NY-LG: Newly elevated Gov. Kathy Hochul named state Sen. Brian Benjamin as lieutenant governor on Thursday, filling the vacancy created by her ascension to the top job earlier this week. Benjamin offers Hochul's ticket the proverbial "balance" that most New York governors seek: Hochul, a white woman, hails from Buffalo, while Benjamin, who is Black, represents a Harlem-based district in New York City.
Benjamin first won his seat in the Senate in 2017, earning the Democratic nod without a primary thanks to a New York law that allows party leaders to pick nominees in special elections. He easily prevailed in the general election in the overwhelmingly blue 30th District and went on to win two full two-year terms. Earlier this year, he ran for city comptroller but finished fourth in the primary after taking just 8% of first-choice votes and getting eliminated in the eighth round of ranked-choice tabulations.
Hochul was able to make her selection unilaterally, without a confirmation vote by the legislature, because the state constitution doesn't specifically prescribe a method for filling a vacant lieutenant governorship. Instead, as New York's highest court ruled in 2009 when this issue last came up, governors can rely on a catch-all provision that allows them to fill vacancies in government posts on their own.
This system creates the problematic possibility that the state's governor and lieutenant governor could both hold their posts without either having won election or the approval of state lawmakers. Such a scenario would arise should Hochul herself leave office early, allowing Benjamin to name his own replacement. In fact, New York flirted with this fate a little over a decade ago, when then-Gov. David Paterson, who rose to the governorship after Eliot Spitzer resigned in disgrace, was himself beset by scandal and faced calls to step down. It was Paterson who, in a surprise, secured that favorable decision from the courts, allowing him to pick Richard Ravitch as his second-in-command without legislative approval.
Not only does the current arrangement raise questions about democratic representation, that tenuous legal decision, which became law thanks to a narrow 4-3 majority, could always be overturned—once again leaving New York without a way to fill vacancies in the lieutenant governor's office (as things stood before Paterson's gambit). Fixing these issues, however, would likely require amending the state constitution, and there's been no sign of any interest in such an effort on the part of legislators.