New York City is a city of dreams.
We dream that our mayor is "really a Democrat."
We dream that he respects civil rights.
We dream that our mayor doesn't have to walk the GOP party line.
The dreams of New York are like a gentle blanket of snow.
That is to say, they quickly turn to brown slush.
The Bloomberg administration sought and received permission from the state's highest court to
disregard laws it doesn't like, putting it in league again with the Bush administration's willful disregard for the safeguards of democracy.
In a stunning blow to the separation of powers, the administration argued and the court ruled that the mayor is free to ignore any city laws he personally feels are not legitimate under state or federal law.
The city law at issue? Giving equal rights to gays, this time in the form of a law that would provide domestic partners with benefits similar to those enjoyed by married couples.
So, is Bloomberg anti-gay? The article says, "Even though the mayor opposes the law as illegal, he has said that he supports such benefits." I've written before when Bloomberg hypocritically claimed to support gay rights while using every legal tool at his disposal not to enforce them.
His argument seems to be that Citizen Bloomberg supports gay rights, but as a public official Mayor Bloomberg is forced to say that no such rights exist. Fine. I'll have Citizen Bloomberg over for dinner sometime. But I'll fight the Mayor every step of the way.
This ruling goes beyond Bloomberg's hypocrisy. Like Bush, he is claiming the right to be executive, legislator, and judge. As the court's chief justice wrote in a dissent,
"an executive who believes that a law is unconstitutional is not powerless but must follow a process by which the judiciary -- and not the executive -- determines the issue in the first instance."
That "old-fashioned" view did not prevail.
Unitary executive, welcome to New York -- and watch out for those piles of melting slush.