ALBANY — After years of watch ing Mayor Bloomberg bankroll Republican control of the Senate, hearing his high-handed lectures on congestion pricing and seeing him back a primary against one of their own, Senate Democrats unexpectedly got their chance to take revenge.
And they did so with a vengeance, killing — at least for now — mayoral control of the schools, the centerpiece accomplishment of the mayor’s two terms in office.
The irony is that it was the June 8 coup attempt by Bloomberg’s longtime GOP allies that cleared the way for a block of largely black and Hispanic city Democratic senators to derail what the mayor wanted most from this year’s legislative session.
“They see Bloomberg as a white Manhattan billionaire who thinks he can boss everyone around and they don’t like it,” said a top Senate Democrat.
Had the GOP coup succeeded, Bloomberg, who had the backing of a sizable number of Democrats, today would have unquestioned control of city schools.
The coup’s failure — which left the Senate split 31-31 between Democrats and Republicans with both sides claiming their own presiding officer — made Brooklyn Sen. John Sampson the new Democratic leader. He, with the agreement of many of his supporters, just happens to be a leading foe of mayoral control.
As the new leader, Sampson was especially resentful of what Democrats saw as heavy-handed efforts by Bloomberg to have the Senate rubber-stamp a mayoral-control extender law passed by the Assembly.
With the Senate deadlocked and fighting over a presiding officer, a vote on school governance was still possible if the warring sides would agree to do it. But Sampson said “no thanks.”
And just to reinforce the point, Democrats, meeting in what may or may not have been a legal session, did take up a symbolic substitute vote: on Bloomberg’s $700 million-plus sales-tax increase.
Fourteen of the 31 Democrats voted “nay,” defeating the measure. It was another strong message to Bloomberg, just in case killing mayoral control wasn’t enough to make the point.