The end of the state legislative session in Albany reveals that once again secrecy and opacity were the norm as the public business was conducted out of sight from the public.
As they do every year, Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and the state Senate rushed through dozens of confirmations ranging from Gov. Hochul’s cabinet to judges to persons on important state panels like the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Financial Control Board. It happened so fast that there was no chance for citizens to express support or opposition to any of the nominees and there are no online records of what occured.
The blame goes both to Hochul and the Senate, under Stewart-Cousins. Hochul waits until the very end of the session to send over her nominations. We heard that she had to even keep back some of her intended nominees as the Senate didn’t have enough time to handle the full list. It’s all bad.
Stewart-Cousins and the Senate can’t control when the governor submit nominations, but the upper house can and should do what every other legislative body that confirms appointments does by making the whole process fully transparent and come into compliance with Senate Rule 15, which says: “the Senate shall make available through a searchable and sortable database on the Senate website: records of committees, agendas, votes, minutes, reports, attendance, fiscal notes, and records of the chamber including, active lists, votes, transcripts, calendars, the Senate payroll report and expenditure reports.”
The Senate does publish all matters related to legislation and nonbinding resolutions and proclamations. But there is nothing online regarding any nomination other than who is scheduled to be considered by the Judiciary Committee, which confirms judges, and the Finance Committee, which handles all other nominees. And even that info is very sparse with some nominees “appearing” and others “not appearing” and meetings being “off the floor.”
The U.S. Senate, the New Jersey state Senate and the New York City Council do it right and the New York State Senate should follow their example. When the president/governor/mayor submits a nominee, the nominee’s name and date of nomination is published online. The same for when a committee and the full body takes up a nomination and the result of the votes.
Interested in how the Senate voted on a judge or a MTA board member or a cabinet commissioner? You’d have to take a trip to Albany and look it up in the Senate journal, which also isn’t online.
Reinvent Albany did a comprehensive study, published last December, of the lack of any information regarding state Senate confirmations. The good government group found California, Illinois and Pennsylvania have their Senate confirmation votes online.
Reinvent Albany also said that that part of the problem is slate voting, where a whole list of nominees will be approved at once, but the U.S. Senate now has adopted something similar called en bloc nominations for some lower level office, but the records still have the dates of when each individual nomination was made by the president and when a committee and the full Senate took actions.
And of course, the governor holds back too many nominations until the very end. She should send those names over much earlier. If the public could see that nominations from January were still frozen in May, it would be clear to all who was to blame. All of this is public business and the public has a right to know what is happening, or not happening, with their government.