‘Protecting his $5M book deal’

Metro

By Vaughn Golden

A slough of government reform groups are siding with New York’s ethics commission as it fights off a legal attack from former Gov. Andrew Cuomo seeking to scrap the panel.

Common Cause New York, the New York Public Interest Group, Reinvent Albany, and the New York City Bar Association among others argue that the new ethics commission is constitutional and should be allowed to continue its work.

“The litigation brought by former Gov. Cuomo is about protecting his $5 million book deal,” NYPIRG Executive Director Blair Horner told the Post. “Yet, if the judge’s decision stands, no future governor could ever agree to an independent selection process. New Yorkers need more independence for political appointees, not less.”

The Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government (COELIG) was ordered by a lower court judge to cease investigations earlier this year as the court assessed whether the 2021 law creating the new panel in its entirety is constitutional.

Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo brought the case, in part to stop COELIG from continuing an investigation into a decision to approve his pandemic-era memoir, “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic.”

The Joint Commission on Public Ethics (JCOPE) had ordered Cuomo to return $5 million in proceeds from the memoir, but a separate court reversed that last year.

In that ruling, the judge left the door open for COELIG to pick the case back up.

Albany County Supreme Court Judge Thomas Marcelle sided with Cuomo in his argument that the process for appointing commissioners to COELIG violated the governor’s power under the state constitution.

Under COELIG’s appointment process, legislative leaders, the governor, attorney general and state comptroller each pick members of the commission. Those appointments are then vetted by a panel of deans from New York’s law schools.

The good government groups write in their brief that this appointment process isn’t perfect, but it’s at least constitutional.

“In New York, we’ve had this problem that the people who get into trouble are the top level people, and when they’re making the appointments and they’re their top level people, they’re not going to appoint people who are really vigorous,” Evan Davis, a former counsel to Mario Cuomo told the Post. “The deans I’m sure help, because they know they’ll be vetted and some will be turned down, but it would be better to have people not directly in the zone of protection of ethics laws, be the ones making the appointments.”

Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi bashed the reform groups, arguing they’re part of the system they’re trying to reform.

“Many of these self described ‘reformers’ are themselves registered lobbyists and lobbying on behalf of the entity that regulates them is in itself ethically dubious,” Azzopardi suggested. “But this isn’t the first time these card carrying members of the advocacy industrial complex have waded into hypocrisy when it suits their needs.”

The case against COELIG is set to be heard by an appellate panel in February.

The appeals panel granted a stay on the lower court’s order effectively allowing it to continue investigations while it continues considering the case.