Yet on Monday, as the Legislature finished approving the budget, some progressive lawmakers were furious.
Several assembly members who voted for the budget bill listed what they saw as failures and said that there was “not a lot we should smile about.” A senator wrote on Twitter that she had cried as the votes were being counted.
Many spoke on the floor against the revenue portion of the budget, which contained the bulk of the policy; 17 Democrats in the Assembly voted against it — a number unseen in the past eight years of Cuomo’s tenure.
“Talking to some of my colleagues, the sentiment was that not much has changed” from when Republicans controlled the Senate, said Assemblywoman Catalina Cruz, D-Queens.
The vigor and volume of the disappointment spoke to a persistent — and some say growing — schism in the ranks of Albany’s newly empowered Democrats, who swept into a legislative monopoly in November by winning eight seats and retaking the state Senate.
Many recently elected lawmakers had hoped that New York could become a testing ground for progressive ideas. But the budget process showed a distance remained between the party’s emboldened left wing, and the older guard, centrist lawmakers who seemed skittish by the pace of change.
In response, progressive activists have begun mulling primary challenges to certain Assembly members. Some lawmakers said they had surprised their leaders by voting against the bill.
“Lots of folks who’ve been here a long time said, ‘Nothing’s going to change unless we vote no,’” said Cruz, who defeated an incumbent in the primary election last year. Cruz said she voted for the bill because of its provisions on criminal justice reform, an important issue for many liberal lawmakers.
To be sure, even critics of the budget acknowledged a slew of accomplishments that would likely have been impossible under a Republican-controlled Senate. Lawmakers approved a first-in-the-nation tolling program for motorists entering Manhattan, a tax on luxury real estate, a ban on plastic bags and a drastic reduction in the state’s use of cash bail.
Nonetheless, some lawmakers’ disappointment with the budget clearly resonated with legislative leaders: On Monday morning, seemingly in response to his some of his members’ displeasure, Heastie appeared less celebratory.
“I’ll be the first to say this is not a great budget,” he said at the end of the vote. “There’s not a lot of happiness in this budget.”
And many Democrats were making clear that they laid the blame for that unhappiness with other Democrats, Cuomo chiefly among them.
Sen. Gustavo Rivera, D-Bronx, said in a statement that his chamber had faced “unrelenting opposition from the executive at every turn” in implementing its priorities, citing the creation of a commission on public financing, rather than a full-fledged public financing law.
Activists had largely blamed the Assembly for the stall on public financing, after Heastie said last month he did not think he had the votes.
On Monday, Alphonso David, the governor’s counsel, defended the planned commission, saying that the Cuomo administration anticipated a robust public financing program would emerge; the budget legislation calls for up to $100 million per year to be spent on statewide and legislative races. “Their mission is to examine, evaluate and make recommendations,” he said, though he noted that those recommendations will have the force of law unless acted on by the Legislature, similar to last year’s commission on legislative and executive pay.
The public financing commission was also criticized by some for including a section that will allow it to examine so-called fusion voting, whereby candidates can run on multiple political party lines. That system encourages the existence of third parties — including the progressive Working Families Party, which has been a consistent needle in Cuomo’s side.
Some of the state’s and nation’s best known progressives, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., have defended fusion voting. Last week, as budget negotiations entered the final stretch, dozens of Democratic Assembly members delivered a letter to Heastie that expressed their opposition to any attempt to ban the practice, and asked that any changes to fusion voting “be subject to legislative and public debate.” The nine-person commission is required to have at least one public hearing.
For many recently elected lawmakers, perhaps the greatest frustration was not any single provision in this year’s budget, but rather the opacity of the budget process at large. Albany’s biggest deals are infamously negotiated by “three men in a room,” where the governor, Assembly speaker and Senate majority leader forge policy behind closed doors, effectively shutting out rank-and-file lawmakers.
“Why are we still basically using the formula we did to negotiate these budgets 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago?” said Assemblyman Robert Carroll, who in 2016 was elected to represent parts of Brooklyn. He was one of the members who voted no on the bill, calling the public finance commission potentially unconstitutional.
Sen. Julia Salazar, who won her seat in Brooklyn last year, echoed that, saying that “the feeling of helplessness and just lack of access to the decision-making process” was discouraging, a sentiment she also expressed on Twitter.
Despite the frustration, the Senate and Assembly each approved a pay resolution that will see Cuomo’s salary rise to $250,000 by 2021; the position has carried a $179,000 a year salary since 1999. The vote, however, was not unanimous; among those who voted against the measure was Sen. Jessica Ramos, a Democrat, who later said on Twitter that she had wished the raise was an April Fools’ joke.
Veterans of the budget process say much of the dissatisfaction is normal: the final bills are always a compromise, making many people somewhat happy, but no one completely so. Cuomo acknowledged the sometimes difficult nature of negotiations on Monday in passing what he called “the greatest budget of the past decade.”
“For me the true test of a government character, really a person’s character, is what they do when confronted with the tough ones,” the governor said.
Still, Mia Pearlman, a co-leader of True Blue NY, a grassroots activism group, said she had no doubt that there was a skirmish within the party in New York, noting that she had heard from “plenty of people” who were interested in mounting potential primary challenges against the Assembly.
“In my personal opinion, this is a battle between the last vestiges of Tammany Hall,” Pearlman continued, referencing the infamous New York City political machine, “and the new progressive left who want nothing to do with machine politics.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.