Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s last-ditch ef fort today to derail Gov. Paterson’s budget cuts and reform agenda may fall victim to nervous Senate Democrats, who fear a voter backlash, sources said late yesterday.
Silver (D-Manhattan) — desperate to stop Paterson’s effort to use a threatened government shutdown to force a cut to education aid, a cap on local property taxes, wine sales in grocery stores, and to permit some CUNY and SUNY campuses to set tuition rates — will try to ram through legislation funding state government and hiking education spending but killing the tax cap and the other proposals.
“This would be a big win for Shelly, and it could be a big loss for the Senate Democrats in November,” said a nervous Senate Democratic aide.
Silver’s defiant move is also aimed at ending Paterson’s potent and novel use of the budget “extender” bills that have funded government since the April 1 budget deadline was missed to undermine the often recalcitrant Legislature’s power.
Paterson’s action has forced lawmakers to choose politically unpalatable, fiscally necessary actions or be responsible for shutting down the state and grant unexpectedly strong powers to the governor’s office at the expense of the Legislature and Silver.
“Shelly is enraged over what Paterson has done, using the extenders to basically neutralize legislative input, and he’s seeking to restore the balance of power in the Legislature’s favor,” said a source close to Silver.
While the Senate’s weak Democratic leader, John Sampson (D-Brooklyn), has endorsed Silver’s power play, several of Sampson’s Democratic colleagues may not go along.
These include deputy leader Jeff Klein of The Bronx, Craig Johnson of Nassau County and William Stachowski of Buffalo, among the moderates in a heavily liberal Democratic conference, sources said.
Sampson hasn’t returned at least some calls from nervous Democrats, it was learned.
The Democrats fear that killing Paterson’s property-tax cap and fiscal-austerity measures will hurt them politically, costing them their mere one-vote majority in the Senate in the November balloting.
“I think we’ll get killed with the public if we go with this [the Silver] plan,” was how an aide to a wavering Democratic senator put it.
Just how badly relations have deteriorated between Paterson and the leaders was made clear early Friday night at the private budget meeting held at the governor’s office in Manhattan.
Through all the back and forth, neither Silver nor Sampson had the courtesy to tell Paterson that within hours they would be submitting the budget bills that are designed to end-run the governor.
“So at the very time they claimed to his face that they wanted to work with him, they were working behind his back to undermine him,” said a source close to the Paterson administration.
Legislative leaders, however, insisted it was Paterson who sought to deceive them.
“The governor publicly announced Friday that he had submitted his [budget] extender bill but, in fact, he never did, and he still hasn’t,” said a senior legislative aide.