State Sen. Malcolm Smith woke up to FBI agents pounding on his door in Queens on Tuesday morning—and his colleagues in the Independent Democratic Conference woke up to a pounding headache. Federal prosecutors charged Smith with bribing New York City political officials in a quixotic bid to run for mayor on the Republican ballot, the latest in a steady stream of corruption cases flowing out of Albany. The elaborate alleged conspiracy and extortion plot also ensnared Queens Councilman Dan Halloran, two… [More]

By Gerald Benjamin   The brief dustup in the Judiciary Committee regarding the nomination of Jenny Rivera for the Court of Appeals is just the latest piece of evidence that Republicans, with their Independent Democrat coalition partners, are presiding in the Senate but not governing through it. The Committee is comprised of 12 Republicans, 9 Democrats and 2 Independent Democrats; unlike the Senate as a whole, it has a Republican majority. The committee chair, John Bonacic, and some GOP members… [More]

Logic would dictate that even if the Amedore-Tkaczyk contest goes Republican, the Democrats would still hold a 32–31 majority and we would all be on our merry way. Not so fast.… [More]

 * As this year’s legislative session came to a close, the environmental community came up short on solar energy when the Legislature and Gov. Andrew Cuomo failed to push through a bill to boost long-term solar energy investment in the state. “If there was one particular disappointment, it was in the area of solar energy,” Dan Hendrick, a spokesman for the New York League of Conservation Voters, said late last night. “The environmental community has been pushing for a long-term,… [More]

It’s unclear whether the four members of the Independent Democratic Conference — which broke off from the main Senate Democratic conference in early 2011 — will end up being a friend or foe as New York progressives try to win back the state Senate majority. But the powerful Working Families Party, whose left-leaning agenda has been stifled under Senate Republican rule, is nonetheless giving its ballot line to all four IDC members, the labor-backed party confirmed. “WFP evaluates all candidates… [More]

The clock runs down in Albany on campaign finance reform This was supposed to be the year that statewide campaign finance reform finally got passed. After decades of frustration and false stops, good-government groups and other proponents of reform found the ally they had been waiting for in the form of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the state’s powerful and effective chief executive. In his State of the State Address in January, Cuomo delighted longtime advocates for reform by not just publicly… [More]

City & State: What’s the difference between trying to form and push a legislative agenda among a four-person caucus as opposed to a 32-person caucus? Jeff Klein: It’s a legislative agenda we all agree upon, and I think that wasn’t always the case in the previous majority. Diane Savino: And I think that’s important, because one thing we learned from having been in the majority in a very—what’s the word? Dysfunctional majority? A fancy word for it?—is that you’re not… [More]

On the one-year anniversary of their defection from the Senate Democratic minority, the four senators of the Independent Democratic Conference—Jeff Klein, David Valesky, David Carlucci and Diane Savino—sat down to discuss their eventful first year together. It included helping pass nearly 40 bills, releasing a sheaf of reports on reforming government and incurring the frequent wrath of their 26 former colleagues. The IDC discussed whether they would ever vote to return Minority Leader John Sampson to control of the Senate,… [More]

City Hall's round-up of who's up and who's down this week in New York politics… [More]

With less than two weeks left in the election, three vulnerable state senators—Brian Foley, Darrel Aubertine and David Valesky—are receiving a much-needed boost from several of the state’s largest unions in the form of a $200,000 independent ad buy.… [More]