On the Right: Nixon can beat Cuomo

George J Marlin

The chief executive of the state of New York is the most powerful of the nation’s fifty governors.

When it comes to the state budget, for instance, the governor has greater sway over it than the President has over the federal budget.

Under New York’s system, the governor rules supreme because he is the “constructor” of the budget and legislators are the “critics.” The “critics” must pass separate legislation, after the budgets passage, to increase spending. And the governor can then veto such bills to prevent budget busting.

Then there are the hundreds of state authorities and agencies that are managed by the governor’s appointees. The board appointments give him the indirect authority to influence billions of dollars of infrastructure spending.

The governor also dispenses thousands of jobs to the party faithful which gives him leverage to control the state Democratic party.

The exercise of this power helps explain why no post-World War II incumbent governor—from Tom Dewey to George Pataki—had ever faced a serious convention or primary challenge.

But this year it’s different. Cuomo’s gubernatorial power doesn’t seem to matter much. That’s why he’s running scared against primary challenger, actress Cynthia Nixon—a political novice, who has made plenty of rookie mistakes, holds extremist left-wing positions and is a public policy lightweight.

Nixon appears to be gaining political steam despite her preposterous proposals that could cripple the state’s job market, destroy its tax base and put the state on the road to fiscal insolvency.

Here are a few of her positions:

– Nixon wants to increase the present millionaire’s tax, which would only drive out more of the top 1 percenters who already pay close to 50 percent of total state and NYC personal income tax revenues.

– Nixon wants the minimum wage to hit $15 an hour ASAP. This would only increase burdens on small businesses and cost jobs for New York’s young people.

– Nixon’s opposed to curtailing pension costs. This sop to the unions will only add to the property tax bills of overburdened homeowners.

Nixon’s wackiest idea: calling for a change in the Taylor Law to allow municipal workers to strike. The very thought of permitting government employees to strike is so crazy that even Mayor Bill DeBlasio publicly opposed it.

Nixon has also stated she believes social change comes through protest (a/k/a mob rule). And at the recent Net Roots Nation convention—a gathering of the looniest leftists—Nixon said, “Republicans are going to call us socialists no matter what we do. So, we might as well give them the real thing.” She voiced support for single payer healthcare, free college tuition, universal rent control and called for the elimination of ICE, cash bail, fossil fuels, and deportation of immigrants.

The popularity of Nixon’s radical positions with a growing subset of Democratic voters has have put the fear of God in Cuomo and has caused him to move further and further to the left.

The frantic governor has flip-flopped on numerous issues. He is now calling marijuana a “gateway drug” and is leaning towards complete legalization.

To appease the teachers union he once called a “public monopoly” that should be broken up, he is willing to scrap his education reform agenda and “disentangle test scores from teacher assessments.”

Cuomo has even come out for abolishing plastic bags claiming the bags “devastate” New York’s “streets, our water and our natural resources.”

And on May Day—the Socialist-Commie holiday—Cuomo signed a proclamation saluting the day and calling on all to recommit “to the fight for fairness and equality.”

As Primary Day, Sept. 13, draws closer, Cuomo’s Hail Mary pass to excite voters is running against Trump.

In his rush to be the un-Trump, he made a stupendous blunder. He pronounced that America “was never that great.”

Huh? Does the governor mean that his grandparents left the Provincia di Salerno, outside Naples, Italy to come to America because it wasn’t “great”?

Was the governor’s father, Mario, wrong when he wrote that his father “paid his taxes to the government of the great land that had given him opportunity”?

If Cuomo loses the primary, it will be because a radicalized Democratic base rejected a hypocritical politician who has no core principles and has flip-flopped on every issue to retain power for the sake of power.

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