|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
By: Benyamin Davidsons
On Monday, former New York State governor Andrew Cuomo was handed a significant victory when a NY judge deemed it “unconstitutional” for the state ethics panel to take away $5 million in profits from his controversial COVID book deal.
As reported by the NY Post, the newly formed state Commission on Ethics and Lobbying In Government had been probing the circumstances behind Cuomo’s 2020 memoir “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic”. The ethics watchdog group, which was created by Gov. Kathy Hochul to replace the Joint Commission on Public Ethics (which had been criticized for being too loyal to Cuomo), sought to claw back the profits that the ex-governor made on the book.
The group claimed that the former governor used top executive staff and other government workers to prepare the book. Cuomo, who resigned in disgrace in 2021 after being accused of sexual misconduct by a dozen women, filed suit in April in Albany state court hoping to delegitimize the independent panel. In his suit, Cuomo claimed that the commission is not authorized to seize his literary profits, and is not even authorized to exist, because it lacks sufficient government oversight. He also insisted that staffers volunteered on his book on their own time, and therefore did not violate any ethics rules.
On Monday, Albany Supreme Court Justice Thomas Marcelle sided with Cuomo, in saying that the ethics watchdog is an “unsanctioned fourth branch of government”. In his bombshell 25-page decision, the judge called the panel an illegal group made up of unelected “urban academics,” saying they shouldn’t have the power to exist. “If the people should choose to be governed by those who are not politically accountable to them or their Governor, who swear no oath of allegiance to them, and who come as a class composed of urban academics and who are not reflective of the cross-section of the people whom they govern, the people may do so,” Marcelle wrote. “But it is for the people to decide and only the people,” the judge added.
Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi, gloated over the decision. “As we’ve said all along, this was nothing more than an attack by those who abused their government positions unethically and — as the judge ruled today — unconstitutionally for political purposes,” Azzopardi said. “Truth and reason won, mob rule lost today,” Azzopardi added. Cuomo has long denied any wrongdoing related to his lucrative $5.1 million deal with Penguin Books to produce the 309-page book lauding his response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The new ethics commission’s status is far from settled, however. In a previous ruling in February, a different state judge, Justice Joseph Lamendola, had found that the state constitution does allow for the creation of the new panel, per the Post. The ethics panel has 11 members including the chair, Frederick Davie, who is also a top administrator at Morningside Heights’ Union Theological Seminar. In a joint statement, Davie and Sanford Berland, the commission’s executive director, said they are reviewing “all options” to respond to Monday’s ruling. “New Yorkers have the right to an ethics commission that is truly independent and fully empowered to administer and enforce the state’s ethics and lobbying laws objectively,” Davie and Berland wrote.
