Andrew Cuomo never heard of the no-bail law; he’s proud of ending an “injustice”; it was the other guy; someone faked his name on it; it never happened in the first place.
The ex-gov is whiplashing himself all over the place on his record of criminal-justice reform as he pretends against all evidence — and sanity — to be the pro-public-safety mayoral candidate.
“We don’t have cashless bail” in New York, Cuomo said (with a straight face!) last week after President Donald Trump issued an executive order aiming to cut federal funding to areas that embrace the pro-crime “reform.”
Sorry, Andrew: Tell that to 94-year-old Audrey Hawkins. She was trying to catch the E train in June when serial criminal Edwin Wright bashed her in the head — just a few months after his arrest for assaulting a child . . . and rapid release because his charges weren’t “bailable.”
Other times, Cuomo resorts to other lies, insisting for example that the (all-powerful?) state Legislature warped his noble vision: He had wanted “judicial discretion” in there, but lawmakers overrode him.
Balderdash!
No-bail passed as part of the state budget, which is assembled in weeks of negotiations and compromise; if the governor (easily the most powerful of the “three men in a room” that cut the final deal) really wanted something, he could get — albeit at the expense of something else he wanted.
Not to mention that this noble son of Mario and Matilda called for cashless bail long before he signed it into law.
In his 2019 “Justice Agenda” — right after the part where he demanded that we “legalize the adult use of recreational marijuana” — Cuomo thundered, “Let’s end the injustice in our criminal justice system. The first step is to replace the cash bail system. . . . We need to take the cash bail system and end it once and for all.”
Sure doesn’t sound like anything was forced down his throat. He may have been rushing to embrace an idea then popular on the left as he eyed a potential run for the 2020 Democratic nomination, but he absolutely took the ball and ran with it.
Indeed, the year before, Cuomo rhymed: “If you can’t make the bail, you sit in jail” (channeling his inner Beatnik); “if you can make the bail, you get out. That’s not justice.”
Is it so hard to say, “I was wrong; I’ve changed my mind after seeing how this worked out”?
It is for Andrew Cuomo, no matter how much he has to insist on an endless series of “alternative facts” now that he wants to paint himself as the responsible (ha!) mayoral alternative to Zohran Mamdani.
Yes, Mamdani is even worse on crime because he actually believes all magic thinking behind these lunatic ‘”reforms.”
Cuomo only backed it because he thought it served his own ambitions, whether his White House hopes or as something he could give the hard left in an unholy trade for some piece of pork or grant of new gubernatorial power.
But that he was happy to make such trades, sacrificing the best interests of law-abiding New Yorkers, sure doesn’t make him any kind of “public safety” candidate now.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
