Your Check Isn’t in the Mail, and Your Senator’s Angry - New York Times

ALBANY, April 27 — “Real Tax Relief, Real Results,” trumpeted the taxpayer-financed mailing that State Senator George D. Maziarz, a Republican, sent this month to his constituents in western New York to promote the property tax rebates that the Legislature passed as part of its budget. The mailing even included a check for “hundreds of dollars” (”not an actual check,” read the small print) with the senator’s name on it in three places.

There is just one hitch: The real checks are not exactly in the mail.

Gov. George E. Pataki declared this week that the Legislature’s tax rebate plan, which altered a similar plan that he had proposed in several key respects, was unconstitutional and void. He said he had no plans to send out any checks to New Yorkers this year.

In doing so, Mr. Pataki is leaving his fellow Republicans in the State Senate twisting in the wind. The Senate Republicans, who fear they could lose their slim majority in November for the first time in decades, had championed the rebates.

Now, after dueling with the governor and then overriding his budget vetoes, they are going back to their districts empty-handed, with only vague hopes that they can work something out later in the session, or vague threats that they might sue the governor.

Several Republican senators said that they felt abandoned by the governor in their hour of need. Instead of telling constituents about the big checks that they could expect just before election day, they find themselves talking about an another Albany standoff.

They are so concerned about losing the senate the RINO’s are trying to buy your votes with our tax dollars. If they had done the jobs and governed as Republicans they would not have to worry about getting re-elected.

Instead of cutting taxes, reforming Medicaid, restructuring the most dysfunctional legislature in the country, they have spent us into billions of dollars in debt. We are now once again the highest taxed state in the country, highest utility rates, highest unemployment, and rate at the bottom of the list for being a business friendly state.

….and now they want to sue the governor. See what happens when no one challenges these people. We have elected Lawyers that write the Laws and only they know how to circumvent them and they do it all the time.