Shortly after 2:30 P.M. on February 9, 2011, the now defunct Web website Gawker published an article about Christopher Lee, a Republican congressman from western New York State. In response to a Craigslist personals advert, which was posted by a thirty-four-year-old authorities worker from Maryland, Lee had described himself, by e-mail, as “a very fit fun classy guy,” lied about being divorced (he was married, with one baby), shaved seven years off his age (he was forty-six however stated that he was thirty-nine), and despatched a photograph of himself shirtless and coquettishly flexing a bicep. Even Gawker conceded that Lee’s actions had been “relatively banal.” Yet, by 6:13 P.M. that very same day, Lee had resigned from his seat in the House of Representatives. “I regret the harm that my actions have caused my family, my staff and my constituents,” he stated in an announcement. “I deeply and sincerely apologize to them all.”
A particular election was quickly held to fill Lee’s seat in Congress. Kathy Hochul, a Democratic county clerk from Erie County, received an upset victory. (”When she was in the auto bureau in Buffalo, she did so much with the license plates,” one voter told the Times.) Hochul served an unmemorable half-term in the House, didn’t win reëlection, and bounced into an government job at M&T Bank Corporation. The stint in Washington raised her profile such that, in 2014, she was tapped to be Governor Andrew Cuomo’s working mate in his first bid for reëlection. As the lieutenant governor of New York, she is second in line to Cuomo, who now faces a quantity of accusations, together with—however not restricted to—undesirable groping and kissing of aides, the suppression of knowledge on COVID-19 deaths in nursing properties, and utilizing state staff to assist write a triumphalist and personally profitable guide about his pandemic response. If Cuomo have been to resign, Hochul would turn into the governor. The story of her political ascent would rank amongst the impossible in state historical past.
But regardless of calls from fellow-Democrats in Congress and the New York State legislature for Cuomo to step down, and a number of state and federal investigations into his and his administration’s actions, the Governor just isn’t resigning. After a decade as the strongest determine in the state, he has handled the overlapping scandals he’s going through as yet one more problem positioned in entrance of him, not so completely different from a tax-revenue shortfall or a hurricane. And, in the previous few weeks, as he’s negotiated a finances with the legislature and minimized his interactions with the press, he’s given each signal of being able to put this unpleasantness behind him. “The nature of being Governor,” Cuomo stated not too long ago, “is there are always multiple situations to deal with.”
In the decade between Lee’s resignation and Cuomo’s present scenario, what counts as a career-ending scandal in American politics has been redefined. Donald Trump, of course, survived a whole time period as President regardless of being accused of sexual assault and of utilizing the Presidency to counterpoint himself, to not point out having a number of shut aides go to jail on a spread of corruption costs—and being impeached twice, the second time on the floor that he incited an insurrectionist mob to storm the Capitol. But it wasn’t simply Trump. In 2015, New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat, was indicted on federal bribery and different corruption costs for allegedly utilizing his workplace to counterpoint a great good friend and donor. Menendez waited out a number of years of authorized proceedings—his costs have been finally dismissed—and stays in the Senate, the place he chairs the Foreign Relations Committee. In 2019, an previous {photograph} from Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s medical-school yearbook surfaced, exhibiting two males, one in blackface, the different carrying Ku Klux Klan robes. Northam, a Democrat, apologized, then retracted his apology and denied that it was he in the photograph. Then he merely caught issues out. Meanwhile, earlier than the public furor about the photograph had even subsided, his lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, was accused of sexual assault. Fairfax denied the accusations. Both Northam and Fairfax stay of their respective workplaces. Fairfax is at the moment working for governor.
In the previous few weeks, as revelations about Cuomo have been nonetheless rising in the New York media, information broke that Matt Gaetz, a Florida congressman and staunch Trumpist, was being investigated by the F.B.I. for doubtlessly violating sex-trafficking legal guidelines. Gaetz has not resigned, both. “I may be a canceled man in some corners. . . . But I hear the millions of Americans who feel forgotten, canceled, ignored, marginalized and targeted,” he tweeted final weekend, attaining new heights in the rhetoric of by no means resigning. “I draw confidence knowing that the silent majority is growing louder every day.”
When Cuomo was the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, his boss, Bill Clinton, refused to resign after being impeached for mendacity about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. But that was a unique period, and, in keeping with current studies, Cuomo considers Northam a extra helpful mannequin. In Virginia, the place the governorship is carefully contested, Northam held on after polls confirmed that Black voters in the state have been sticking with him. In current weeks, Cuomo has held public occasions with distinguished Black neighborhood and political leaders. Early on, his scenario was additionally compared with that of Al Franken, the former Minnesota senator who resigned after a number of ladies got here ahead in 2017, saying that he’d touched them inappropriately in public. In 2019, The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reinvestigated the Franken case and discovered that many of the Democratic senators who known as for Franken to resign now remorse doing so.
One lesson of the Franken case is that there are completely different levels of allegations. Many Democrats bear in mind Franken merely for instance of the danger of resigning too early. But, in 2017, many additionally noticed Franken’s resignation serving a bigger objective: it preserved each the momentum of the nascent #MeToo motion and the Democratic Party’s authority to talk about the points that the motion highlighted. And, though Franken’s buddies and former colleagues in the Senate might now remorse how they handled him, what number of of his former constituents in Minnesota have observed the distinction between having Franken and his substitute, Tina Smith, in the Senate? In Virginia, in the meantime, it was stated that the risk of a Republican takeover of energy in the state stored Democrats from bailing on Northam. Such a risk doesn’t exist in the identical means in New York. The political context of the Cuomo case is extra like Franken’s, however the allegations towards him are way more damning.
For years, Cuomo was usually described as somebody who knew the way to push each button and pull each lever of energy. More current studies have revealed that button-pushing and lever-pulling have been usually euphemisms for getting on the telephone and yelling at folks. Yet Cuomo continues to carry himself out as New York’s indispensable man, at the same time as he bowed to many of his extra progressive antagonists’ priorities on the finances deal he agreed to at the starting of April. The scandals have even bled into Cuomo’s beforehand vaunted pandemic response. Restaurant staff in New York took to joking that each time a lady got here ahead and accused Cuomo of misconduct, the Governor would elevate the indoor-dining-capacity restrict by 5 per cent. County officers reported getting calls from a detailed Cuomo aide who was in cost of vaccine distribution, checking in about their loyalty to the boss.
Cuomo has dismissed the thought of resigning as “anti-democratic.” But why? Apart from a tie-breaking vote in the state Senate, just about the solely accountability the New York state structure provides to the lieutenant governor is to step into the function of governor in the occasion “of the removal of the governor from office or of his or her death or resignation.” In different phrases, the job was designed to supply a democratic treatment for the Governor’s resignation. Cuomo—in a means not so completely different from Gaetz invoking his “silent majority”—is suggesting that, so long as the persons are nonetheless with him, he needn’t resign. The latest polling exhibits that fifty-three per cent of New Yorkers nonetheless approve of the job he’s doing. But public help just isn’t a protection towards accusations—it’s nearer to a justification. And many politicians who’ve made this sort of argument lately absolutely notice that, for their very own sake if nobody else’s, by no means resigning is usually the greatest path out of a scandal.
New York now appears destined for at the least a number of extra months of political uncertainty, as the info of Cuomo’s varied scandals are weighed towards the pursuits of completely different state actors and energy facilities. Just a couple of weeks in the past, information protection about Cuomo couldn’t assist point out that March 12th was the thirteenth anniversary of the resignation of one of Coumo’s predecessors, Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer—who shared Cuomo’s popularity for self-regard and relentlessness—resigned after the revelation that he’d been hiring prostitutes. Resigning wasn’t some noble act. His efficiency of it, standing at a lectern beside his spouse, was so fraught that it partly impressed the long-running tv drama “The Good Wife.” Christopher Lee’s apology assertion, for all we all know, was written by a workers member. But they have been responding to what they believed the second demanded. They made no particular plea about the will of the voters. (How many New Yorkers complained that Spitzer’s resignation was “anti-democratic”?) They have been dwelling in a unique political actuality. If we have been nonetheless dwelling in it, we’d already be speaking about Governor Kathy Hochul.
