New York State Senate majority leader Joseph L. Bruno, the highest-ranking Republican in the state, announced last night that he won't seek reelection to the Senate this year. Bruno has been majority leader for fourteen years now, twelve years of which he served alongside George Pataki and Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver.
This era was the single longest period the same three politicians composed the "three men in a room" who control the New York State political process. That said, the last couple years haven't been kind to Bruno. Since 2006, he has faced a federal investigation into his business dealings, police surveillance against him ordered by former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, and a whittling of his Senate majority to a single vote.
Bruno's period as majority leader doesn't have much to recommend it. He maintained a consistently conservative record, attempting to reinstitute the death penalty, working with Pataki to slash Medicaid spending, and thwarting Spitzer's attempt to legalize same-sex marriage last year. He descended into bigotry at times, referring to blacks and Hispanics as "people who got their hands out" for welfare and to homosexuality as an "abnormal lifestyle".
Bruno's retirement represents the best opportunity in years for Democrats to retake the Senate, which, with the exception of 1965, has been in Republican hands since 1939. If Senate Democrats succeed in November, Gov. David Paterson will have a completely Democratic legislature to work with, meaning that 2009-2011 could be as productive a time for enacting progressive legislation in New York as it would be federally under an Obama administration. Given that, if it were a country, New York would have the world's sixteenth largest economy, this is no small thing.
--Dylan Matthews
