Andrew Cuomo’s resignation as governor of New York could be seen as surprising only through the prism of his combative persona, which made it seem inconceivable. The reality, as I observed yesterday, was this: “We are nearing checkmate. It is just a matter of how long it will take Cuomo to see it.”
It didn’t take long. He was out of options. We’ve noted repeatedly that, while the state assembly’s impeachment investigation was a meandering sham, being slow-walked by Cuomo’s dwindling faction of allies so that he’d have the time he needed to survive, the only thing that could change the dynamic was the sexual-harassment investigation being conducted by attorney general Letitia James — a likely aspirant for the governor’s job and a leader of the progressive Democratic faction that is hostile to Cuomo and the Democratic establishment.
James’s report, released last Tuesday, could not possibly have dropped the hammer harder. It galvanized the moribund impeachment probe.
Within hours of the report’s issuance, President Biden called for Cuomo’s resignation. That instantly prompted assembly speaker Carl Heastie’s volte face. Heastie was Cuomo’s most critical ally in the legislature. When he echoed the president’s assessment that the governor was no longer fit for the job, it signaled that the Democratic establishment had surrendered to the progressives: They were prepared to impeach Cuomo.
Once that was decided, it was no longer in their interests to drag things out. One minute, impeachment was going nowhere; the next minute, it seemed, the assembly was directing Cuomo to pull his defense together and submit it pronto — by close of business Friday. That, as the governor’s lawyer Rita Glavin complained this morning, was the simulacrum of due process. In truth, it meant the political decision to impeach and remove had been made. And impeachment is political, not legal.
Cuomo’s right hand, Melissa DeRosa, bowed out on Sunday night. I recounted yesterday that she has her own potential legal problems to worry about. But she’d have hung in there if Cuomo’s prospects for survival were detectable. They weren’t.
The game was already over. The only question was how many moves Cuomo would play out before conceding. Here, another quirk of New York law was crucial.
Though the assembly was clearly going to impeach Cuomo in a matter of weeks, New York impeachment law is vague. There was a good chance the governor could have delayed his removal trial in the state senate by tying things up in the courts, where he has appointed many of the state judges. But the problem was this: He wasn’t going to be governor — not really.
New York law provides that a governor is suspended upon being impeached by the assembly. Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul was going to be acting governor. Cuomo was going to be . . . a mere litigant. He’d be fighting in court, but he would not be wielding gubernatorial powers — the powers he habitually used to pressure and intimidate people until he got his way.
Cuomo would be Samson with a crew cut.
The Democratic Party had cut him off. And not just him. For Cuomo staffers who want to have a future in Democratic politics, there was no percentage in sticking with the boss. DeRosa was not going to be alone in heading for the exits. Moreover, the work of the executive branch was paralyzed. Cuomo’s micro-managerial style is to rule with an iron fist, mainly through DeRosa. With the governor holed up in the mansion futilely searching for a way forward, and with his extraordinarily hands-on top aide bowing out, the state government has been imploding.
Meantime, although sexual-harassment allegations have gotten all the attention for a week, let’s not forget that this was the second time James dropped a bomb on the governor. It was her earlier report on Cuomo’s suppression of his administration’s recklessness regarding COVID-positive nursing-home patients that got the impeachment ball rolling several months ago. Sexual harassment finally ignited the impeachment push, but Cuomo was not going to be impeached on sexual harassment alone.
When it got down to brass tacks, the nursing-home order, the thousands of preventable deaths, the cover-up, and the mind-blowing hubris of Cuomo’s writing a self-laudatory memoir of his handling of the crisis he’d botched — not to mention illegally inducing state employees to work on the book and pocketing a lucrative advance — were going to be central to the impeachment case.
Cuomo has no good answers on these matters. The media-Democrat complex protected him from being held accountable for months because it had lionized him as the Anti-Trump. Once Trump was gone, Cuomo had outlived his usefulness.
Finally, as I related yesterday, we had the weekend theater of a high-visibility press conference conducted by the Albany County sheriff to announce the unremarkable fact that a complainant — whom the sheriff repeatedly described as “the victim” — had filed a police report. Brittany Commisso’s groping allegation may be no more than a misdemeanor under New York penal law, and it is anything but clear that Cuomo, who vigorously denies the allegation, will actually be charged. But a misdemeanor is still a crime.
Remember the first Trump impeachment? For months, Democrats searched in vain for a statutory crime that they could plausibly fit to President Trump’s Ukrainian escapade: the withholding of congressionally appropriated aide from a foreign country to pressure that country to investigate his political rival. Democrats were desperate on this score because they understood that misconduct that rises to the level of a crime — at least if it’s a crime the public can easily grasp — injects an impeachment push with added urgency and credibility. The president wasn’t going to be impeached and removed over vague “abuse of power.”
That is the salience of the Commisso allegation. As a criminal-justice case, it is probably of minimal significance. But for the impeachment case, it was a bombshell. It enabled those who most want Cuomo out to present the impeachment effort as an imperative to wrest power from an abusive governor now under formal law-enforcement investigation for a sexual-assault crime.
Andrew Cuomo was out of allies, ostracized by his party, being abandoned by his staff, and not just out of time but at that turning point where dragging things out was becoming the path not to survival but to its opposite — more and more self-inflicted damage. It was time for the governor to go.
At noon today, he went.