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The Filibuster's Ugly History and Why It Must Be Scrapped |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=27902"><span class="small">Sean Wilentz, Rolling Stone</span></a>
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Friday, 19 March 2021 12:50 |
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Excerpt: "The filibuster is no cornerstone of senatorial greatness. It is an accident that has spun out of control."
Students bearing signs critical of filibuster stalling civil rights legislation in Congress and protesting segregation begin noon hour parade in front of Dillard University in New Orleans on March 8, 1960. (photo: AP)
The Filibuster's Ugly History and Why It Must Be Scrapped
By Sean Wilentz, Rolling Stone
19 March 21
The filibuster is no cornerstone of senatorial greatness. It is an accident that has spun out of control
 he case for ending the Senate filibuster rule is based not on simple partisanship but out of concern for American democracy. Partisanship becomes a problem when normal political parties place narrow self-interest so far above all other considerations that the nation obviously suffers as a result. And, in truth, both parties have long deployed the filibuster — the provision in the Senate’s rules that effectively requires a supermajority of senators to guarantee passage of most legislation — when they find themselves in the minority. In normal times, the parties have normalized the filibuster, to the point where it appears to be a natural feature of the Senate’s operations.
In fact, however, there is nothing natural about the filibuster, and, even more important, the United States long ago ceased to have two normal political parties. For at least 25 years, the Republican Party has been in the grip of a radicalization that had led it from Reaganism — already a departure from the party’s mainline traditions — to Newt Gingrich’s scorched-earth right-wing politics and then to the authoritarian putsch-prone personality cult of Donald Trump. Instead of believing in its own appeal to a majority of voters with anything resembling ideas, the GOP relies on themes of culture-war demagogy, conspiracy mongering, and racial division. Yet even that is insufficient: Lacking confidence in that repertoire of dog whistles, Republicans have now become utterly dependent on gerrymandering and brazen voter suppression.
The Republican Party is a “normal” party only in the sense that the segregationist wing of the Southern Democratic Party before the modern civil rights era was “normal.” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the Trump worshipper, has stated that his idol has some sort of “magic.” The “magic” Graham couldn’t define was the same old dark “magic” that was practiced by his predecessor, Strom Thurmond. Indeed, Republican strategy and tactics, although national rather than sectional in scope, are strikingly similar to those of the old Dixiecrats, reviving and updating the old Jim Crow politics, with restrictive ID laws and election-roll purges taking the place of the poll tax and the grandfather clause — Jim Crow 2.0.
So, these are the stakes at the heart of the current debate over the filibuster. With the tiniest possible majority in the Senate — achieved only by overcoming voter suppression in Georgia — and just a razor-thin majority in the House, the Democrats have a very small window for achieving reforms that might reverse the greatest attempted subversion of American democracy since the violent overthrow of Reconstruction. To say that killing the filibuster will come back to haunt the Democrats, as Republicans are wont to do, is to miss the severity and immediacy of the crisis. As the party of a sitting president usually suffers losses in midterm congressional elections, there’s certainly a strong possibility that the Republicans will regain the House or the Senate, or both, in 2022. But unless checked right away, Republican-controlled state legislatures will be hell-bent on curtailing voting rights and turning probability into certainty — and then imposing Jim Crow 2.0 as the law of much of the land. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln at another moment of maximum danger for democracy, the tug has to come, and better that it should come now instead of later.
Without losing his cool, President Joe Biden has learned from the wishful thinking of Barack Obama, who believed Republicans would listen to reason only to discover they were determined to wreck him. Republicans, in their lockstep opposition to the historic $1.9 trillion pandemic relief and stimulus bill, have proved true once again to their obstructionist nihilism. This time, of course, their obstruction failed, but only because the bill, a revenue measure, was open to a process known as reconciliation, whereby simple majorities in both houses of Congress are sufficient to win passage. With the filibuster intact, most of the rest of Biden’s program will require a 60-vote supermajority to pass the Senate. And although some important measures might conceivably win the backing of the required 10 Republican senators (assuming Democratic unanimity), others plainly will not, above all the crucial measures H.R.1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Bill.
H.R. 1 is a large piece of legislation, known as an omnibus bill, which provides numerous fundamental reforms in our voting system: easing, not restricting, voter registration; protecting the system from hacking and outside interference; and shining a light on the dark-money contributions concealed by current laws. The Lewis Voting Rights Bill authorizes targeted review of voting changes in jurisdictions across the country, focused on eliminating methods deliberately aimed at discriminating against racial minorities. It would be a formidable obstacle to the wave of pending Republican-sponsored voter-suppression legislation, amounting to, at the latest count, some 253 separate proposals in 43 states.
Together, H.R. 1 and the John Lewis Bill would bring the most sweeping reform of our electoral laws since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Yet far from radical, the proposals seek mainly to correct for the regression on voting rights and open elections in recent years, as inscribed in the retrograde Supreme Court Shelby County and Citizens United decisions that have gutted both the original Voting Rights Act and public accountability for private megadonors. The reform bills should be properly viewed as truly conservative measures, taking voting rights back to where the civil rights movement of the 1960s had taken them. Not surprisingly, though, Republican pseudo-conservatives have blasted the reforms as “a threat to American democracy” (the Heritage Foundation) and “a power grab” designed to create “a permanent partisan majority” (Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn). The word “conservative” has lost its meaning when Republicans use it.
In short, so long as the filibuster remains in place, the bills are almost surely D.O.A. in the Senate. Remove the filibuster, however, and the chances for passage are strong.
The repeal of the filibuster should thus be a no-brainer for Democrats. Why hand Republicans the cudgel to protect red-state legislators’ efforts to secure and entrench GOP control built on minority rule? As repeal involves changing the rules of the Senate and not a piece of public legislation, it requires only a simple majority to pass. Yet at least two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have so far resisted, claiming they want to encourage bipartisan cooperation in a hyper-polarized time. Repealing the filibuster, Sen. Sinema says, “runs contrary to the deliberative nature of the Senate, and would afford too much power to the majority party.” Senator Manchin, meanwhile, has stated he wants to make the filibuster “painful” to use. So, the door to change slowly opens.
The claim that without the filibuster the majority party would have too much power is bizarre on its face: Getting rid of the filibuster would not be giving the majority any more power beyond the power it enjoys by virtue of being the majority. The other complaint, that the filibuster is somehow fundamental to the Senate’s institutional core, is historically groundless. The filibuster is no cornerstone of senatorial greatness. It is an accident that has spun out of control.
The framers of the Constitution made absolutely clear that they favored strict majority rule in legislative matters. In “Federalist 22,” Alexander Hamilton described making a supermajority “requisite to a decision” as a kind of “poison” that subjected “the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser.” Still, the Constitution left it to the members of the House and Senate to devise their own rules for their respective chambers. At first, both houses heeded Hamilton’s wisdom, adopting what was known as the “previous motion” rule that permitted a simple majority of voting members to end debate. For nearly 20 years, the Senate got along well enough under the rule. Senators sometimes turned tactically verbose to delay action on a bill, but not so much that the previous motion was invoked very often. Then Hamilton’s archrival Aaron Burr, the vice president of the United States, got into the act.
In March 1805, Burr, under indictment for killing Hamilton in a duel a year earlier, stepped down from the vice presidency and delivered an emotional and highly praised farewell speech to the Senate. Along the way, reflecting on his years overseeing the Senate, he described the body’s rule book as a mess, filled with redundant and otherwise needless regulations, and he singled out the little-used previous-motion rule. The following year, the Senate abandoned the rule, not because the members wanted to find a way to become more deliberative, nor because they wanted to enable the minority to obstruct the majority, but because Aaron Burr, in a digression on housekeeping, told them they should, with no motive beyond the procedural.
The Senate now lacked any means to cut off debate, but the rise of the filibuster — the word derived from the Spanish filibustero, or “pirate” — came only in the years preceding the Civil War, when individual members would attempt to hold the Senate hostage by refusing to yield the floor for hours on end. At one critical moment, in July 1841, the powerful Henry Clay of Kentucky attempted to halt a debate over a bill he favored to charter a new national bank with a simple majority vote, provoking William King of Alabama to threaten a grandstanding filibuster: Clay, he remarked, should “make his arrangements with his boarding house for the winter.” The threat worked, and Clay backed down.
After the Civil War, Senate leaders from both parties tried to get rid of the practice but failed, as those opposed would simply filibuster the proposal to death. In 1917, when filibusterers threatened a bill supported by President Woodrow Wilson that would arm merchant vessels in the run-up to America’s entry into World War I, the Senate instituted the first so-called cloture rule, requiring two-thirds of all members present to close debate. Thereafter, though, the cloture rule could not stop southern Democrats from mounting the most notorious filibusters of all, blocking anti-lynching bills and every-other-variety civil rights measure from the 1930s until 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson finally engineered the breaking of the filibuster that threatened passage of his landmark Civil Rights Act, resorting to every legislative trick in the book to force unwilling senators into line. (Not that the filibustering of civil rights measures has ended: Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, for example, sidelined the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Bill in 2020.)
Several modifications of the filibuster have followed since the 1960s, most importantly, in 1975, a reduction of the number to three-fifths (or 60 members in the current Senate if all senators are present). Most recently, exceptions have been carved out regarding spending bills and the approval of executive-branch positions and federal judges. Yet even as the Senate has relaxed the means to get around a filibuster, the practice itself has become easier to undertake, requiring a simple request from any member, bypassing the need to grandstand on the floor of the Senate for hours on end. Not surprisingly, the number of filibusters, as measured by the number of cloture motions, which began rising fairly steadily in the mid-1960s, has skyrocketed in the deeply polarized 21st century. By grinding action to a virtual halt, the easily-invoked filibuster has virtually robbed the Senate of its legislative function. Thanks to the gridlock, the august job of U.S. senator has never before been so useless.
In all, there is nothing especially deliberative about the filibuster, which has always been a tool of obstruction. Calls for its elimination are nothing new. As politics have become toxic with the radicalization of the Republicans and asymmetrical polarization, its destructive anti-democratic power has intensified, even after the Trump catastrophe that culminated in the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. In the current crisis of democracy, with so many of our basic constitutional and majoritarian norms under attack — including the right to vote, the most fundamental democratic right of all — it is absurd to protect the filibuster as some sort of venerable guardian of sound government. In reality, the filibuster is nothing more than Aaron Burr’s haphazard folly, a well-intentioned mistake that for far too long has impeded the majority will in the name of deliberative democracy. It is time to get rid of the filibuster and allow Alexander Hamilton to finally triumph over his nemesis Burr, freeing the Senate once and for all from the “poison” of minority rule. There may not be a next time.
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Immigration: Reopening Mass Influx Facilities Goes Against Biden Administration Promises |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=58736"><span class="small">Jennie Rose Nelson, NACLA</span></a>
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Friday, 19 March 2021 12:50 |
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Excerpt: "The Biden administration has proposed legal frameworks to protect unaccompanied immigrant children, while also reopening facilities that have caused widespread harm."
A dorm at the Homestead compound in an image provided by the federal government in 2016. (photo: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services)
Immigration: Reopening Mass Influx Facilities Goes Against Biden Administration Promises
By Jennie Rose Nelson, NACLA
19 March 21
The Biden administration has proposed legal frameworks to protect unaccompanied immigrant children, while also reopening facilities that have caused widespread harm.
 n February 18, Biden’s U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 was introduced to Congress. The bill proposes extensive reforms to improve pathways to citizenship for 11 million people, alleviate court backlogs, and address the root causes of migration. According to sponsoring congresswoman Linda Sanchéz, the Act will “restore the United States’ commitment to human rights.”
After the unhinged brutality of the previous administration’s approach to immigration, this Act gives grounds for hope by substantiating Biden’s campaign promises to shift away from implicit criminalization and hostile enforcement.
Unfortunately, just days after the Act’s congressional debut, the administration announced that two Trump-era overflow facilities for unaccompanied immigrant children would soon reopen. The Carrizo Springs, Texas, Influx Care Facility has already admitted 890 children, and the notorious Homestead, Florida, Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children will likely reopen in the coming months under a new name, the Biscayne Influx Care Facility.
Biden has since called upon the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to oversee the care of 4,000 children in temporary shelters across Texas, further fueling incendiary media claims that we are facing an anarchic "border crisis.” Despite White House claims of operational improvements within these temporary influx facilities, community members insist that they are inherently dangerous and beyond reform.
The reopening of Carrizo Springs and Homestead not only undermine Biden’s campaign promises, they contradict various provisions within the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021. The Act arguably serves as the foundational blueprint for this administration’s immigration reform efforts. Such an immediate and massive rift between proposal and practice begs the question whether broad claims will indeed be backed by meaningful change.
Unaccompanied Immigrant Children and the “Best Interests of the Child”
Unaccompanied immigrant children are minors under 18 years of age arriving at the U.S. border without the presence of a biological parent. High rates of severe psychological trauma, compounded by age and language barriers to self-advocacy, make unaccompanied immigrant children one of the most critically vulnerable populations of migrants and refugees.
The Flores Settlement Agreement outlines primary obligations regarding the treatment of unaccompanied immigrant children in federal custody, establishes basic minimum standards of care, and mandates time limits for children in federal holding facilities. These obligations have gone unfulfilled in the past, and children have suffered physical violence, sexual assault, and medical neglect that have led to the deaths of several children.
Ironically, emergency influx facilities such as Carrizo Springs and Homestead are used to help federal agencies meet the Flores obligation of transferring children from Customs and Border Protection into Health and Human Services facilities that are, in theory, more equipped for childcare. Unfortunately, legal loopholes associated with federal property regulations, national emergency declarations, and institutional privatization have frequently rendered these facilities no safer. It’s time to revamp legislative protections for unaccompanied immigrant children.
Biden’s U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 acknowledges this need by building upon legal notions of “the best interests of the child,” a principle enshrined in relevant international human rights law. Specifically, the Act proposes enhanced partnerships between federal agencies and nongovernmental child welfare organizations. It calls for improved guidelines and protocols for basic minimum standards of care. It also reaffirms the responsibility of federal agencies housing unaccompanied immigrant children to provide adequate medical care, sanitation, nutrition, legal information, and the meaningful availability of qualified child welfare professionals.
The Act proposes reasonable access to detention and shelter facilities for both governmental and nongovernmental oversight mechanisms and increased funding to school districts to improve unaccompanied immigrant children’s access to education. The Act mentions support for and access to gender, trauma, and age-sensitive humanitarian assistance including “to fund national- and community-led humanitarian organizations in humanitarian response.”
Why would the Biden administration propose a bill that seeks to enhance legal frameworks to protect unaccompanied immigrant children while simultaneously reopening mass influx facilities that have caused immeasurable harm? According to Press Secretary Psaki, “This is not kids being kept in cages... ...This is a facility that was opened that’s going to follow the same standards as other HHS facilities. It is not a replication.”
But how different can these facilities really be while maintaining original infrastructure, mass bed capacity, and legal loopholes that previously allowed abuse to occur behind closed doors? According to local community activists and immigrants’ rights attorneys–not enough. Press Secretary Psaki’s comments are reminiscent of Kirstjen Nielson’s reference to these facilities as “summer camps.” Attempts to assuage public concern by semantically differentiating a “shelter” from a “detention center,” despite prisonlike conditions and testimonies of abuse, is an egregious misrepresentation of reality. Local community activists are acutely aware of this rhetorical pattern, and the fight against the reopening of Homestead is already underway.
Homestead
Abuses at the Homestead detention center are well documented. Its prospective reopening is cause for grave alarm. Amnesty International’s 2019 report, No Home for Children: The Homestead “Temporary Emergency Facility,” documents a consistent failure on behalf of the facility’s managing company, Comprehensive Health Services (CHS), to fulfill obligations regarding the best interests of the child. According to this report, prisonlike conditions, widespread case mismanagement, harassment, and abuse were exacerbated by “the continued categorization of Homestead as a temporary emergency facility–as well as its location on federal land–[which] enables it to circumvent the more stringent requirements governing permanent shelters.”
Facilities like Homestead and Carrizo Springs are not required to meet state regulations regarding child welfare, and they are not subject to the associated mechanisms of oversight, accountability, or staff vetting processes. Homestead staff members who were hired without proper background checks have been implicated in multiple cases of sexual abuse against children.
Homestead’s for-profit business model, which incentivized cost cutting and bed-filling over the safety and dignity of unaccompanied children, made it more dangerous. But regardless of whether CHS will resume management of Homestead, the physical site itself has proven unfit to house children in any capacity. The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) published a 2020 report detailing environmental conditions that pose “serious health and safety threats to the children who were housed there, including possible exposure to toxic chemicals from a neighboring Superfund site.” The report shows that there is “widespread contamination surrounding the shelter and the ability for many of these chemicals to travel in soil and groundwater raise considerable concern that detained children were exposed to unsafe levels of hazardous chemicals.” The hazardous chemicals found in toxic levels include pesticides, arsenic, and lead.
Mass influx facilities are fundamentally unable to offer the kind of individualized care needed for such a vulnerable population of children. According to Neha Desai, the Director of Immigration with the National Center for Youth Law, "The size of the facility itself really precludes the children's basic well-being." Desai interviewed children detained at Homestead and described many of them to be “living in this condition of constant toxic stress." Furthermore, the size of other large-scale facilities has contributed to grievous case mismanagement. With hundreds of children still separated from their parents in the wake of Zero Tolerance, there are valid concerns that this has led to children being permanently lost. It’s both horrifying and impossible to imagine the true scope of pain and suffering that has occurred because of these facilities’ negligence and abuse.
Community organizers across the country are calling for influx facilities to be shut down, and for the administration to instead prioritize investment into community and family-based care, home studies, and post-release services. The instances of negligence and abuse within mass influx facilities have been too frequent and too severe to reasonably consider them exceptions to an otherwise acceptable model. Homestead and Carrizo Springs do not represent an unfortunate inevitability, but an informed policy choice aimed at maximizing profits by disappearing a problem instead of committing to long-term, durable solutions.
At the very least, the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 demonstrates executive acknowledgment of reasonably humane standards for the treatment for unaccompanied immigrant children in federal custody. Unfortunately, this does not guarantee concrete action. Prison abolitionist movements have taught us that surface level reforms can further problematize efforts for meaningful change. The more normalized these influx facilities become, the more difficult it will be to dismantle them further down the road.
Mass influx facilities are fundamentally unsafe for children, and they must be permanently shuttered. AFSC, Freedom for Immigrants, and United We Dream were instrumental in the initial closing of Homestead, and local chapters are continuing to mobilize against the facility’s renewal. We are in an unprecedented political moment in which radical justice for immigrants is possible, but it will not happen without sustained community action. The lives and safety of thousands of unaccompanied immigrant children depend on our continued advocacy and attention.
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The Planet Cannot Survive Our Remorseless Pursuit of Profit |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=58735"><span class="small">Owen Jones, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Friday, 19 March 2021 12:50 |
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Jones writes: "Oil companies knew 50 years ago the huge damage they were doing. Their motive to ignore it is the same now as it was then."
'In 2020 we saw deadly floods in Indonesia (above), bushfires in Australia, both drought and record rainfall in China and extreme storms from the Philippines to Nicaragua.' (photo: Juni Kriswanto/Getty)
The Planet Cannot Survive Our Remorseless Pursuit of Profit
By Owen Jones, Guardian UK
19 March 21
Oil companies knew 50 years ago the huge damage they were doing. Their motive to ignore it is the same now as it was then
 apitalism is on a collision course with human life and the future of our planet. Each year, air pollution takes more lives than smoking: the last estimate suggests 8.8m deaths across the world, compared with 7m from cigarettes.
As documents seen by the Guardian reveal, the oil industry has known for half a century that pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels poses severe threats to human health. By the late 1960s, Shell’s internal documents warned air pollution “may, in extreme situations, be deleterious to health”, while by 1980, Imperial College was warning of “birth defects among industry worker offspring”. And yet the same industry actively lobbied against clean air regulations proposed to protect health and save lives.
This may cause moral revulsion, but the behaviour is perfectly rational. An economic system based on accumulating profit will downgrade all other considerations, including the sanctity of human life. There is no economic incentive for a fossil fuel company to willingly support measures that minimise the detrimental impact of their relentless search for profit: indeed, quite the opposite.
Take another example of a product that has a detrimental impact on the environment and our health: meat. Eating too much processed and red meat is bad for health, while meat and dairy production accounts for 14.5% of global greenhouse emissions. But healthier diets and lower emissions as a result of lower meat consumption would not accord with big meat’s desire to maximise profits. In 2014, the industry splashed out around $10.8m (£7.7m) in campaign donations, and another $6.9m lobbying the federal government. That investment paid off: in 2015, the US Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services declared that sustainability would not be considered as a factor in their flagship dietary guidelines.
In western countries, capitalist economic systems go hand-in-hand with politically democratic ones, theoretically providing checks and balances to corporate interests. However, in reality there is often a direct correlation between political influence and economic power. One 2014 study by US academics concluded that the US was an oligarchy rather than a democracy, because “economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interests groups have little or no independent influence”. In other words, organised wealthy interest groups – like fossil fuel companies – had a powerful impact in shaping government policy; ordinary citizens didn’t.
In the three years following the Paris agreement it was reported that the largest five stock market listed oil and gas companies spent nearly $200m (£153m) a year lobbying to delay, control or block policies to tackle climate change. Fossil fuel companies understand the need to signal their green credentials in an age of growing public awareness about the climate crisis, but are accused of “greenwashing” by activists. Recently, in a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission, a group of environmental NGOs challenged the oil major Chevron, saying that its climate-friendly image is misrepresentative when fossil fuels are still at the heart of its operations.
Executives and shareholders will safeguard and increase their wealth – which they will pass on through the generations to their fortunate children, giving them the financial means to protect themselves from the consequences of the climate crisis engineered by their ancestors. The planet, and the rest of us, will not be so lucky. Unless we are able to bring global temperatures below a 1.5C increase on their pre-industrial levels by 2030, we will suffer even more severe consequences.
In 2020 we saw deadly floods in Indonesia and Bangladesh, bushfires in Australia and wildfires in California, both drought and record rainfall in China, Siberian wildfires and extreme storms from the Philippines to Nicaragua. A growing climate emergency means ever greater threats to water and food security, destabilised ecosystems, and millions driven from their homes, no doubt to be demonised as refugees and migrants by the wealthy nations most responsible for emissions.
According to one report, the top 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions, while the poorest half of humanity are responsible for just 10% of global emissions. Yet it will be the global south that pays the heaviest price. This is not a bug of capitalism: it is a central feature. The remorseless search for profit – and an economic system that enables the capture of our political systems by multinational companies with bottomless pockets – represents a fatal threat to our health, to our lives, and to our planet. Without a determined effort to drive back the political power of these corporate titans – which means questioning the very fundamentals of our economic system – our planet will continue to perish. Time is not on our side.
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FOCUS: A Cuomo Accuser's New Claims of Harassment and Retaliation |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=46386"><span class="small">Ronan Farrow, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Friday, 19 March 2021 11:38 |
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Farrow writes: "In her first extensive interview, Lindsey Boylan sheds new light on a toxic workplace, as insiders detail the campaign to discredit her."
Lindsey Boylan's tweets accusing Andrew Cuomo of harassment helped spark an uproar that has since engulfed her life. (photo: Widline Cadet/The New Yorker)
A Cuomo Accuser's New Claims of Harassment and Retaliation
By Ronan Farrow, The New Yorker
19 March 21
In her first extensive interview, Lindsey Boylan sheds new light on a toxic workplace, as insiders detail the campaign to discredit her.
n the morning of December 13, 2020, Lindsey Boylan sat in the passenger seat of her family’s car, with her husband at the wheel and her six-year-old daughter in the back. She began typing a series of tweets on her phone. Boylan, a former special adviser to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, had felt increasingly troubled as press reports mentioned Cuomo as a potential Attorney General in the Biden Administration. For more than a year, she had been raising allegations on Twitter that Cuomo presided over a hostile and toxic workplace, initially drawing little attention. A week before, Boylan had tweeted again, and another former Cuomo employee had reached out to her privately, to share a story of being sexually harassed by the Governor. “I felt really responsible for what happened to this woman, because I didn’t do something about it,” Boylan told me, in her first detailed interview about her allegations. She saw the stories about Cuomo’s political prospects as a cause for urgency.
In the car, she began tweeting allegations that Cuomo had sexually harassed her, too. “@NYGovCuomo sexually harassed me for years. Many saw it, and watched,” she wrote. She referenced harassment about her looks and described an unpredictable and intimidating workplace experience. Her husband became aware of the tweets only as the reaction began to build online. “I felt like I was just exploded,” Boylan recalled. “And he felt like he was having a heart attack.”
As Boylan’s disclosures began to draw notice on social media, a group of current and former Cuomo staffers who served as his informal crisis-communications brain trust moved to squash them “in real time,” according to one person with direct knowledge of the effort. Members of that group included Melissa DeRosa, a senior aide; Rich Azzopardi, Cuomo’s spokesperson; and Steven M. Cohen, a former secretary to the Governor. They circulated Boylan’s tweets and held a series of urgent calls. The group had just emerged from a frantic effort to respond to allegations that Cuomo’s office had deliberately undercounted COVID-related deaths in New York nursing homes. They were “putting that to bed, and then she pipes up. And then it’s sort of a big scramble,” the person with direct knowledge of the effort told me. “It was, like, what the hell do we do about this?” Cuomo’s advisers arrived at a plan to leak Boylan’s personnel records, which included allegations that Boylan had bullied colleagues, some of them women of color. “The decision was made collectively,” the person with direct knowledge of the effort said. “That these are facts, the reporters should see them.”
An intermediary who says that he was not on the calls, Rich Bamberger, a former communications director for Cuomo who now works for the public-relations firm Kivvit, called several reporters and advised them to contact the Governor’s office. According to the person with knowledge of the conversations, Azzopardi then sent Boylan’s personnel files to reporters. By day’s end, several of the complaints about Boylan had appeared in stories, by the Associated Press, the New York Post, and the Albany-based Times Union. Boylan recalled being stunned by the articles. “I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe,” she said. In the ensuing days, Cuomo aides began contacting people who had worked under Boylan—which some of the recipients found intimidating, the Wall Street Journal reported last week. Cuomo advisers also considered releasing a letter attacking Boylan’s credibility and reputation, drafts of which were first reported by the Times this week. They ultimately decided against releasing the letter. “My life was, you know, for a period, destroyed,” Boylan told me. In a statement, Beth Garvey, Cuomo’s acting counsel, said, “With certain limited exceptions, as a general matter, it is within a government entity’s discretion to share redacted employment records, including in instances when members of the media ask for such public information and when it is for the purpose of correcting inaccurate or misleading statements.”
Boylan’s allegations largely faded from public view, until last month, when she posted a detailed account of her experience on Medium. Boylan told me, during a series of lengthy interviews, that she decided to disclose her allegations via online posts and initially declined interview requests from journalists because “having someone dissect my trauma is not something I wanted.” She said that the essay took her more than a month to write. “I realized I had to own this experience,” she told me. “It was something I was going to have to talk about eventually.” A series of disclosures about Cuomo from other women, including multiple allegations of harassment and one of groping, quickly followed Boylan’s. “Seeing Lindsey’s story was a huge factor in my decision to come forward,” Charlotte Bennett, a former Cuomo staffer who began publicly discussing her account of sexual harassment by the Governor after Boylan’s Medium post, told me. “Coming forward didn’t feel like a choice—it felt like my responsibility to validate Lindsey’s story and signal to others that it was O.K. to come forward.”
The revelations have left Cuomo’s political future in New York, which he has governed since 2011, in a free fall. He now faces probes by both the New York attorney general, Letitia James, and the state assembly, which this week retained a law firm for that purpose. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other prominent Democrats in the state congressional delegation have called for the Governor to resign. This week, President Biden, a longtime ally of Cuomo’s, said that the Governor should step down if the allegations are confirmed by investigators. Cuomo acknowledged some of the harassment allegations, saying, “I now understand that I acted in a way that made people feel uncomfortable,” but he maintained that his behavior was unintentional and denied all allegations that he “touched anyone inappropriately.” A spokesperson added, “As we said before, Ms. Boylan’s claims of inappropriate behavior are quite simply false.”
Until December 13th, Cuomo’s grip on power in New York had been near-absolute, a dominance secured at times through his willingness to discredit and intimidate his adversaries. Then Boylan posted her tweets. At first, it seemed as if she would meet the same fate as so many others who had challenged the Governor. Now, the Cuomo team’s response may turn out to be one of its final efforts to frighten an opponent into submission.
Between 2015 and 2018, Boylan served in several government roles, including deputy secretary for economic development. In 2016, she began interacting with Cuomo directly and had her first encounters with a workplace culture under him that she said was rife with bullying and retribution. “It was toxic, and particularly for women,” she said. Her description matched those of multiple current and former Cuomo staffers I spoke with, though others told me that the office culture was intense but not inappropriate. Boylan’s leaked personnel files reportedly contain allegations that she bullied women who worked with her, including Black women. Several former colleagues of Boylan’s, none of whom are Black, told me that they found the claims plausible and said that they had also found Boylan herself to be a hostile presence in the workplace. “I’ve seen Lindsey do her job well, but I’ve also had experiences where I felt belittled or bullied by her,” a former colleague, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me. Others disputed that account or said that Boylan’s conduct was consistent with a culture where volatility was the norm. “It was a hard place to be,” Joel Wertheimer, an attorney who served as Cuomo’s staff secretary, told me. “They were nasty and awful.” Wertheimer quit after just seven months, dispirited by the environment. He is now a campaign consultant to Boylan, who is running for Manhattan borough president. He added, “I also was not the best version of myself when I was working there.”
Boylan said that Cuomo set the tone, ridiculing several of his closest staffers, including Stephanie Benton, the director of the Governor’s offices. “I remember, Stephanie had a haircut that he kept making fun of her for all day in front of other people. And she was crying,” Boylan said. (Benton, who is still employed in state government, said that Boylan’s account was untrue and that the Governor had always treated her well, adding, “If I felt otherwise, I would speak for myself.”) Boylan also said that Cuomo repeatedly ranted about another staffer, a young male aide, being “fat.” The young male aide, who no longer works for Cuomo, declined to comment on his experience and asked not to be named. Boylan described the workplace culture under the Governor as aggressive and combative. At a party in the pool house at the Governor’s mansion, in Albany, Boylan recalled seeing a dartboard bearing a photo of Bill de Blasio, Cuomo’s antagonist since he was elected Mayor of New York City, in 2014. “I couldn’t believe how brazen that was,” she said. (A spokesperson for the Governor declined to comment on the dartboard.)
Boylan had her first interaction with Cuomo after a speech he gave at Madison Square Garden on January 6, 2016, when she was working as the chief of staff at Empire State Development, a state entity that promotes economic growth. She said that he seemed to pay an unusual amount of attention to her. Soon afterward, she said, her boss, Howard Zemsky, told her that Cuomo had a “crush” on her. (Zemsky did not respond to a request for comment.) During the next two years, Boylan said, the Governor repeatedly commented on her appearance and touched her more than she felt was necessary or professional. “He would put his hand on my lower back,” Boylan said, adding that her experiences mirrored those of another woman, Anna Ruch, who told the Times that the Governor touched her lower back and asked to kiss her at a wedding reception. “He would find a way to, like, touch me in passing—getting on the plane, getting off the plane,” Boylan said. “He frequently stared at my legs.”
Kelsey DePalo, who met Boylan when both attended Wellesley College, told me that Boylan was initially excited to work with Cuomo, but her attitude soon changed. “She would talk about how he was creepy,” DePalo recalled. “We would talk about, you know, how when, if someone opens a door for you, they can open a door, or they can open a door and put their hand on the small of your back. They can lean over to tell you something, or lean over to tell you something and also put their hand on your knee.” She added, “You can sometimes catch someone, like, looking at your outfit in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable. Or commenting on your appearance. And so she would describe how he gave her the creeps, and was very touchy-feely in ways that made her feel highly uncomfortable.”
Another friend, as well as Boylan’s mother and husband, told me that Boylan had discussed similar concerns with them in 2016 and 2017. Boylan’s mother, Karen Boylan, saw the behavior as a pattern. “I hoped she would stay away from him,” she told me. Karen told me that, years earlier, she had quit a job as an accountant at a law firm after her boss sexually harassed her. Boylan was in high school at the time, and told me that her mother’s experience, which she referred to in her first tweets about her harassment allegations, deeply affected her. Boylan’s mother said that she had described the harassment to her daughter to prepare her for what she might face in the workplace. “It was something that we talked about a lot while she was growing up,” Karen told me. “You know, you hope your children learn from this.”
In an e-mail sent on August 4, 2016, Karen wrote, to her daughter, “I was thinking after our conversation last night about Governor Cuomo… I would hate (couldn’t tolerate) living with a partner or husband who behaved like that with women. It sounds very inappropriate what he says to you too.” Three months later, Boylan forwarded her mother an e-mail in which a Cuomo staffer asked Boylan’s supervisor whether she would be at an event the Governor was attending. “It’s gross,” Boylan told her mother, in a text that day. “I just wish I could be told how great I am based on my intelligence and abilities rather than some dumb thing.” (A spokesperson for Cuomo said that the staffer who sent the e-mail “oversaw events and scheduling, so it was her job to understand what relevant senior members of the team—male and female—would be attending Governor events.”)
Boylan said that the Governor frequently sought her out, sometimes taking her away from substantive responsibilities to fulfill a role she felt was ornamental. The Regional Economic Development Council awards, in Albany, in December, 2016, were the culmination of a year’s work for Boylan. The monetary awards to local businesses and organizations are a part of Cuomo’s economic strategy and were a centerpiece of Boylan’s portfolio. After the awards, a Cuomo aide aggressively pressed Boylan to return to New York City on a helicopter with Cuomo and Maria Bartiromo, a television host, who had spoken at the event. Boylan refused. “He likes to put women next to each other,” Boylan said. “Like we’re part of his tools, or his little, you know, dolls.” (A spokesperson for Cuomo said that the flight arrangements were “not a point of contention.”) A few days later, Benton, the Cuomo aide, e-mailed Boylan, telling her that the Governor had suggested Boylan look up a woman that colleagues had told her was romantically linked to the Governor. “You could be sisters,” Benton wrote. “Except you’re the better looking sister.” (Benton told me, “That was my attempt at banter, not his.”)
At a holiday party held at an Albany convention center later that month, Boylan said, when the Governor approached her, she left the room. Later that day, she said, the young male aide, who Boylan said had been bullied, called and told her that the Governor wanted her to come to the Capitol. (The aide declined to comment on the call.) As Boylan walked to Cuomo’s office in the Capitol, she called her husband and told him that she was afraid. In a statement, her husband said that he could “sense absolute terror in her voice.” Cuomo showed her his office, and called attention to a cigar box that he told her was a gift from President Bill Clinton. Since childhood, Boylan had idolized Hillary Clinton. She once waited in line for hours to have a photo taken with her, an experience that she said “changed my life.” Boylan said that the obvious reference to Clinton’s sexual behavior disturbed her, because the Governor knew that she considered Hillary Clinton a role model. “It was deeply distressing,” Boylan told me.
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or much of his adult life, Donald Trump was known for going after his enemies with frivolous lawsuits, so much so that by the time he ran for president in 2016, he and his businesses had been involved in 
