During the height of the pandemic, Gov. Andrew Cuomo soared in popularity across New York and even the country with daily news conferences in which he stressed a fact-based approach to combating the COVID-19 virus mixed with folksy stories of family and friends.
Now? The discussion is whether Cuomo should resign, be impeached or await the fate of voters if he runs for a fourth term in 2022.
Or whether we should await the results of state Attorney General Letitia James’ investigation into the allegations of five women that Cuomo sexually harassed them before deciding.
How did Cuomo get here? Two scandals – underreporting the number of nursing home deaths due to COVID-19 and the sexual harassment allegations.
Added to the governor’s woes are reports that he created a “toxic” workplace environment going back to the 1990s and downplayed the danger of structural flaws on the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge.
So what should be done?
Some Republicans have been quick to call for Cuomo’s resignation. Others in the GOP have called for impeachment hearings.
But it is hard to take their opinions seriously when they supported President Donald Trump for five years after 24 women made credible claims of sexual assault and Trump himself was caught on an “Access Hollywood” recording bragging about his ability to grab women by their private parts due to his fame.
The same can said for Republican attacks on Cuomo’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This hypocrisy doesn’t make the Republicans wrong, but it just makes it hard to take them seriously. They could, of course, begin fixing that problem by announcing that Joe Biden was elected president in a free and fair election.
But Republicans are not alone in calling for Cuomo’s removal from office.
U.S. Rep. Kathleen Rice, the former Nassau County district attorney, became the highest-ranking Democrat last week to call for Cuomo’s resignation after the story of a third woman alleging sexual harassment was published in The New York Times.
State Sen. Rachel May, a Democrat from Syracuse, urged Cuomo and everyone else involved to resign for their role in rewriting a report to obscure the full extent of nursing home deaths.
And then Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins declared Sunday that the governor should resign “for the good of the state.”
This was followed by a statement from the Assembly speaker, Carl E. Heastie, who questioned the “governor’s ability to continue to lead this state” and suggested that Cuomo had lost his party’s support in the state Capitol.
Others counsel patience.
Jay Jacobs, the state and Nassau County Democratic chairman, has urged his fellow Democrats to not form an opinion until James completes an investigation of the sexual harassment claims.
And on Monday 21 Democratic women in the Assembly said James’ investigation should be allowed to be completed.
Cuomo himself was adamant in resisting calls for his resignation, arguing he was elected by the people, not “by politicians.”
“I’m not going to resign because of allegations,” the governor said, calling the notion “anti-democratic” and a violation of the due process clause of the Constitution. “There is no way I resign.”
But Cuomo is not exactly being consistent in defense of due process and democracy.
Perhaps the best argument for Cuomo to resign came from Cuomo himself after an article appeared in the New Yorker in 2018 on then-Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, which reported multiple women making serious allegations of assault.
“No one is above the law, including New York’s top legal officer,” Cuomo said in a statement at the time. “I will be asking an appropriate New York district attorney to commence an immediate investigation and proceed as the facts merit. My personal opinion is that, given the damning pattern of facts and corroboration laid out in the article, I do not believe it is possible for Eric Schneiderman to continue to serve as attorney general, and for the good of the office, he should resign.”
Schneiderman resigned a short time later.
We will stipulate that a man using a position of power to sexually harass a woman is a serious offense. But not as serious as assaulting a woman, sexually or otherwise.
We agree that the two lawyers that James selected to conduct a probe into the sexual harassment allegations should be allowed to go ahead.
James has already issued a report that said the state failed to report the deaths of nursing home residents who had died in hospitals and were not previously counted by the state as nursing home deaths.
This was confirmed hours later by the state Health Department, which added more than 3,800 deaths to its count of nursing home deaths and raised the total from 12,743 in February to more than 15,000.
This did not change the overall number of COVID-19 deaths in New York, but it was important data needed to understand where the disease struck, why and if there was anything that could be done to prevent future fatalities.
James’ report also found a number of nursing homes that “failed to comply with critical infection-control policies,” including those that did not isolate residents who had tested positive for the virus or screen employees for it.
This raised the question of whether nursing homes followed state requirements and what kind of oversight those homes received from the state Health Department.
The report from James, a fellow Democrat, also cast a renewed light on a state directive that ordered nursing homes to accept and readmit patients who had tested positive for COVID-19.
As we have said, Cuomo’s unwillingness to release the full data seems damning proof that the governor did make the wrong call.
The New York Times added evidence of Cuomo stonewalling on nursing home deaths with a report Friday that his administration had rewritten a report to obscure the full extent of the nursing home deaths.
It seems very likely that Cuomo’s actions resulted in the loss of some lives and wrong is wrong.
But the loss of lives caused by Cuomo’s actions seems very small when compared with Donald Trump downplaying the coronavirus and leading a campaign against wearing masks and social distancing – a campaign many Republican governors are following to this day.
So we believe the state Legislature’s vote to remove Cuomo’s emergency powers in responding to COVID is the right answer.
And then there are the allegations of sexual harassment.
They began in a Twitter post in December from Lindsey Boylan, a former economic development aide, who said Cuomo said to her “let’s play strip poker” while on a government aircraft and later claimed he kissed her on the lips in his Manhattan office.
Boylan said she added details to her complaint after state Assemblyman Ron Kim, a Queens Democrat, accused Cuomo of bullying him, including a threat to “destroy” the lawmaker for criticizing the governor’s nursing home policies.
Cuomo’s staff called Boylan’s accounts “simply false.”
Boylan’s complaint was followed by Charlotte Bennett, another ex-aide in her 20s, who told The Times that Cuomo had asked her numerous questions about her sex life, including whether she thought age made a difference in romantic relationships.
Bennett later said in a CBS interview that while working alone with Cuomo he told her he was lonely and looking for a girlfriend.
The Times Monday then published an interview with Anna Ruch, who said Cuomo at a wedding touched her bare back, cupped her face with his hands and tried to kiss her unsolicited. She said she turned away and he kissed her on the cheek.
Cuomo said he “never made advances” toward Bennett, that he meant to act as a mentor and he didn’t intend to act “in any way that was inappropriate.”
On Wednesday, Cuomo apologized for his conduct but insisted that he had never “touched anyone inappropriately.”
“I understand I acted in a way that made some people feel uncomfortable and it was unintentional and I truly and deeply apologize,” he said.
Then two additional accounts were published over the weekend by The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.
James’ investigation of the allegations by Cuomo’s former aides continues.
But we are now four years into the #MeToo Movement focused on men misusing positions of power to have sex with women, so it is hard to understand what Cuomo, a lawyer and former attorney general, would not understand about sexual harassment.
This is especially true given Cuomo’s touting his sexual harassment policies that included a requirement that all private businesses hold sexual harassment training.
Cuomo has a strong record of accomplishment in New York, some of which we may owe to what the governor called his “aggressive” style in getting things done on behalf of the public and others call bullying.
But bullying eventually carries a price and Cuomo has crossed bright red lines when it comes to sexual harassment and his withholding information if not actively obscuring data on nursing home deaths.
Still, the majority of New York voters seem to have had it right in a Quinnipiac University poll published over the weekend that found 55 percent of voters polled said Cuomo should not resign.
But 59 percent said they would not like to see him run for re-election in 2022.
For the moment, that sounds about right.
