N.Y. Gov. Cuomo seen as getting political boost from gay marriage bill

It also has stoked talk that Cuomo is rapidly transforming himself into a first among equals when it comes to the jockeying for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.

“It’s not just that he delivered on a major civil rights issue for the Democratic base in a huge state, it’s how he did it — winning bipartisan support and sticking with it when it seemed it might fail,” Democratic consultant Jason Ralston said. “Combine that with his name and his focus on the middle class, and he is at the front of the pack for 2016.”

Obviously, it’s early to be talking about the 2016 race, as the 2012 presidential election is more than a year away.

It remains unclear whether the Democratic nominee in five years will be challenging a Republican in the White House or will be in an open-seat race after two terms for President Obama. Given that, all speculation about the 2016 contest is taken lightly.

But political strategists are forever looking toward the future and the next big thing — and Cuomo made a claim to that title by guiding passage of the same-sex-marriage legislation through the Republican-controlled state Senate. (Four Republican lawmakers voted with Democrats to pass the measure.)

“With the world watching, the legislature, by a bipartisan vote, has said that all New Yorkers are equal under the law,” Cuomo said after signing the bill Friday.

For Cuomo, it brought to a close a largely productive session of the state legislature.

“Passage of gay marriage bill tops amazing year for Gov. Andrew Cuomo,” read the headline of a news analysis by the New York Daily News’s Albany bureau chief, Kenneth Lovett.

“Unlike the detached George Pataki, the boorish Eliot Spitzer and the feeble David Paterson, Cuomo found a way to work with a scandal-scarred and credibility-challenged Legislature,” wrote Lovett, touting Cuomo’s successes on a budget bill and ethics reform legislation.

Cuomo’s strong session has paid off with sky-high approval ratings at a time when most governors are struggling badly.

A Quinnipiac University poll conducted earlier this month showed that more than six in 10 New Yorkers approved of the job Cuomo was doing, while just 18 percent disapproved. Amazingly, 59 percent of self-identified Republicans said they approved of how Cuomo was handling his job.

Albany, NY - Senate Temporarily Restores NYC Rent Law ...

Albany, NY - New York’s Senate on Friday temporarily restored New York City’s rent control law until a longer term solution can be negotiated by midnight Monday.

The extension is retroactive to its expiration earlier this week and runs until midnight Monday, so all 2.5 million men, women and children in more than 1 million rent controlled apartments will be protected from any rent hikes or eviction landlords might have sought after the bill lapsed.

Lawmakers are now trying for an agreement on a long-term fix, a thorny issue made even more complicated by a deal brokered by Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo to link the rent-control measure with a bill that would cap the growth in property taxes at 2 percent a year statewide.

Democrats want rent control; Republicans want the tax cap.

New York City Democrats in the Assembly and Senate and Cuomo want to strengthen the rent law so thousands of more constituents don’t face spikes in rent and thousands more apartments don’t leave the program under some provisions Democrats have long criticized.

Republican senators, however, whose upstate and Long Island constituents don’t benefit from rent control, want to simply extend most recent law. Landlords who are major campaign contributors have pushed for that.

The law that dates to 1946 lapsed Wednesday night over a political fight. The bill to simply extend the law until Friday night for more negotiations was first rejected by Democrats, then by much of the Republican majority angry that New York City Democrats wouldn’t provide the votes that were expected to pass it.

Democrats were protesting their limited role in those negotiations, fearing that Republicans would win with a straight extension of what Democrats consider a flawed law for several years.

On Friday, similar fights broke out in the Senate. First there was an agreement on a new bill to temporarily extend rent control until Monday at midnight. Then that agreement fell apart, a special session was threatened, and the deal finally went through, all to extend the law three days.

Senate Democrats claim Wednesday night’s protest vote made its point and will result, with Cuomo’s effort, in a long term extension that better protects tenants.

“We felt on Wednesday that there was no momentum going forward,” said Sen. Adriano Espaillat, a Manhattan Democrat.

“There is finally some knocking of heads together in negotiations,” said Democratic Sen. Liz Krueger of Manhattan.

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