The Gridlock Solution?
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- July
- 6
Assemblyman Michael Gianaris, D-Queens, and good-government groups this morning said they found a solution to the Senate gridlock: the state Constitution allows the governor to appoint a lieutenant governor, who would be able to break the tie.
They said that the Public Officers Law gives Gov. David Paterson the power to appoint a lieutenant governor who can serve until next year’s elections. The position has been vacant since Paterson left it to take over for Eliot Spitzer in March 2008.
They wrote a letter to Paterson saying that Section 43 of the Public Officers Law applies in this situation and “is not precluded by the Constitutional mandate that the Temporary President of the Senate shall perform the duties of the Lt. Governor during a vacancy.”
Public Officer Law Section 43 states ” [i]f a vacancy shall occur, otherwise than by expiration of term, with no provision of law for filling the same, if the office be elective, the governor shall appoint a person to execute the duties thereof until the vacancy shall be filled by an election…”
Paterson, speaking this morning on CBS radio, said the law doesn’t allow him to appoint a new lieutenant governor. But then he said he would read the letter and then it’s “a determination that would have to be made.”
Sen. George Winner, R-Elmira, said on Fred Dicker’s radio show this morning that Senate Republicans have studied the issue and determined that the attorney general in 1943 ruled that the governor could not appoint a new lieutenant governor.
But Gianaris said the state’s highest court ruled after the AG’s findings in 1943 that the governor could fill the vacancy.
Here’s the groups’ letter to Paterson.
This entry was posted
on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 11:42 am by Joseph Spector.
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the governor should appoint a lt governor because the language would seem to suggest that he has the power
to do so..if someone wants to challenge it in
court they can take the heat for crippling state
government…
I don’t get it. If this were such an obvious, legal, and workable solution, why wasn’t it proposed or effected over a month ago, or a year ago? Seems to me there was a time in the ever-increasing distant past when at least some of our leaders, instead of being blind partisans and ideologues, were straight-talking and decisive.
the governor has doubts about whether he can do it
constitutionally but frankly someone has got to
take a stand