Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand joined a fast-growing group of Democratic lawmakers in New York and called on the New York government, Andrew Cuomo, to resign on Friday over allegations of sexual misconduct and perversion. of the mortality rate of Covid-19.
The rapidly increasing pressure on Cuomo by politicians from his own party has raised questions about whether he will be able to govern effectively at a time when he has been tasked with overseeing the state’s management of a complex public health crisis. , including the deployment of Covid. -19 vaccines and business reopening safe.
It also showed that the Democrats are willing to unite their opposition against a prominent member of their own party who faces accusations of sexual harassment and hold their own members accountable in a way they like the Republicans who misconduct accused, treated.
“We commend the courageous actions of individuals who have come forward with serious allegations of abuse and misconduct,” Schumer and Gillibrand said in a joint statement. “Because of the multiple, credible allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct, it is clear that Governor Cuomo has lost the trust of his government partners and the people of New York. Governor Cuomo must resign. ”
Also Friday, 16 other members of the House of Representatives delegation of 19 people in New York, including the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jerrold Nadler, and the progressive leader, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, appealed to him to resign.
The representatives who did not explicitly demand his resignation offered Cuomo little consolation. Rep. Tom Suozzi and Gregory Meeks said that if Cuomo could not govern effectively, he should retire. Meanwhile, Representative Hakeem Jeffries called the allegations are “deeply disturbing” and support the investigation into his behavior – but ultimately call for Cuomo to consider for himself “whether he can continue to lead the state effectively.”
On the same day, New York magazine and the New York Times published investigations suggesting that Cuomo had promoted a poorly managed and abusive work environment in the governor’s mansion. “In last week’s interviews, more than 35 people who worked in Cuomo’s executive room described the office as very chaotic, unprofessional and toxic, especially to young women,” the Times reported.
New York Attorney General Letitia James is currently overseeing an independent investigation into the claims of sexual harassment against Cuomo, which began when former assistant Lindsey Boylan claimed in February that he wanted her against her in 2018. kissed on the lips. Her statement was followed by a number of other allegations of misconduct by women, including a former assistant who accused him of touching her in his private home, and another assistant who said he had proposed to her effectively. in the way he inquired about her sex life.
This week, the state legislature in New York also launched an accused investigation into Cuomo’s behavior over sexual misconduct and evidence that he appears to be concealing the actual death toll from nursing home residents in the state caused by Covid-19. On Thursday, more than 50 Democrats from the Senate and the New York Assembly said Cuomo had “lost public confidence” and asked him to resign.
But Cuomo resisted the growing calls for his resignation on Friday, describing the attempts to force him out of office as ‘culture canceling’. He denied harassment and abuse and was adamant about his intention to remain in office. “I did not do what was alleged, period,” he told a news conference.
“I am confident that when New Yorkers know what the facts are, I have confidence in the decision based on the facts,” he said. ‘But wait for the facts. An opinion without facts is irresponsible. ”
Cuomo’s political fortunes have changed dramatically since the earlier stages of the pandemic, when he calmly presented confidence to the public in press conferences praising him among Democrats and even an Emmy. Now the company over a presidential election in 2024 has been replaced by questions about whether he will survive his current term.
The Cuomo allegations have tested Democrats’ commitment to sexual harassment
As Anna Noord of Vox noted, Democrats have sometimes been reluctant to deal with allegations of misconduct against members of their own party rather than against Republicans accused of sexual abuse, such as former President Donald Trump or Judge Brett Kavanaugh, Supreme Court:
When several women came forward in 2017 to report unwanted touch or kiss by Senator Al Franken (D-MN), several Democratic senators, including Gillibrand and then Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), appealed to him to resign. But Gillibrand in particular later suffered political setbacks for the decision, with donors withdrawing from her.
In 2020, when Tara Reade came forward to report that Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993, the Democrats – including Gillibrand – largely defended him (a task perhaps made easier by the fact that Reade posed questions about her changing version of Biden’s actions, as well as her previous writings on Russia).
Now Biden is president, Democrats control Congress, and Trump is no longer in the White House or on Twitter to remind Americans of the allegations against him. And what Democrats are doing to Cuomo will, to some extent, be a test of how seriously they take sexual harassment allegations into an era when they are in power.
Increasingly, Democrats in New York are arguing that they will not tolerate the kind of allegations Cuomo faces.
There are also other factors that contribute to the Democrats’ decision to run for Cuomo’s resignation. Before multiple allegations of sexual misconduct surfaced, the scandal over Cuomo’s suppression of Covid-19 death data seriously undermined his reputation as an effective and reliable policymaker over his signature issue over the past year.
And most importantly, Cuomo’s slide was accelerated by his bitter relationship with the Democrats in New York even before a scandal broke out. Ron Kim’s member of the New York Assembly, for example, said that after criticizing Cuomo’s handling of the nursing home’s mortality rate, he received a call from Cuomo during which the governor ‘spent ten minutes on my career and ordered me has to issue a statement that would have been used to cover the Secretary of State. ”
As Clio Chang and Alex Shephard of the New Republic explain, many Democrats have long been fed up with Cuomo’s opposing relationship with his own party:
While the State Assembly has remained largely more loyal than the Senate, which is more or less in open rebellion, Cuomo has spent a decade in the bureaucracy, sitting politicians and humiliating them and sitting in these bodies. Part of what we are seeing now is the repayment. Thanks to Cuomo’s decision to single-handedly prevent a Democratic majority from taking office in the Senate for several years, there is an extraordinary amount of bad blood.
Whether Cuomo will resign is an open question. But it is clear that his reputation and political capital were more fragile than was generally believed, and that they received an enormous and irreversible blow.