Assemblyman: Espada “auctioned” himself to the highest bidder
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- July
- 13
Assemblyman Jim Tedisco, R-Schenectady, is proposing legislation that would allow for recall votes of state or statewide officials they believed were derelict in their duties. Voters would have to collect a 50,000 signatures to do this for a statewide official and either 10 percent or 5,000 signatures for a state legislator, whichever is lower. Recall votes would have to take place within 90 days of receiving the petitions.
Tedisco (pictured here) criticized Sen. Pedro Espada, D-Bronx, who was at the center of a month-long leadership stalemate that brought business in the Senate to a halt. Espada and another Democrat in the Senate broke ranks help Republicans take control of the body away from Democrats. Espada was president pro tem of the Senate under the GOP coalition government. The second Democrat later went back to the Democratic conference, which created a 31-31 split.
After weeks of a stalemate, Espada went back to the Democratic conference and was elected majority leader last Thursday.
Tedisco’s proposal was prompted specifically by Espada, whom Tedisco claimed was willing to “auction himself off to the highest bidder four separate times.”
“Usually, when a mugging takes place it’s not done in broad daylight. But what we’ve seen with the Senate impasse over the last several weeks has changed that,” Tedisco said in a statement. “What Senator Pedro Espada has done, aided and abetted by many of his colleagues, is nothing less than an outright mugging of our democratic process and those who should and still can be the most powerful voices in our government.”
Tedisco said the most powerful voices should by the state’s 19 million residents. “The citizens of Senator Espada’s District or any other State elected officials should not have to wait until the end of a legislative term to send a message that their government is not for sale,” Tedisco said.
This entry was posted
on Monday, July 13th, 2009 at 11:33 am by Cara Matthews.
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Jay Gallagher has covered Albany for Gannett News Service since 1984 and has been Albany Bureau chief since 1989. He`s a native of the Boston area and likes to point out that in this millennium, the score is Red Sox 1 championship, the Yankees 0. 
Cara Matthews has been a statehouse correspondent in the Albany Bureau since August 2005. Prior to that, she covered Putnam County government and politics at The Journal News for nearly five years. Before that, she worked at newspapers in Connecticut and covered the state Legislature for one of them. 
