Governor Andrew M. Cuomo was in his 39th floor office above Third Avenue in Manhattan, after meeting with corporate executives to ask for help lobbying Congress for federal Hurricane Sandy aid, when he heard the news: a gunman had opened fire in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, killing twenty children. He called his counterpart in Connecticut, Governor Dannel P. Malloy, to offer condolences. “I didn’t even have the words,” he said. “It was incomprehensible.”
One month later, Cuomo claimed victory, stunning many observers with the speed and apparent ease with which he pushed a gun control package through a divided Legislature. The state Senate, controlled by a coalition of thirty Republicans and six Democrats, approved the package, which included a significant expansion of the state’s assault weapons ban, on its first day in session; the Assembly, controlled by Democrats, followed suit the next day, and the governor signed the legislation into law.
The weeks between the mass shooting and the bill signing illustrated the classic Cuomo formula, honed over years in public life and refined during his first two years as governor. Eggs are broken, speed rules, an open process is sacrificed, and results are achieved— sometimes triumphant, often jagged and imperfect. Before New York’s new gun control law was even passed, lawmakers were acknowledging that they would have to pass a second measure to clean up some of its errors.
Cuomo, a Democrat who is often mentioned as a possible presidential contender in 2016, had been determined that New York would be the first in the nation to respond to the school massacre. And he saw opportunity presented by change: the Senate, which had been controlled entirely by Republicans skeptical of new gun laws, now was governed by a coalition that included some urban Democrats who wanted gun control. The state’s population was sympathetic too; even on Long Island, a Republican stronghold but also a largely suburban region, haunted by memories of a 1993 shooting rampage on the Long Island Rail Road.
First, there were threats, delivered in phone calls or through intermediaries: He would seek to dissolve their fledgling coalition by pressuring his fellow Democrats to reunite; pummel recalcitrant Republican senators for months with a seven-figure advertising blitz backed by national groups like the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence; and campaign on Long Island, where nine of the thirty Republican senators live, and across the state.
Then, there was the cajoling. Guns, he told the Republicans, were not the issue for them to take a stand on. He shared with them his internal polling data, which showed popular support for a tighter ban on assault weapons, even among gun owners.
There is a dispute over what exactly Cuomo then said to senior Republicans. A person with direct knowledge of the exchanges quoted Cuomo as saying: “You think your record is good the last two cycles? Maybe you should listen to me? Maybe I should be your consultant!”
A senior Cuomo administration official denied that such statements had been made or that there was any contentiousness between the Democratic governor, seeking new gun laws, and the Republican Senate leadership, leery of such laws. But clearly, there was aggressive talk.
“He wanted to get this done, and he was push, push, push,” said State Senator Thomas W. Libous of Binghamton, the chamber’s second-ranking Republican and the governor’s closest ally in the Republican caucus. “Some people don’t know how to take that,” Libous added. “I understand; sometimes I can be passionate too. Sometimes, when we want something, we push hard for it. The governor is trying to make his mark.”
Cuomo had been a longtime supporter of gun control, and after the mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado last summer, he instructed his aides to begin developing new gun control proposals. But he had done little publicly, other than making an occasional comment at a news conference, until Newtown. “I think for me, like for people all across this country, that was it,” the governor said in an interview last week. “You said, ‘Enough.’ That was it. It’s not an intellectual response; it was more emotional, visceral. Just, it was enough.”
Cuomo, who has three teenage daughters, said he could not help but think of them. “Anyone who has a child remembers the first day they dropped the child off at school and they remember that feeling in the pit of their stomach when they were driving away, that little fear that they felt in their spine that said, ‘You know, I’m leaving my child; God forbid something were to happen,’” he recalled. “This said you were right to have that anxiety, because your nightmare actually came true.”
The governor’s aides worked with several advocacy groups, including the Brady Campaign in Washington, New Yorkers Against Gun Violence and the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence in San Francisco, to develop a package of measures that would be comprehensive, but also politically achievable. They looked to other states; a provision in the new law to require mental health professionals to report possibly violent patients was similar to a recommendation by a task force created last year by Governor Martin O’Malley and state legislators in Maryland.
For a time, Cuomo and his team were so eager to act that they contemplated calling the Legislature into special session in December. By the time a few dozen lawmakers had assembled in Albany the week before Christmas for an economic development meeting, negotiations were moving so rapidly that the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, a Manhattan Democrat, instructed his members not to leave the capital until they had called his office, just in case a gun control deal was ready.
The Assembly was clearly ready to support new gun control, so Cuomo focused his lobbying on the Senate, where the outcome was less certain.
A few days after the shooting, the Senate Democrats had chosen a new leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins of Westchester County. Cuomo invited her to visit. When she arrived, he offered his congratulations and then turned to gun control. By the end of the session, Senator Stewart-Cousins had pledged that all 26 members of her caucus would support his effort.
Cuomo believed he could get the votes to pass a gun control measure in the Senate, but any doubt was erased by a 24 December ambush in Webster, near Rochester, in which a lone gunman set fire to a car and his house, then killed two firefighters who responded.
“To the extent the Legislature needed any reinforcement, there was no question after Webster,” Cuomo said. He courted a newly elected senator, Simcha Felder, a Democrat from Brooklyn who had decided to align himself with the Republican caucus. And he sat down with the five Democrats whose Independent Democratic Conference had struck a power-sharing agreement with the Senate Republicans; afterward, their leader, Senator Jeffrey D. Klein, a Bronx Democrat, told reporters he was squarely behind the governor’s effort.
Even with the votes, Cuomo still had to ensure that the Senate Republican leader, Dean G. Skelos of Long Island, would not try to prevent the bill from coming to the floor. Senator Skelos and his aides wanted to impose stiffer penalties on the use of illegal guns; extend and expand Kendra’s Law, which empowers judges to order mentally ill patients to receive outpatient treatment; and soften some of the new provisions restricting assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
Cuomo was open to the first two of those requests, and he also did not push the Legislature to approve microstamping, a controversial form of ballistics identification, which he had supported but which had been met with resistance by Republicans. In an effort to further mollify their conference, the Senate Republican leadership distributed to their members a one-page handout listing fifteen “rejected Democrat proposals”, crediting themselves with rebuffing, among other things, a suggestion to confiscate guns now deemed assault weapons and limit gun purchases to one per month. “Can buy unlimited number of guns”, the senators were reassured.
The weekend after his 9 January State of the State address, Cuomo and his allies received some help: a poll by Newsday and Siena College found that more than seven in ten residents on Long Island supported an expanded ban on assault weapons. Recalling the Newsday poll, Speaker Silver said: “I think it may have sealed it.”
On the first full day of the Legislative session, the Senate Republicans met behind closed doors for several hours to discuss the measure, while gun-rights activists tried, futilely, to put the brakes on a deal. The head of the state’s National Rifle Association affiliate, Thomas H. King, showed up at the office of the Senate Republicans; Skelos, he said later, would not see him.
Around 9 p.m., Senator Gregory R. Ball of Putnam County, a gun-rights advocate and avid trap shooter, emerged from the Republicans’ private meeting with a defeated look. “I don’t think any lives will be saved today,” he said. “The only life that may have been helped is the political life of Andrew Cuomo running for president.”
Later, on his way to the floor, Skelos acknowledged that the gun issue was “difficult for many to deal with,” but he described the final bill as “well balanced.” He voted for it, as did all of his Long Island colleagues in the Senate who were present.
Rico says it's politics as usual...
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