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Gov. Hochul has invested her legacy in “Prop One” — colloquially known as the “Equal Rights Amendment” — on the Election Day ballot in two weeks.
It’s fitting, because Prop One sums up both Hochul’s administration and the direction of New York’s Democratic Party over the past decade.
Because it is so ideologically confused, the Empire State’s ruling party must hide behind something that’s popular to pass all sorts of other things that aren’t popular, or even practicable.
What is Prop One? Hochul says it’s about abortion rights: “By voting yes …, we can enshrine abortion rights in our state Constitution, protecting them from the ultra-conservative state legislators, members of Congress, justices and presidential hopefuls who want to dismantle those freedoms,” she wrote this week.
So voters naturally expect to enter the voting booth to decide “yes” or “no” on a straightforward question about abortion.
No dice.
Consider: The state’s existing right to free worship reads like this: “The free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship, without discrimination or preference, shall forever be allowed.”
Hochul and state lawmakers could have asked voters to agree to a similar “free exercise of access to abortion” amendment. And it would pass: Two-thirds of New York’s voters support abortion access.
Instead, Hochul allowed lawmakers to cynically use the abortion issue to sneak all sorts of other stuff into the amendment — which doesn’t even mention abortion.
So the proposed amendment expands the state’s list of groups of people protected from discrimination, adding “ethnicity, national origin, age, disability, and sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive healthcare and autonomy.”
But! Lawmakers don’t actually want to outlaw much of this discrimination. They still want, say, quotas for women-owned businesses in construction contracts.
So they have offered themselves an out, allowing them to continue to pick and choose: Prop One also “allows laws to prevent or undo past discrimination.”
Indeed, the state’s courts, parsing these contradictory clauses — you can’t discriminate, except when you can — could fairly determine that any law affecting any of these groups of people is constitutional or unconstitutional, according to the judges’ whim.
But even with this safety valve for themselves, lawmakers have created a mess: There’s a reason why some of these seemingly innocuous protections aren’t already in the state Constitution.
If you can’t discriminate based on age, you can’t offer senior discounts, like half-price MetroCards.
What’s a reasonable accommodation for a person in a wheelchair who wants to be a sanitation worker?
It’s lawmaking for the social-media age: Hochul and the legislators are congratulating themselves on being forward-looking on abortion, and leaving the rest of us to sort out the surprises later.
Sound familiar? It should.
Hochul loves to tell us that she’d never raise taxes on the middle class. But she did raise taxes on the middle class — a $1.1 billion payroll-tax hike to benefit the MTA in 2023.
By sneaking the tax hike into a state budget with lots of other things people actually wanted, she diverted attention from it.
Ironically that same year, some of the other things that people actually wanted in the state budget were half-measure fixes to previous ill-advised laws: criminal-justice “reform” and marijuana legalization.
Remember when advocates told us, in the Gov. Andrew Cuomo era, that bail reform and pot reform were mostly to keep fare-evaders and casual tokers out of prison?
Of course, there were no fare evaders and casual tokers in prison, just as there is now no threat to New Yorkers’ abortion access.
Under this ruse, though, back in 2019, we got an explosion in shoplifting and violent crime, and storefront after storefront of illegal pot shops.
In 2019 Cuomo also gave us congestion pricing — which Hochul has now “paused.”
Democrats want credit both for passing congestion pricing, and for stopping it.
And now they want credit for stopping discrimination — while continuing to reserve the right to discriminate.
The same dynamic holds at the local level: We’re going to close Rikers Island! Just not . . . now. Or . . . soon.
This split-screen is the result of irreconcilable differences — differences that are so stark that there’s really no room for compromise, at least not for an inept politician like Hochul.
Many of the necessary compromises would be found in the details of policy negotiation, and brokering such details is something the governor can’t seem to master.
You either put people in prison for repeat shoplifting, or you don’t. You either charge people to drive into Manhattan, or you don’t.
When you’re afraid to take a stand on either side, the natural result is something like Prop One, which says everything and nothing.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.