No Question: Re-Elect Our Republican State Senators

I started this as a comment to our contributor Steve Zodiac's posting of last night, criticizing my piece on Tuesday about the Democrat and Chronicle's endorsements of state legislative candidates.   However, I think it's expanded to full posting status.

Steve, I think you read more into my posting than I had intended, but reading it again I understand why.   I should have concluded the piece with the reasons why we need to return our Republican State Senators to office in this year's election.   You've now supplied what I left out.

Admittedly, I think the Democrat and Chronicle asked a seriously reform-oriented question, about the Triborough Amendment.   In the view of most advocates of reform, the Senators have been on the wrong side of that issue.   So have all the Democratic incumbents in the Assembly.

Yet there's a gigantic substantive difference between the GOP State Senators whom the newspaper chided for not being sufficiently reform-minded, and the Democratic Assembly members it criticized on the same grounds.   The former have tolerated some bad policies like Triborough, when the circumstances of the time make changing it a practical impossibility; when a serious effort to change it would accomplish nothing other than bringing the state's richest and most powerful special interest, the public employee unions, down on their heads.

Contrast that to the incumbent Democratic Assembly members, who actively promote, instigate, expand, aid and abet, either themselves or through supporting an Assembly leadership headed by Sheldon Silver, the toxic brew of policies that hold the state back and unfairly burden its people.

I couldn't agree more with Steve's statement that "Any hope we have of meaningful change in New York begins with Republicans winning back the State Senate majority."   Even our commenter, Anonymous 10/22 9:40am, who hit the Senators pretty hard, said he's going to vote for his Republican State Senator over his liberal Democratic opponent.

There's a new, healthier, climate in the country and the state, where people finally are paying attention to what's really going on in government.   This makes it possible to consider seriously, for the first time in decades, reforming the policy failures that wreak havoc on New York.   For all the reasons Steve discussed in his piece last night, that's all out the window if the Democrats keep the State Senate.

I'll be voting enthusiastically for my Republican State Senator on election day.