|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Sexual Harassment- Gov. Andrew Cuomo- Charles Schumer
March 12, 2021
TRUENEWSBLOG- TNB
By Staff:
TRUENEWSBLOG – New York’s two Democratic senators, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, said Andrew Cuomo, the state’s Democratic governor, should resign.
NO GO FOR CUOMO — But Cuomo isn’t budging. After a sixth allegation of sexual misconduct surfaced this week, New York Democrats in Congress and state legislators in Albany called on him today to resign, Cuomo said once again that he has no plans to take their advice.
“Let the review proceed. I am not going to resign,” Cuomo said on a conference call with reporters. He added that quitting now would be “bowing to cancel culture.”
Nightly chatted with Albany-based New York Playbook writer Anna Gronewold over Slack about what happens next.
What stood out to you about Cuomo’s press conference today?
I was struck, but not entirely surprised, by how energetic he sounded after weeks of devastating news coverage, especially damning new reports in The New York Times and New York Magazine about a culture of fear, harassment and intimidation in his office.
Cuomo came out ready to fight, even throwing slight shade at more than a dozen New York Democrats in Congress who announced in tandem this morning that they wanted him to resign.
I didn’t expect him to resign today — I think the poetry of resigning the same day Eliot Spitzer did in 2008 would be almost too much for anyone to bear.
But his commitment to waiting until the results of at least two investigations comes out, and the matter-of-fact manner that he stated Covid-19 stats at the beginning of the press conference were a pretty clear stance that he’s not going to let anyone, even broad coalitions of his former political allies, take him out without a fight.
Do you think there’s anything that would lead him to resign?
So far I’ve been wrong whenever I’ve answered that question, so please don’t put any of your hard-earned money on my answer. But I think if Cuomo decides to step down of his own accord, it would be because he saw definitive numbers that he had lost the majority of voters.
Despite the intense coverage, a lot of this is swirling around Twitter, journalists and the political sphere. We’ll get new polling soon (and I assume that the Cuomo admin has its own internal numbers) that would show how many average New Yorkers want him to resign. Last numbers we had on that, 55 percent said he should stay in office (March 4)
If he doesn’t resign, where does this go next?
There are currently two investigations into his alleged misconduct, which so far ranges from inappropriate “predatory” behavior to literally groping a woman beneath her shirt.
One is from state Attorney General Letitia James. It’s unclear what she is looking for or what she might find, but if the results are particularly damning, it would be irrefutable. Cuomo has consistently said New Yorkers should wait on her findings to establish their opinions of him.
The second investigation was authorized yesterday by the Assembly, and is the first step in impeachment. There is broad support in the Legislature to move ahead with that process, but that could take weeks to months. Due process is at times a long and messy process, and depending who you ask that can be good or bad. The only other time a New York governor has been impeached was in 1913. (Read this fun account from Dr. Terry Golway.
Things are obviously moving fast. What should we be watching for this weekend?
On a granular, kind of wonky level, the Senate and Assembly are supposed to release their one-house budgets in the coming hours or days. The budget process is historically dominated by the governor, partly because of how the New York process works and partly because of how Cuomo has for years been able to strong-arm the legislature to get his way.
It’s possible that Cuomo is in a weak enough position that it will embolden the Senate and Assembly’s Democratic majorities to get a little bit riskier with their proposals. They’ve got an enormous upper hand at the moment.
On a larger level, no one I’ve spoken with — even Cuomo loyalists — think that these are the last of the allegations to come out
