Angry New Yorker

Tuesday, August 03, 2004
 
We've climbed our soapbox time and again here to highlight the perverse nature of New York State's current government, which as if anyone needed more evidence to detail its Keystone Cops quality, was just exoriated in a report from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School. The report, LEGISLATIVE PROCESS:AN EVALUATION AND BLUEPRINT FOR REFORM, available at http://www.brennancenter.org/programs/downloads/albanyreform_finalreport.pdf, starkly concludes:

New York State’s legislative process is broken. * * * Neither the U.S.Congress
nor any other state legislature so systematically limits the roles played by
rank-and-file legislators and members of the public in the legislative process."

Despite the desperate state of NYS' legislature, the report positively
notes "[f]ortunately, many of the shortcomings of the current system can be
remedied without new legislation or constitutional amendments. Mere changes
in the rules of the Senate and Assembly would make a significant difference."
The big question is will anything change in Albany in the near future? We hope so, and we urge all of you to deluge the representatives, the press and your neighbors to press for reform. Otherwise Iraq will shortly, ironically, have more democracy than the Empire State.


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