Mayor Bloomburg tries to get away with breaking the rules. more below the fold.
"We have to do something about low level graft, it's getting so big that it's beginning to interfere with the high leval graft"—Will Rogers imitating President Calvin Coolidge
The law is the law. Local authorities can change some laws, others they cannot, and there is something particularly skuzzy about trying to change a law that is above your "pay grade" by fiat, but that's what a tiny majority of the New York City Council did yesterday. Term limits was part of the City Charter, confirmed twice by the voters, and in one of the most dishonorable moves in recent New York history, they decided to chuck the whole deal and let Mayor Michael Bloomberg and themselves run again.
Okay, I admit it, I was never a Bloomberg fan.
I didn't vote for him the first time he ran. I never liked the idea of a billionaire buying an office, so I voted for the now-defunct Liberal party candidate, Alan Hevesi, who is now a convicted felon, and went home feeling like I did my duty to save the world. He did rather well but I couldn't bring myself to vote for a Republican and voted for Fernando Ferrer instead. Be that as it may, I was content that he won.
Bloomberg was actually a Democrat, but when he ran in '01, it was assumed that he couldn't win the Democratic nod and nobody really wanted the GOP one, so they let him have it. New York is a one-party city, and even though Rudy Guiliani somehow managed to get elected twice, (probably because he ran on the now-defunct Liberal line, which was there to permit people in the city to vote for Republicans with a clear conscience) the idea of a Republican mayor, even with one actually in Gracie Mansion, was almost unthinkable to New Yorkers, but the idea of Mark Green was even more unthinkable. (I know this is a bit too much like inside baseball, but that's the way local politics works.) In 2005, the ikk factor was gone and he was reelected easily. Everyone was cool and we knew that we'd get someone new in "09...or so we thought.
The reason there are term limits in New York is because the same bunch of people keep on running in gerrymandered districts and the internal workings of the parties are completely corrupt. Something had to be done, and it was. "Eight years and you're out" was something the people of New York understood and liked. The Politicians on the other hand were furious. After they were imposed, there was another vote later forced on the people by the powers that be. It went the same way as the first.
Bloomberg wants to be Mayor forever. He won't say so, of course, but he was talking about this a few months ago when the Dow Jones Industrials was still up around 12, 000. Now he says he's indispensable. There's going to be a lawsuit about this, there always is. I don't know how it'll end up, but it's just another reminder democracy requires eternal vigilance. You can't trust these people as far as you an throw them.
I apologize for the trolls trying to get me. They're a bunch of morons who love hurting people.