Gov. Paterson may be calling legislators back to Albany next month to deal with New York’s $2 billion budget gap, but one group already knows it won’t be getting its meal ticket clipped.
That would be the state teachers union (naturally), which last week struck (yet another) gamy deal with Senate Republicans – saying it plans to endorse the full slate of GOP incumbents just as Majority Leader Dean Skelos vowed to oppose budget cuts that would threaten the interests of teachers.
Nice how that works, isn’t it?
Actually, it was entirely predictable.
Skelos, after all, is desperate to cling to his narrow majority – so, given all the other times his conference has caved to union pressure, why stop now?
Support from the New York State United Teachers, moreover, brings not only a massive campaign war chest, but legions of volunteers for phone banks and get-out-the-vote operations.
NYSUT, meanwhile, had initially decided to remain neutral in the race for Senate control – a measure of its anger over GOP backing for Paterson’s now long-stalled property-tax-cap proposal.
But that was before Wall Street froze up – and the gov started talking about the need for major budget cuts to plug the state’s newest fiscal gaps.
Now the teachers really have to defend their share of the loot.
The result: business as usual in Albany.
And that bodes extremely ill for the prospect of making ends meet – at least without massive and corrosive new tax hikes, anyway.
The teachers aren’t the only interests in Albany with strings to pull, of course.
Paterson, wisely, continues to insist that all options remain on the table, including cutting into the education pie.
But whether he can keep them there in the face of a bought-and-paid-for Legislature is another matter.