You can forget about a political divorce between Mayor Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.
The mayor yesterday launched an impassioned defense of his longtime ally and suggested she was getting unfairly pounded for a corruption scandal involving another member of the council.
“I’ve always said that I think Speaker Quinn, who is getting criticized for this, is a person of enormous integrity, and I think she has done an excellent job of running the city,” Bloomberg declared.
“It’s not an easy job, and I think she’d done it well.”
Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, one of Quinn’s opponents for the Democratic mayoral nomination, is calling on her to eliminate discretionary spending by council members after Dan Halloran (R-Queens) was arrested on federal corruption charges.
Bloomberg defended the so-called “member items,” even though they’ve led to the indictments of council members who abused them.
Some political observers speculated that the mayor was preparing to abandon Quinn after she proposed an NYPD inspector general, which he repeatedly attacked as unnecessary and dangerous to the city’s safety.
Soon after that battle, Quinn came out in support of a bill mandating paid sick leave for workers in the city. Bloomberg promised to veto that measure as hurtful to businesses.