Governor Andrew Cuomo will leave the office of Governor of New York within the next two weeks. Why he felt the need to put in a two-week notice when no one would care if he just left is beyond me, but he did.
That means his lieutenant governor will step in to fill the role.
It seems she’s making a lot of people in the left-leaning media nervous. Here’s just one example of the freakout.
Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul, who in two weeks will succeed the disgraced Gov. Andrew Cuomo, positioned herself in the conservative suburbs of Buffalo as a Democrat who feasted on liberal sacred cows.
She obtained local government posts in her native Erie County, which encompasses the Rust Belt city and adjoining communities, by running not only on the Democratic line but that of the state’s Conservative Party. Appointed Erie County Clerk in 2007 by then-Gov Eliot Spitzer—a Democratic favorite at the time—she shot to statewide prominence by going after the Buffalo area’s undocumented immigrant population: when Spitzer that same year proposed granting drivers licenses to migrants without a social security number, she not only fought to block the policy but threatened to have any such applicant who turned up at her office arrested.
It was largely this record and reputation that she ran on when GOP Rep. Chris Lee resigned his seat in the House in 2011 over a lewd photo scandal, although she did support the Affordable Care Act. Her victory in a four-way race, in a strongly Republican district and at the height of the Tea Party wave, seemed like a coup for the Democrats and then-President Barack Obama.
But the Obama administration soon learned Hochul was anything but a reliable ally. While she endorsed increasing taxes on high income earners, she reiterated her campaign-era openness to cutting entitlements such as Medicaid, supported stripping out portions of the Affordable Care Act, and voted for the GOP-sponsored balanced budget amendment.
Most notably, she was one of 17 House Democrats who voted with Republicans to declare Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for declining to cooperate in an investigation into the “Fast and Furious” scandal, in which certain Department of Justice offices deliberately allowed gun dealers to sell firearms to traffickers, in the hopes of tracking the weapons to drug cartels.
Now, they do eventually cop to her “evolving” on gun control. Cam called that out earlier this week.
So, what’s with the freakout? Yeah, she had a pro-gun past but has completely turned her back on it once she decided to run for statewide office. That’s normal in New York, at least if you want to win. While much of the state by landmass is pro-gun, much of the population lives in the anti-Second Amendment haven known to the rest of us as New York City. Of course she “evolved” on it.
See, politicians often lack principles by which they refuse to budge. Hochul appears to be just another example of such a specimen. She’s all about the Second Amendment until the moment she needs to appeal to gun control-loving voters, then all bets are off.
My guess is that they fear Hochul will swing back around. Either that or they’re smarting over their bae Cuomo leaving office and are hoping they can shame a man who has no shame into staying in office.
I’m pretty sure that won’t happen, and the women who deal with the governor’s office should feel much safer knowing that.
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