Now that Vito Lopez is out of the picture, the spotlight is on state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. The problem is, that spotlight is far too narrow. What we need here is a floodlight.
Newspaper editorial boards and prominent Republicans have called for Silver to resign in the face of two explosive reports detailing the extraordinary lengths Assembly leaders and staff went to in trying to cover up the repeated sexual abuse that Lopez, now a former Assembly member and ex-Brooklyn Democratic boss, inflicted upon his female staff members.
Yet to no one's surprise, the Democrats who control the Assembly have closed ranks and confined their criticism to Lopez alone.
We at Common Cause/NY have not joined the chorus calling for the speaker's head, because the problem is greater than the symbolic sacrifice of Silver can address. All 150 members of the Assembly owe their constituents a public debate to explain their support for Silver and their expectations for his continued leadership.
Common Cause/NY filed a complaint last fall calling on the Joint Commission on Public Ethics to conduct a thorough investigation of both Lopez and the Assembly itself. More than an indictment of any one leader or staff member, the JCOPE report and the recent attempt to sanitize it by the Assembly ethics committee are an indictment of the entire Legislature.
To describe Silver as "all powerful" gives each and every Assembly member a convenient out:
"I am as disgusted as you and wish the institution would change, but my hands are tied. Besides, even if we passed tougher oversight laws, the Republicans in the Senate wouldn't let them pass," earnest Assembly members will tell us.
And the response from the Republicans in the Senate?
No ringing calls for better oversight and enforcement of sexual harassment laws — or of any other ethical standards. Instead, there is glee over Democrats running afoul of the law and calls for Silver to step down.
Never mind that members of their own conference are serving jail time or have been forced to resign. That's old news. In Albany today, everyone has someone else they can blame for their collective failure to act.
The public isn't served by having the Assembly oust one leader and replace him with another equally protective of the members and the institution. We have had our differences with Silver, but there is no question that he is a skilled legislator. We'd still rather have his support for reform legislation than many others in the Assembly.
But the difficult question that isn't being addressed in the Lopez scandal is whether the speaker was actually doing what his conference expects him to do: put the interests of conference members first and foremost.
New Yorkers need to know that the right lesson has been learned from this tawdry episode. That lesson isn't to do a better job of covering up and protecting members. We do not want to see the adoption of tougher internal rules that continue to be ignored by the leadership and staff with little consequence beyond, perhaps, transient public embarrassment.
To rebuild the public trust, members of the Assembly need to couple their statements of support for Silver with a clear indication that they expect tough internal rules to be followed. Both houses of the Legislature need to plug the gaping hole in ethics oversight and grant JCOPE enforcement as well as investigatory authority.
Finally, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the Senate should join the Assembly in passing Fair Elections, a critical piece of campaign finance reform with real enforcement and public matching funds to finally signal that they understand who they work for: the people of New York.
Susan Lerner is executive director of Common Cause of New York.