Gov. Kathy Hochul appears to have put New York’s controversial bail reform law on the back burner following her electoral win over tough-on-crime challenger Lee Zeldin — despite bipartisan calls for action.
During the campaign, Hochul said she was “willing to revisit” the crucial public safety issue when state lawmakers reconvene in January. She also vowed to start fixing New York “first thing tomorrow” as voters went to the polls.
But her remarks since the Nov. 8 election have prompted speculation that Hochul will kick the can even further and fold such issues as bail reform, judicial discretion and “Raise the Age” into negotiations over the annual state budget due April 1.
“They certainly love to hide things like this in the budget,” state Sen. George Borrello (R-Chautauqua) said of Hochul and other leading Democrats.
“But for every day that goes by, more victims are senselessly created as a result of their deadly policy — so it needs to be addressed long before then.”
Assembly Minority Leader Will Barclay (R-Fulton) also said he expected Hochul to signal her intentions when she outlines her budget priorities in the governor’s annual January speech to the Legislature.
“I think one big indicator will be the governor’s State of the State [address],” he said.
The governor has big leverage in the state budget process over lawmakers, with a two-thirds majority ultimately needed to override gubernatorial resistance to policy proposals.
New York’s governor controls the budget process by proposing bills that lawmakers can vote against but can’t change.
Adding unrelated legislation to the budget package also gives legislators political cover to vote in favor of controversial measures by letting them claim they needed to approve spending on education and other items.
Zeldin, an outgoing Republican House member from Long Island, made opposition to bail reform a centerpiece of his surprisingly strong race against Hochul.
The conservative pol’s success in slashing Hochul’s lead in the polls panicked Democrats so much that President Biden, former President Bill Clinton and others were dispatched to stump for her in the closing days of the campaign.
Hochul wound up beating Zeldin 53%-47% in a state where registered Democrats outnumber their GOP counterparts by more than 2-to-1.
By contrast, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo was reelected 60%-36% in 2018 before resigning last year to avoid impeachment over multiple scandals including the alleged groping, unwanted kissing or harassment of 11 women and covering up the true number of nursing home deaths from COVID-19, all of which he denies.
Borrello blamed Hochul’s “thin margin of victory” on voter “discontent” with Hochul’s support for “far-left policies, first and foremost being bail reform.”
Former Democratic Nassau County Executive Laura Curran — who was ousted last year in a backlash against bail reform — also said during a recent podcast that her party should have embraced Mayor Eric Adams’ call to let judges lock up defendants they deem threats to public safety.
“Democrats would have been smart to have allowed judges to consider dangerousness,” she said. “If they had made that adjustment, I think it would have been very, very helpful.”
Assemblyman Simcha Eichenstein (D-Brooklyn) told The Post that New York’s bail law could be toughed in ways that don’t “take us back to the old system that was discriminatory.”
“New Yorkers are not OK with the direction we are heading as it relates to crime and I think we should take note of that,” he said. “There’s no shame in reforming bail reform.”
But both Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-The Bronx) and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D-Yonkers) have been steadfastly opposed to any rollbacks, saying that data doesn’t show bail reform is responsible for rising crime.
“We are very interested in, obviously, that victims of crime are given their proper redress but also we don’t want to again criminalize people for being poor,” Stewart-Cousins told Spectrum News on Tuesday night.
During a post-election trip to the annual SOMOS political conference in Puerto Rico, Hochul was vague on her plans for bail reform beyond saying she wanted New Yorkers to have “the sense of safety that they deserve.”
“I will take the time with my team, and people in [the Division of] Criminal Justice Services, my advisers and my legal team to come up with any way we think we can improve public safety,” she said.
A Hochul spokesperson declined to comment beyond Hochul’s previous remarks.
