June 15, 2023

Tomorrow afternoon, the NYS Council and our colleague associations that led this year’s fight for OMIG Audit Reform will meet with Assemblywoman Amy Paulin (the Assembly bill sponsor and Chair of the Assembly Health Committee) to discuss A6813.  As you know, the Assembly failed to move the bill through the Ways and Means Committee and to the floor for an up or down vote before departing Albany last Saturday.  Unfortunately (as of today) it does not appear the bill will get a spot on the agenda when the Assembly returns to Albany to finish up the work they didn’t get done before departing Albany last week.  The Assembly is expected back on Tuesday and Wednesday next week.    

To this point, Assembly leaders have told us they will take up this issue during 2024 budget negotiations. This is an extremely disappointing outcome, and there is no denying that inaction enables the continued ability of OMIG to generate funds for the state budget over the needs of Medicaid providers and the individuals they serve.  

As you may recall,  last year the Governor vetoed the prior version of the OMIG Reform bill in December, despite both houses of the legislature having passed it unanimously earlier in the year.  Below is an interesting article that considers the current power of Democrats in Albany, including their ability to override vetoes. 

Democrats have veto-proof supermajorities in Albany. They aren’t using their power.

A total of 221 vetoes on non-budget bills have been issued since Democrats assumed the supermajority at the beginning of 2021.

BY: BILL MAHONEY | 06/14/2023 03:51 PM EDT, POLITICO

ALBANY, N.Y. — State Senate Democrats were clear when they campaigned to grow their new majority in 2020 that they wanted the 42 seats needed to give their conference a veto-proof supermajority.

“If you have the opportunity to pass bills which you actually know are going to remain law, it’s a good thing,” Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins said at the time.

Democrats succeeded and won 43 seats that year. And coupled with the Assembly, where the party has had at least two-thirds of the chamber’s seats for all but two years since 2002, Democrats became the first party with enough seats in the Legislature to unilaterally override a gubernatorial veto since Thomas Dewey’s tenure in the 1950s.

But as the end of the third session of Albany’s new status quo nears, one thing has yet to happen: The Legislature hasn’t taken a single vote to override a governor’s veto.

A total of 221 vetoes on non-budget bills have been issued since Democrats assumed the supermajority at the beginning of 2021. Each of these has come from Gov. Kathy Hochul, who assumed office in August of that year.

The Legislature had the votes to override 209 of them, or 95 percent, a review of the budget bills by POLITICO showed. Each of the 209 passed with at least 100 votes in the Assembly and 42 in the Senate, enough to override a veto if the bills were brought back to the chamber.

And seven of the remaining 12 had good chances as well, with the bills falling short of supermajority support by just a vote or two when a few members were absent.

For most of the vetoed bills, gaining the votes for an override would have likely easy: 87 of the vetoed bills passed both chambers unanimously while 146 of them had 10 or fewer no votes in the two chambers combined.

Democrats defended their decision to not use their relatively newfound power.

“Sometimes the value of a supermajority is in the possibility of a veto override, not the actual exercise of it,” said Senate Deputy Leader Mike Gianaris. “When everyone involved knows that you can do it, that effects negotiations, that effects the outcome without exercising the threat.”

The clearest example of that came when lawmakers passed a June 2021 bill to fund any impeachment trials that might occur over the next year. With an override potential looming and Gov. Andrew Cuomo already reeling from scandals, he begrudgingly signed the bill —certainly knowing that an override to a veto loomed.

There have been other bills, however, where it’s been clear that a supermajority isn’t enough to force an issue. That was the case with legislators’ decision last week to not vote on a housing package before wrapping up their annual session.

A housing bill lacking Hochul’s support, such as tenant protections known as “good cause,” would have also likely lacked the support of some of the more moderate legislative Democrats, and the majorities didn’t have enough votes to spare to still hit the two-thirds thresholds.

Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie issued a statement when a housing deal was abandoned that didn’t even acknowledge the possibility of an override on the subject: “It takes all three parties — the Senate, the Assembly and the governor — in order to enact legislation into law,” they said.

Some groups, however, urged lawmakers to pass their own housing plan and force Hochul to either sign it or veto it.

“The supermajority in the Legislature had an opportunity to respond to this moment of crisis by daring the governor to veto a bill,” Housing Justice for All’s campaign coordinator Cea Weaver said in a statement. “While Governor Hochul did everything she could to kill Good Cause over the past year, the choice to bend to her — and the real estate industry — ultimately lies with Carl Heastie and Andrea Stewart-Cousins. Legislative leadership blinked and folded.”

But for most of the vetoed bills, the reason there have not been any override attempts is simply due to the fact that they’re not consequential enough to warrant going to war with a governor.

There might have been unanimous support for proposals like a 2021 bill that would have let West Islip’s school district retroactively fix a paperwork problem with an old bus contract, or one from 2022 to conduct a study on the adequacy of fire services in Caumsett State Park. But for most legislators, these aren’t worth soured relationships.

“It is a complicated set of factors that go into determining the relationship with the executive and when to exercise which powers that we have,” Gianaris said.

“This Senate majority has shown we know exactly how to do it and when to do it, the chief judge battle being the most notable example. We know how to use our leverage when we have it, and at this point, that particular arrow in our quiver has not had to be shot. But one day it might.”

Neither chamber has taken a veto override vote since 2018.

And that wasn’t a real two-house attempt: The Republicans who controlled the Senate at the time brought up a vetoed Democratic bill in an attempt to throw Hochul, then the lieutenant governor, for a loop when she was presiding over the chamber while members were bickering over an abortion measure.

The last serious attempt at an override came when lawmakers failed to override then-Gov. David Paterson’s veto of a 2010 ethics bill.

Legislative leaders flexed their influence in 2006 when they overrode more than 200 of then-Gov. George Pataki’s budget vetoes on subjects such as child tax credits and a decade earlier on pay for NYPD officers.

Outside of Pataki’s tenure, the only successful override in Albany since the current rules were established in 1873 was on a 1976 bill on school aid authored by then-Assemblymember Leonard Stavisky, whose wife, Toby Ann, is now a long-time state senator.