Advice and Consent + The Sham Charter Revision Commission
Currently, the City Council has advice and consent authority over more than 70 positions that are appointed by the Mayor. This process allows Council Members to ask nominees tough questions, evaluate their merits, and ultimately vote to approve or disapprove their nomination. This week, we are seeing the importance of this ability following Mayor Eric Adams’s nomination of Randy Mastro to serve as Corporation Counsel, the City’s top lawyer. Given Mastro’s controversial record, the Council has a critical role to play over the next month in evaluating if he is the right person for the position.
Earlier this year, the Council passed Speaker Adrienne Adams’s bill Intro. 908, which would grant the Council advice and consent authority over 20 new positions, including the Commissioners of the Parks, Sanitation, and Social Services Departments. This would mimic the way that Congress has the ability to review the President’s nominees for Cabinet Secretaries. I supported this bill because I believe the nominees for these important positions should go through a rigorous vetting process to ensure they are prepared to take on the urgent challenges our City is facing. I view Intro. 908 as an essential good government measure that would install needed checks and balances on the City’s executive branch.
Because this bill would change the City’s Charter, it needs to go to the voting public to be approved or disapproved as a ballot question. The Council filed for the question to be included on the ballot in the upcoming elections this November. However, Mayor Adams has sought to block the question from reaching NYC voters. He is attempting to put his own questions on the ballot because as Mayor, his questions would be allowed to reach the voters first, pushing back the public vote on Intro. 908 back to a future election.
In order to manufacture an air of legitimacy around his procedural block, the Mayor launched a sham Charter Revision Commission that was stacked with his allies and ran a public input process that Speaker Adams aptly criticized as “wholly unserious”. I joined Council colleagues at a Commission hearing last week to criticize their work. See my testimony to the Commission in full here. Last week, the Commission reached its predetermined outcome—producing new ballot questions that would undermine the Council’s ability to legislate. I see this move as not only a cynical power grab, but retaliation for the admirable actions the increasingly bold Council has taken over the last year, including overriding the Mayor’s vetoes to pass a ban on solitary confinement and requiring more demographic reporting on NYPD stops.
I oppose the ballot questions that the Mayor’s Commission has proposed and urge him to allow the public to vote on expanded advice and consent authority.
