Adrianne Shropshire

Omnipotence: strengthening the mayor’s hand

In a ruling yesterday, the states highest court sided with the Bloomberg administration by striking down the Equal Benefits law that would have provided that certain city contractors pay benefits for the domestic partners of their employees. While this is certainly a set back in advancing domestic partner rights, it represents a major set back for the advancement of progressive public policy and a disturbing trend of accepting the expansion of executive power.

The ruling stated, "Where a local law seems to the mayor to conflict with a state or federal one, the mayor's obligation is to obey the latter, as the mayor has done here,". Seems to the mayor to conflict? The mayor has no obligation to prove that there is a conflict, he can simply not enforce any law where he claims that there is a potential conflict. Last year the Council overrode a number mayoral veto's. This ruling has the potential to make many of those, and other, hard fought legislative victories obsolete simply because the mayor does not agree with them. So much for our system of checks and balances.

The dissenting opinion said, "an executive who believes that a law is unconstitutional is not powerless but must follow a process by which the judiciary - and not the executive - determines the issue in the first instance." So without going to court, the mayor can just simply ignore the legislation that the council passes. The burden will be on the Council and advocacy groups to spend money in the courts just to get laws that attempt to protect working people and others, like the Equal Benefits bill and the Health Care Security Act, enforced.

It is no secret that the balance of power in city hall is heavily tilted toward the mayor. This uneven relationship ultimately hurts the citizens of our city by silencing the voice of their local representative. In 2009, 40 of the 51 council seats will turn over due to term-limits, we will elect a new mayor, and I would suggest that we add in to this transformation of our local government, the passage of charter reform amendments that can correct the current imbalance.

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Posted at 7:20 AM, Feb 15, 2006 in Democracy | New York
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