It is dawning on more and more New Yorkers that Gov. Hochul is in over her head.
Halfway through her fourth year in office, she’s piling up a collection of failures and still making rookie blunders.
The most fundamental one is that her policies are at odds with her stated goals.
She says she wants safer streets and subways, but won’t fight the Legislature for big changes in the criminal justice system, which favors criminals over their victims.
The same mismatch is clear with her economic goals.
She says she wants to make New York more affordable, but keeps raising taxes and spending, which are driving the cost of living higher and higher.
How does she not understand such basic things?
The policy mismatch might be fixable if her politics were clever and first rate, but they are also incoherent.
She’s seen as a pushover in Albany and is invisible in the city, raising questions about what exactly she does all day.
Most important in the dog-eat-dog world of politics, nobody is afraid of her.
Her biggest goof
Which brings us to the governor’s handling of congestion pricing, which is shaping up as the single biggest blunder of her troubled tenure.
She’s so deep in the weeds that she apparently believes she can out-negotiate and outsmart President Trump, an attitude that is almost certain to fail and alienate him from the city that he loves and that desperately needs his help.
He’s already the target of Dems in New York’s congressional delegations, with Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand trying to stir up a lame resistance movement over his early actions, which happen to be very popular.
Typical of the animus was the speech that Rep. Jerry Nadler gave in a House committee hearing Tuesday, where he railed against Trump’s plans to end waste and fraud in the bloated federal budget.
“Elon Musk and his band of near-teenaged accomplices are undermining the rule of law and shredding the Constitution along the way,” Nadler said.
This is nuts on stilts. Trump has made it clear he wants to help New York, yet Dems are putting their party’s Washington agenda first.
Shame on them.
A better, sharper governor would see the dangers and look for an opening to work with Trump for the good of the state, but she’s apparently willing to skip the opportunity if it means dropping the congestion tax.
Recall that she has been on both sides of the issue.
She was for the tax on working people before she was against it, and then suddenly she was for it again.
Now she’s trying to save the $9 fee on cars entering Midtown from Trump, who was always against it and correctly sees the tax as another nail in New York’s coffin.
The mere fact that Hochul is fighting him on it is a sign of her poor judgment.
Even worse, she apparently believes she can force the president to keep his hands off the program.
Not smart.
Following the leader
Her biggest mistake is that she’s listening to Hakeem Jeffries, the Brooklyn congressman.
Perhaps because he is the Dems’ House minority leader, Hochul thinks he knows what he’s doing.
Or maybe she’s afraid of him.
Either way, Jeffries’ advice is purely partisan and he is oblivious to the real-world outcomes of progressive policies.
He never saw a sign of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and supported every single bill Biden sent to Congress, including those that drove up inflation.
Recall it was also Jeffries who urged Hochul to “pause” congestion pricing before the election because it would be a killer for suburban Dems.
He wanted to be speaker, and if deception was required to win a House majority, he was fine with that.
Elex-meddle scheme
So Hochul obeyed by announcing her pause, and then flip-flopped and imposed the tax soon after the votes were counted.
Aides whispered to anti-Trump media that she did it quickly, before he took office, so he couldn’t stop it.
Trump doesn’t buy the idea that he can’t reverse it.
He says he has a plan to kill the tax through federal powers if Hochul won’t do it herself.
Ah, but Jeffries had a plan for that, too, one that would move him closer to being speaker.
And once again Hochul listened to him.
The plan this time was to hobble House Republicans by getting New York Dems to change state election law so they could keep the seat held by Rep. Elise Stefanik empty until the November election.
Normally, a special election would be held soon after Stefanik is confirmed as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations.
Jeffries’ goal was to shrink the GOP House majority to one or two seats in the hopes that Dems could thwart Trump’s legislative agenda and maybe even seize the majority for themselves through resignations or deaths in the next two years.
And, so the Dem thinking goes, they would make a deal with Trump: He would accept congestion pricing if they would withdraw the legislation and proceed with an election for Stefanik’s seat soon.
Hochul and Trump have talked several times, and the latest development is that she suddenly flip-flopped on the election law legislation and now wants it to be put on ice.
In effect, she’s pausing it to see what Trump does.
He should call her bluff by killing the congestion plan.
He was right from the start that it’s a job killer and gives people yet another reason to avoid the city.
In truth, Trump would be helping her politically if he made the tax go away, but she probably wouldn’t understand that, either.
Most important, she needs him more than he needs her, and his ability over the next four years to deliver on big infrastructure projects for the city and state would do more good than anything New York can do on its own.
Or is that also a mystery to her?
Adams plays ball & scores
Mayor Adams is certainly one official who understands and appreciates the benefits of having a fellow New Yorker in the White House.
The move by the Department of Justice to drop its corruption case against Adams is directly informed by Trump’s own awful experience with New York prosecutors.
He saw in the mayor another example of how law enforcement under the Biden administration was used against political opponents, with the Justice memo saying “it cannot be ignored that Mayor Adams criticized the prior administration’s immigration policies before the charges were filed.”
The memo also argued that the planned spring trial would be too close to the next mayoral election, where Adams is seeking re-election.
It shouldn’t be lost on Hochul and New York congressional Dems that Adams has agreed to work with federal officials on catching and deporting illegal immigrant criminals, a fact cited in the memo as supporting the decision to drop the case.
