Hey Ho, Yo Yo, Andrew Cuomo's Got to Go
Another Lackal.
First off, I’m sorry that this Jackal is coming to you a few hours late. I won’t name names, but my wife (Elisabeth) invited her sisters (Becky and Amy) to spend the weekend with us and it was a little hectic.
Second, I have a good chunk of new signups this week and that’s because a lot of you SHARED the Jackal with your friends (I also signed up one person against their will). But I truly do appreciate all of you sending this around.
Two quick notes for the new sign-ups:
I don’t give you “must-reads” because that is too bossy. Instead, I do “should-reads,” because we are polite in this Substack.
I don’t know if I’ve said this before, but a lot of people charge money for their Substack. However, I will never, ever do that because the content isn’t valuable enough and I spend money on stupid things anyway.
With that out of the way, let’s get into the good stuff. The obvious big story: Andrew Cuomo.
Early last week, New York Attorney General Tish James announced the findings of the Commission she put together to investigate the “good” Governor, and (spoiler) they turned out to be pretty gross. The investigation - which was performed by two independent law firms - ultimately found that Governor Cuomo sexually harassed almost a dozen women and used the power of his office to cover up investigations and/or public scrutiny into his behavior. While I think the whole report (or at least its summary, which is about 14 pages) is worth reading, this is the headline for me:
A quick note on the two law firms that James chose to investigate Cuomo:
Vladeck, Raskin, & Clark, P.C., is a great and scrappy employee rights law firm that is more concentrated in domestic labor laws. They’ve won a ton of important labor cases against government entities and giant corporations.
Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP is what you’d call a “white shoe” law firm, meaning they’ve been around for a thousand years, are extremely prestigious, and are so rich they don’t even have to use commas in their name. They have multiple offices around the world (they were the first U.S. law firm to officially practice law in Japan) and annual revenue in the billions.
To put it simply, James’s selection of these two investigatory firms was - in and of itself - pretty commendable, since she got herself a workhorse and a showhorse, and together they put together an amazing report.
So, in light of the investigation’s findings, what is going to happen to Cuomo? I will say this, off the bat: There is a 0.2% chance that he will resign. It’s funny, but in a lot of the same ways that people throw around psychological diagnoses about Trump, many people who are close to Cuomo do the same thing. He is often described as an actual, full-on case of narcissistic personality disorder, which means it’s almost impossible for him to fully appreciate his wrongdoing.
Given that Cuomo will not resign, I would say there is a 99.8% chance that the New York Assembly will impeach him. The Speaker of the Assembly - Carl Heastie - has said pretty clearly that his caucus will impeach Cuomo if he refuses to resign:
On March 1st, the attorney general was authorized to undertake an independent investigation into sexual harassment allegations against Governor Andrew Cuomo. On March 11th, I authorized the Assembly Judiciary Committee to undertake a broad impeachment investigation concerning the conduct of the governor.
Now with the attorney general’s task completed, the Assembly is working to expeditiously conclude our investigation - which covers a broad range of issues - so that we can bring this sad chapter of our state’s history to a conclusion.
As I stated last week, the governor has clearly lost the confidence of the Majority members of the New York State Assembly. The attorney general’s report lays out in painful detail the many instances and ways in which he reportedly harassed and created a hostile work environment for the employees of the Executive Chamber and others he came in contact with (my emphasis).
I think it is incredibly significant that Heastie is saying Democrats are fed up with Cuomo. It seems unlikely that any Republican in New York would defend Cuomo at this point, but it’s quite a thing to say that your own Party is going to remove their leader. And reporting from the Times-Union seems to indicate that Democrats are going to move relatively quickly with the impeachment.
I’ll actually give you the must-reads on Cuomo right here as opposed to at the end, since I do want everyone to read this great piece on the significance of Albany’s Times-Union and its coverage of the Cuomo Administration.
Relatedly, the Times-Union has a great write-up on Cuomo’s nine other scandals.
The Washington Examiner also says the obvious: Cuomo has always been corrupt.
And here’s what I wrote about Cuomo earlier this year.
The other big news was the pretty amazing jobs report for July. In that month, we added 943,000 jobs, and upward revisions were made to previous reports from May and June, meaning that average job growth over the past three months was about 832,000 jobs a month. Virtually every other piece of the report was good: Labor force participation went up; wages went up; and the unemployment rate ticked down to 5.4% from 5.9%. Basically, it was about as good of a report that we could hope for, although I’m still trying to reach Donald Trump for comment on this headline:
Some should-reads, and most are going to center around the nutty story that Donald Trump (the human toilet seat in the picture above) was really trying his damndest to “do a coup.” We mostly learned the most about this on Saturday, after former acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen testified before the January 6th Committee. Kinda funny that a good chunk of Republicans didn’t want to investigate January 6th!
To break it down quickly:
CNN also had similar reporting. Chris Hayes broke down how Trump staying in power was “unnervingly plausible.”
Everyone has been making fun of Tucker Carlson for crushing on Viktor Orban, the current leader of Hungary. David French has a good piece on why Tucker sucks, and Matt Yglesias has a good piece on why Tucker sucks even harder.
Finally, there is a good piece in Slate related to our topic on the anti-vaccine grift movement from last week.
As a reminder, here is the publication schedule from last week:
August 23rd
September 13th
September 20th
However, if the infrastructure bill passes at some point in between all of those dates, I’ll have to write something on it.
Have a great week all my beautiful babies.
