By: Daniella Doria
A congressional candidate from New York City is coming out against Governor Hochul’s bail reform policies. Democrat Max Rose is urging the legislature to have an emergency meeting to repeal the no-cash bail laws. Mayor Eric Adams and Representative Lee Zeldin have also urged state lawmakers to toughen the rules that govern bail.
“Mayor Adams is right about this. We need more Democrats to come out and say the bail law needs to be fixed. This has to happen,” Rose told The New York Post.
Rose, a moderate Democrat running for his old congressional seat in Staten Island and southern Brooklyn, is expected to win the Aug. 23 primary against socialist candidate Brittany Ramos DeBarros writes Carl Campanile.
“This is very simple. Gov. Hochul and the legislature need to have a special session to change the bail law, including imposing a `dangerous standard’. Judges need the discretion to detain recidivists. Get it fixed,” Rose said.
Rose continued to say fellow Democrats — such as Hochul, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bronx) and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D-Yonkers) — should be able to “walk and chew gum at the same time,” noting they recently approved laws to stiffen gun restrictions in public areas in response to a US Supreme Court ruling in June.
Campanile writes that the purpose of the law was to prevent low-income criminal defendants from being detained simply because they were too poor to post cash bail. Rose agrees with the premise of the law.
“The problem is we went to the other extreme,” he said, echoing Adams, Zeldin and other critics. “There is no reason we can’t have both public safety and fairness.”
The governor last week stated there has been “no discussion” tied to calling lawmakers back to Albany for a special session.
“What I’d like to point out is that significant changes to the bail laws were made — reforms to the reforms — because I believe that we have to do everything we can in our power to protect public safety,” Hochul said, noting that there needs to be a “consensus” among lawmakers in order for the changes to be approved.
In 2018, Rose defeated incumbent Republican Dan Donovan to win election to New York’s 11th congressional district. The district includes all of Staten Island and parts of southern Brooklyn. In the 2020 election, Rose lost to the Republican nominee, state assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis, NY Times reported.
After losing reelection to Congress, Rose briefly considered running for mayor of New York City in the 2021 election, but ultimately did not enter the race. On January 20, 2021, he was sworn in as special assistant to the United States Secretary of Defense for COVID-19 under President Joe Biden serving in the role for six months
