"As I sit here, I'm saddened by the interjection of politics into a very significant issue," said state Sen. Toby Ann Stavisky, D-Manhattan, on Thursday as the chamber was voting on a bill crafted to fight human trafficking by increasing punishments and adding tools for prosecutors.
Her comments, offered in response to Republican criticisms of the Assembly's Democratic majority, reminded me of the famous line from "Casablanca" by Claude Rains' Captain Renault: "As I sit here, I'm saddened, saddened, by the interjection of gambling at Rick's Cafe Americain," or words to that effect.
If Stavisky is genuinely saddened by the interjection of politics into the human trafficking bill or any of the other nine elements of Gov. Andrew Cuomo's Women's Equality Agenda she must have spent the past 18 months in a state of abject, obliterating depression.
And with four days left in this year's legislative session, I recommend a crash diet of Prozac and screwball comedies, because there's more political interjections to come.
More than any other debate in Albany since the legalization of same-sex marriage three years ago this month, the trajectory of the Women's Equality Act, as it's now called, has offered the most compelling case study in the gap between policy and politics. Since those are both squishy terms, let's agree for the purposes of this column that "policy" denotes the agreed-upon rules of a civil society, and "politics" refers to the electoral bloodsport that places people in position to set those rules.
To date, the WEA has been an abject failure as policy, but a resounding success as politics. But that may be changing.
Introduced by Cuomo in his January 2013 State of the State address, the WEA braided together existing civil rights bills covering pay equity, domestic violence, sexual harassment in the workplace and more. It also roped in a version of the Reproductive Health Act, a Democrat-backed piece of legislation that supporters insist is nothing more than a codification of Roe v. Wade in state law.
Senate Republican leader Dean Skelos, however, says it opens the door to "abortion expansion" through vague language. If any of his conference members differ from him on that, they're keeping quiet about it — perhaps due to fear of inviting a right-flank primary.
Incredibly, Cuomo waited five months before introducing the WEA as an omnibus bill just two weeks before the end of the 2013 session. When it was clear that Skelos wouldn't allow it on the floor for a vote, Cuomo and the women's advocacy groups upended their former insistence on an all-or-nothing omnibus package and allowed the bill to be cracked into its 10 components. The nine non-controversial measures whizzed through the Senate on the final day of session, but the Assembly Democrats refused to take them up — a decision led by the women's caucus, which Speaker Sheldon Silver was desperate to appease after the tribulations of l'affaire Vito Lopez.
And that's how 10 one-house bills fail to make it to a governor's desk.
Like Sleeping Beauty, the WEA's status has remained motionless through 2014, despite the Assembly's re-passage of the omnibus bill and the Senate's a la carte action last week on the human trafficking measure and another WEA bill on workplace accommodation for pregnant women.
Absent a mind-boggling Senate coup before Thursday, the abortion plank isn't coming to the floor this year, period.
But because political pressure flows to where it finds an opening, there's an increasing chance that the Assembly will take up at least a few of the WEA stand-alones due to activists' increasing desire for the Legislature to, y'know, accomplish something.
Assemblywoman Deborah Glick, who continues to speak for the all-or-nothing faction, said Monday that she'd prefer waiting to "see if we can in fact change the dynamic in the Senate in November" — which is, as far as I can tell, tantamount to an admission that what's really at play here is the Democrats' desire to spend the next six months battering the GOP over the head with 10 mallets instead of just one.
During Thursday's debate on the human trafficking bill, several Republican senators argued that the Assembly's refusal to take it up postponed relief for victims of this type of crime. Well, OK — but why did the Senate wait until June 12 to pass a bill that could have been approved at the beginning of session on Jan. 8? Or is it only Assembly inaction that leaves women in danger?
This kind of talk by the Senate GOP drives Assembly Democrats bats, as they correctly point out that they've been pressing for many of the WEA components — often in more robust form — for years, only to see the measures bottled up by the Senate GOP.
I'll leave you with a metaphor: If a stickup crew barricaded inside a bank with 10 hostages offered to release nine of them, it's unlikely the police would refuse on the grounds that keeping everyone in the bank is more likely to make the thieves feel guilty enough to surrender.
They'd be more likely to take what's on offer at the moment, because lives are at stake.
cseiler@timesunion.com • 518-454-5619