the month when lawmakers are dealing with the state budget.<\/p>\n As I mentioned earlier, numbers alone do not tell the full story of a legislative session.\u00a0 What is clear is that the session, at least numerically, was consistent with previous years.\u00a0 What makes this session unique are the arrests and indictments of the legislative leaders.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, those arrests did not fundamentally change the way Albany operates; the faces changed but not much else.\u00a0 The legislative leaders continued to control the process in both houses.<\/p>\n It continues to be the case that if the leader opposes bills, no matter how popular, they are blocked.<\/p>\n Here are some examples:<\/p>\n The Child Safe Products Act\u00a0<\/strong>which would have regulated toxic chemicals in children\u2019s products. The bill had two-thirds of the Senate as sponsors, was approved by an overwhelming bipartisan majority in the Assembly, and was supported by the governor.\u00a0 Yet, the Senate leader killed the bill by blocking it from coming to a vote.<\/p>\n The same was true of Senate legislation to ban the dumping of fracking waste, which had a majority of Senate sponsors; a bill to ban microbeads; legislation to improve elevator safety; and legislation to improve patient protections.\u00a0 All of these efforts had the votes to pass, but were killed by the Senate leader\u2019s opposition.<\/p>\n The numbers show that despite all of the indictments and promises for change, Albany\u2019s status quo remains firmly entrenched.\u00a0 Hopefully, the public will not accept a system that undermines legislative innovation and reform.Voters must demand more or ensure that lawmakers pay the price in next year\u2019s elections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The dust hasn\u2019t completely settled yet, but the 2015 legislative session is in the books and New Yorkers can draw some conclusions about the activity of their representatives. A recent review of the 2015 session identified some surprises.\u00a0 For example, while there has been considerable discussion over the session\u2019s failures, an overview of the legislative […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1505"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1505\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1507,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1505\/revisions\/1507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}