A couple of Sundays ago, Maureen Dowd gave us a perfectly splendid interview column in The New York Times on recently retired House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, arguably the most influential and savvy female politician in this country since Eleanor Roosevelt.
Even more significant than Hillary. Pelosi lost the speaker’s job when the Democrats lost the House by a whisker last November, but she’s still going strong as an elected congresswoman from California.
Pelosi, in her trademark casual way, made an observation halfway through that column that made me do a double eye blink. It wasn’t news exactly, but hearing it from her took on enhanced import and hammered home a brutal truth: It was our fault.
"She said that she believed the Democrats could have held on to the House … if top New York pols had realized that the key issue in that state was crime," Dowd wrote. "That is an issue that had to be dealt with early on, not 10 days before the election. The governor didn’t realize early enough where the trouble was," Pelosi said.
Four seats were flipped Democrat to Republican in the New York congressional delegation. Pelosi’s replacement as speaker, Republican Kevin McCarthy, has a four-vote majority. The numbers don’t lie.
And politically what drives the bus in New York in terms of dominant public apprehension hasn’t changed much since last November, either. It’s still crime. It’s crime as a reality, and also the equally important perception that government and the courts aren’t doing enough about it.
At this point, Gov. Kathy Hochul has no excuse and no wiggle room. She has to deal with it, and in such a public way that even her harshest critics can see it. Then she has to message it out, over and over, until the public perception that this administration is soft on crime, or inept at dealing with it – one is as bad as the other – is changed. Or she is dead meat politically. Her political chops, or lack of them, are already suspect as evidenced by too close an election last November, and by getting outmaneuvered by the Senate in trying to seat a Court of Appeals chief justice.
Right now opinion on crime is in deep gloom. A Siena College poll three weeks ago, just after the State of the State address, reveals that 93 percent of New Yorkers feel crime in the state is a serious or very serious problem, a number that hasn’t changed since a year ago. That’s staggering. Also, by nearly a three-to-one margin, voters "regardless of region, party or race," want judges to have more discretion in setting bail or remanding to jail. These two issues have become linked, fairly or not. The public sentiment on both, however, is clear and unambiguous.
Not so incidentally, at the same time, Hochul’s favorability statewide has risen to the highest level since she’s taken office. Call that an ace in the hole. For now.
Hochul’s smart gambit in the proposed state budget language addressing bail reform yet again, if allowed to survive the budget process, should get the job done for her. And for us too. Sanity and common sense would return to a process that has been out of kilter since 2019, when the original bail reform was passed. And further, we would finally move toward a broader view of bail as not just an assurance of court appearance.
With one small proposed language cut – “least restrictive means to ensure return to court”— with cases that are bail eligible – serious crimes – judges would be given both the discretion to set bail or remand without restriction, and treat bail as more than a guarantee of reappearance. That is judicial discretion squared.
Last year, bail reform measures steered by the governor gave judges ten conditions to consider in setting bail, referring to the individual’s history, potential for violence, gun involvement, and other factors that in the aggregate went a long way to identifying “dangerousness” without actually using the word. “Dangerousness” is one of those buzzwords that gets defense lawyers atwitter. New York is the only state in the nation that does not consider dangerousness as a consideration for setting bail or remanding. Getting this passed was a coup for Hochul, but went largely unheralded, much to the governor’s frustration. The continued confusion over judicial discretion clouded the issue.
Those ten conditions combined with this year’s tweak would mean, according to a Times Union guesstimate based on past judicial conduct, a likely ten percent increase in violent offenders being bailed or jailed pretrial, that is, a couple of thousand cases. This will not go unnoticed by the media, and hence the public. Definitive ocular proof there’s a new sheriff in town.
Although the administration wisely cautions that “changing bail laws will not automatically bring down crime. What it will do is make crystal clear that judges, in fact, have the discretion necessary to protect the safety of New Yorkers.” Finally.
Now let’s see how the progressive state Senate will try to undo Hochul’s best-laid plans, and oh, maybe, spit in the public’s eye.