The new slate of possible nominees to head New York’s highest court shows just how big of a battle Gov. Kathy Hochul has ahead of her.
First, the good. The seven names released Friday by the Commission on Judicial Nomination for Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals do give Hochul options.
That is, it’s not all crime-loving progs of the kind Deputy Senate Majority Leader Mike Gianaris wants to see legislating from the bench.
Anthony Cannataro, acting chief judge (still, thanks to the Senate’s disgraceful takedown of Hochul’s first pick, Hector LaSalle), and an eminently sane Democrat, is on the list.
So is Shirley Troutman, a former prosecutor and current associate judge on the court. She’d be the first black woman chief judge, is also no loony lefty and is seen by many as a possible front-runner.
But confirming either won’t change the court’s current 3-3 split between liberals and lefties, kicking that question down to the next high-court nomination.
Yet Gianaris and his camorra won’t be happy until they have flipped the court left in order to achieve by judicial means what they can’t — yet — by legislative ones.
Their top priority is a Court of Appeals that will favor their lawsuit aiming to allow the Legislature’s Democratic majorities another shot at gerrymandering New York’s districts for the House of Representatives, tossing the neutral map drawn up under court supervision after they ignored the state Constitution to disenfranchise Republicans.
After that would come a host of high-court action creating new rights for criminals and Dem-favored special interests.
Hochul’s obliged to send a name of the Senate in the 30 days. If she’s going to stare down Gianaris (as we hope), this time she needs to build bridges with moderate Dems in the Senate to avoid a repeat of the “assassination” of LaSalle, a respected jurist who’d’ve become New York’s first Latino chief judge.
The gov’s instincts are centrist, and she’s now refusing to let the far left bully her out of insisting on her modest fix to the no-bail law. But defeating progressives’ relentless, anti-democratic drive for permanent dominance over New York will require her to build a working “coalition of the sane.”
