New York Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman will report on the state of the judiciary today, and here’s a preview: He’ll say everything would be hunky-dory, if he only had more money.
Welcome to hard times, Your Honor.
But your case would be more compelling if you’d handle the cash you already get with more care.
Lippman essentially stuck his thumb in Gov. Cuomo’s eye — budgetarily speaking. The new governor asked for restraint, and the jurist said, “Maybe for thee but certainly not for me.”
Cuomo laid a 10 percent cut on state-agency spending in the budget he proposed Feb. 1 — while Lippman is demanding, and will get, a 5 percent increase in his.
He’ll get it because, as is the American custom, the judiciary is an independent branch of government, and therefore pretty much immune to legislative and executive budget-cutting.
But that’s all the more reason for a chief judge to practice self-restraint.
Yet judicial spending since Lippman took office in 2009 is up 12.7 percent — against 1.2 percent inflation.
And it’s up 28.8 percent over the last five years — compared to an inflation rate of just 11.4 percent.
Meanwhile, here’s a couple of nuggets not likely to be found in Lippman’s remarks today:
* As The Post reported last week, Lippman & Co. are spending more than $23 million to convert an old Albany office building into, among other things, luxury suites for Court of Appeals justices. They’re in town a scant 60-odd days a year, but they won’t have to bother with hotel reservations.
* And speaking of out-of-town travel, The Post reported yesterday that Lippman himself is developing a taste for junkets — having decamped to Vail and the Virgin Islands most recently.
New Yorkers expect shared sacrifice, which goes a long way to explaining Cuomo’s popularity — as outlined above.
They certainly are not getting it from Jonathan Lippman — nor, we suspect, will there be any meaningful commitment to it in today’s speech.
But it won’t want for whining.