Four Investigations = Four-Ring Political Circus
Op-ed
BY CONGRESSMEMBER CAROLYN MALONEY

Last month New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's office completed and released a report on alleged wrongdoing by Governor Eliot Spitzer's aides that found that the governor's staff had broken no laws. At least three other government agencies, including the Albany District Attorney's office, the state Senate Committee on Investigations and Government Operations, the state Commission of Investigation and the state Ethics Commission, announced subsequently that they were launching their own inquiries following the attorney general's report. Now, a fourth, highly partisan investigation led by the Republicanled state Senate Investigations Committee has begun.

These four parallel investigations are fast becoming a four-ring circus. While this sideshow might make for good political theater, it is a sad fact that these overlapping investigations risk becoming a serious and tiresome distraction from the many urgent matters that confront the Empire State.

After all, investigating allegations of misconduct in our state's executive branch is exactly the mission for which the state Ethics Commission was created in the first place. It was constituted in part to avoid legislative gridlock resulting from politically motivated investigations of the executive branch by the legislative branch, and it should be allowed to do its job.

The Ethics Commission is led by the universally respected former Dean of Fordham University Law School, John Feerick, a former chair of the state Commission on Government Integrity and of the state Commission to Promote Public Confidence in Judicial Elections, and a past president of the New York City Bar Association, the Citizens Union, and the American Arbitration Association. Chairman Feerick and his fellow members of the Ethics Commission, whose membership consists of appointees of both Republican and Democratic Governors, are the right governmental body to investigate the governor's aides.

We need continued reform and progress in Albany, not a return to paralysis. That kind of stasis is what will surely ensue if we continue down the present path. The Empire State has too much on its plate for the state senate leadership to let us sink into another Albany morass.

New York remains the number one terrorist target, and we must maintain our state government's focus on safety first. That means we need the governor and the legislature working together in mobilizing support for legislative initiatives vital to our well-being, like reauthorizing federal terrorism risk insurance to allow the vital engines of our state's economy to keep functioning smoothly. Leaders in Albany must redress the imbalance that has historically shortchanged the public schools in our nation's greatest city of their fair share of state education aid. And Albany must work to restore the economic vitality of upstate New York, which has seen its population and its jobs draining away slowly but surely for decades now. It's also up to our leaders in Albany to make sure New Yorkers have access to quality, affordable health care, that our aging, decaying infrastructure is properly maintained and updated, and that our mass transit network continues to deliver millions of people reliably around our city and state every day.

In short, we New Yorkers have a lot of work to do. And it's high time our leaders in Albany rolled up their sleeves and started working together to pull the oars of the ship of state in the right direction. So let's ask our state senate leadership to focus on doing its real job, instead of engaging in another round of pointless, partisan "gotcha" politics. Let the Ethics Commission do its job, and let New York's elected leaders get back to their real work, which is governing our great state.

Congressmember Carolyn Maloney represents the 14th Congressional District, which encompasses Astoria and other neighborhoods in Western Queens and parts of Manhattan's Upper East Side.