Gov. Kathy Hochul heads into her reelection year aiming to make the best of her dismal record — while simultaneously seeking to placate the far left and co-opt Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s backers by caving to his demands, even if hurts New Yorkers.
Hope for the best, New York — but brace for the worst.
Ever since becoming the Empire State’s latest “accidental governor” (not even then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who tapped her as lieutenant gov, ever dreamed she’d wind up in his seat), Hochul has repeatedly proven she’s got less backbone than a jellyfish.
Over her 4½ years as the state’s chief executive, she’s endlessly kowtowed to the left and shifted with the political winds.
Even before Mamdani cleared a (razor thin) majority of votes in November, Hochul raced to jump on his bandwagon and endorse him — plainly deciding that her own political future depends on compromise (at least!) with his toxic agenda of de-policing, antisemitism, higher taxes and assorted socialist fancies.
That fits her record: The few times she’s dared to confront progressives in the Legislature, she’s done it feebly — rarely getting more than a few crumbs.
One of her biggest embarrassments came when she let progressive lawmakers run roughshod in torpedoing Hector LaSalle, her nominee to become the state’s chief judge — the first time a New York governor’s nomination for that job was shot down.
It wouldn’t be her only humiliation.
Hochul was too timid to push hard to fix Albany’s disastrous criminal-justice reforms, which fueled a crime spike (major felonies in the city are still 25% higher than before cashless bail began in 2020) and forced shopkeepers to lock toothpaste behind display windows.
Eventually, she got only modest changes through the Legislature: a few minor tweaks to the no-bail law and the rules for “discovery” (which govern prosecutors’ evidence-gathering and -sharing).
Today, New York still remains the only state that bans judges from considering a defendant’s danger to the community when determining bail.
The Raise the Age law continues to destroy teen lives in record numbers.
And defendants are released every day just hours after they’re arrested, in the case of most crimes.
Hochul also made little headway in lifting the cap on public charter schools, even though they consistently blow away traditional schools in the percentage of kids who meet proficiency standards.
Talk about affordability! Charters are the only way many lower-income kids can afford to get a decent education, but Hochul has effectively given up on challenging anti-charter Democrats to lift the cap, let alone scrap it.
Nor has she said much about the horrific state of New York public schools generally: Nearly half the kids aren’t “proficient” in math and English.
True, the state’s Constitution oddly assigns most responsibility for schools to the Board of Regents, whose members are chosen by the Democratic-controlled Legislature.
But if Hochul truly cared about kids’ education, she’d not only have pressed harder to get the charter cap scrapped, but also made a huge stink about the pathetic state of the regular public-school system.
But apparently she’s fine with half the state’s kids flunking.
Her record on that system, in which the only sure way to escape lousy public schools is to pay for better private ones, is just one example of what makes her calls for “affordability” so laughable.
Consider, too: She’s suddenly stepping back (a bit) from her budget-busting green agenda, now that the costs are starting to take a major bite out of voters’ pocketbooks.
But make no mistake: The added dollars are largely her fault; she could’ve retreated years ago, and moved to scrap the whole “zero emissions” plan rather than merely delay it.
Instead, it took the coming election, and warnings of possible blackouts this summer, to get her just to lift a finger.
So now she’s putting off a program that slaps companies that exceed emissions limits, and suspending the state’s all-electric buildings law as well.
She also OK’d a key gas pipeline and claims she’s now for an “all-of-the-above” strategy — yet she leaves out several energy sources and won’t even mention the word “fracking,” though allowing that perfectly safe drilling method would be a real economic boon to the gas-rich Southern Tier and a boost (via cheaper energy) to the whole state.
Nor is she scrapping her Sustainable Future Program, a boondoggle burning $1 billion on “alternative energy.”
As for New York’s fanciful zero-emission goals, she admits the state won’t meet imminent deadlines but remains in denial about the impossibility of meeting them any decade soon without tanking local economies.
Once the election is over, count on Hochul to pivot back to her costly climate agenda, just as she similarly “paused” hefty congestion tolls in Manhattan as the 2024 election approached — only to restore them once voting finished.
She’s flip-flopping on taxes, too: After repeatedly vowing not to raise them, Hochul has now hinted about socking corporations again to pay for yet a new entitlement: government-paid child care.
That would be a sop to Mamdani and his “tax the rich” voters.
But companies (those that don’t flee the state altogether, taking jobs and tax revenue with them) will only raise their prices to cover the cost of those taxes.
How does that promote “affordability”?
Indeed, it’s downright scary to wonder how far the gov will go to pander to Gotham’s new socialist, antisemitic mayor and his fans.
Then again, such a strategy could well backfire: Again, nearly half (49.2%) of New York City’s voters refused to back Mamdani last year; the far less left-leaning statewide electorate would never get behind someone who follows a radical, Mamdani-backed course.
Yet Hochul plainly figures she needs to shift left to avoid falling prey to a lefty primary challenger, or seeing a progressive third-party candidate doom her fall campaign.
Thanks to decades of misguided leadership in Albany, New York’s share of the US population has been plunging for decades — which is why the state now gets only 26 seats in the House, down from 45 as recently as the 1940s.
If Hochul sticks to her spineless, suck-up style of governing, it’ll only get worse.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
