NEW YORK (WCBS 880) – One of the state Senate’s longest-serving Democrats now supports reevaluating Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s emergency powers.
Last March, lawmakers granted Cuomo some extraordinary latitude to respond to the pandemic, allowing him to bypass the normal legislative process to create and suspend laws on his own.
Republicans and a progressive faction of Democrats have been calling for those powers to be rescinded for months.
But now state Sen. Liz Krueger is calling for Cuomo’s broad authority to be reevaluated, signaling some potentially significant pushback from the governor’s own party.
Krueger also said in a statement to NY State of Politics that the governor’s office should face oversight hearings around its response to the pandemic, particularly around state Attorney General Letitia James’ report about an alleged undercounting of nursing home deaths and a recent New York Times article detailing several top officials who have quit Cuomo’s Health Department.
“Over the course of the last year I have stood by the Legislature's decision to give the Governor extraordinary emergency powers because I believed rapid decisions would have to be made on behalf of the people of our state,” Krueger told NY State of Politics, in part. “Unfortunately, based on discoveries from the last few days regarding the intentional underreporting of deaths of nursing home residents throughout the state and the mass exodus of the state's public health experts from their jobs, I believe the legislature should conduct oversight hearings and re-evaluate the continued use of such broad emergency powers by the Executive.”
The governor’s office is pushing back. In a statement, Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Cuomo, said in part: “The governor's executive power is very limited. Any executive order by the Governor can be easily overridden by a simple majority of the legislature.”