Trump senses the marketplace and rides the wave. He sees where the public is marching, runs to the front of the parade, and bangs the drum the loudest. We have reached a point where people don’t even remember what government has accomplished. Generations have come and gone since government won wars, produced the GI Bill of Rights, passed Social Security and Medicare, built bridges and a national highway system, and enacted the Civil Rights Act.
If you don’t believe government is capable of performing, you don’t bother electing people who can make it perform. Trump never promised any positive performance. He never laid out an affirmative goal, mobilized public support, or developed the government that could achieve it. House Speaker Sam Rayburn used to say, “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.” He was right. Getting government to actually deliver a quality product on time is no small feat. Passing a new piece of legislation is not easy. Trying to move government quickly or precisely is like driving a tractor trailer on a race course. Its design is the obstacle. That does not mean it’s impossible, but it is difficult.
I know the challenge well. I’ve spent much time in the bowels of the beast. As a young man frustrated with government’s lack of performance, even when my father was governor, I set up a nonprofit to provide housing for the homeless and get them out of welfare hotels. I spent eight years at HUD, the most dysfunctional of all the federal agencies. I’ve spent ten years as governor. I know that government can make a difference. I also know all too well how hard it is, how much skill and effort it takes, and that government is only as strong and effective as the level of public support and unity it inspires.
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IN MARCH THE state legislature, which normally meets from January to June and recesses for the remainder of the year, was still in session. The key legislative action is normally the passage of the budget by April 1, but for years the state legislature never actually passed the budget “on time.” It became a joke and a symbol of government dysfunction.
The truth is, the budget is hard to pass because it allocates every dollar of the state’s $175 billion. The two houses of the legislature have their own priorities, and each region of the state has competing priorities. Upstate New York and downstate New York are very different places. In years past, it was such a difficult equation to solve that the governor and the legislative leaders gave up. It was not unlike the federal government, which doesn’t even try to pass a budget anymore and just rolls forward with what they call continuing resolutions, which are slight modifications to the existing budget.
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IN THE PRECEDING thirty years, governors had passed an on-time budget only seven times. Batting .233 is barely acceptable in baseball but certainly not in government. When I took office, I took it as a personal mission to get it done, to demonstrate government credibility. We did that. I’ve passed an on-time budget every year of my administration, the first time one administration has done this in more than fifty years. Having said that, I acknowledge that getting a significant piece of legislation passed is still no small feat. Now, with the first “hot-spot cluster” in the country, we needed to pass a plan for how the state would handle the COVID crisis.
The governor’s legal power to handle a “disaster” was actually very limited and amounted to basically expedited procurement. It’s a law that was constructed in a different time for different situations. I told the legislature that this situation would dwarf anything we had seen in New York, including the devastation wrought by Superstorm Sandy in 2012 and the two terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and 2001. I told them that without the legal responsibility to handle the situation, I would not represent to the people of the state that I was in charge. If 213 members of the legislature wanted to manage the COVID situation, God bless them. I wouldn’t take on the responsibility without the authority. I wasn’t bluffing. Any other arrangement would be chaos.
I knew confidence in government in the middle of an emergency was a tall order. What we were attempting to do was virtually impossible. I would not ask the people of the state to trust me if I didn’t know I could deliver. Allowing different local governments to put different policies in place, often inconsistent with surrounding policies, is asking for chaos. To handle the emergency unfolding in front of us, I needed the authority to make decisions for the welfare of the entire state.
Many politicians think they want control, but they don’t really want the responsibility that comes with it. They do, however, want control of the microphone. I have seen too many situations where a politician will adopt a different policy from a neighboring jurisdiction just to be different. No one gets a headline by saying, “We’re doing the same thing as everyone else.” I have made this mistake myself before. But the virus does not respect city or county boundaries or even state boundaries. We were watching the situation unfold in California with caution as different cities and counties took different actions, with some declaring emergencies and restrictions and others not, while a confused public tried to understand which path was correct.
The legislative proposal we put forth accomplished two goals: fund coronavirus as a statewide emergency and give the governor power to set statewide policy. It was obvious to me that this was the only way to proceed. But it would not be easy with the legislature, where politics often drive lawmakers to “bring
