What a great Editorial and right on the mark!

The end of an error

The only good thing to say about the Three Stooges free-for-all at the state Capitol this week is that it won’t happen again with Gov. Pataki playing the role of Curly. The question is: Will Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer step in as Shemp? He must not.

Over the course of roughly 24 hours, Pataki, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno put on a crowning display of the cynical, public-be-excluded, public-be-damned style of governing that has become a way of life in Albany.

Despite descending into the ooze of bartering legislation for a pay raise - essentially legal bribery - the boys left town having accomplished nothing. The pressing issue of confining sexual predators in mental institutions after their prison terms expire was tabled for the - let’s count - ninth year in a row.

Pataki had summoned lawmakers to a special session to deal with the so-called civil confinement of habitual and dangerous sex offenders. Officially, that was the only item on the agenda. But in keeping with the ways of Albany, there were secret wish lists, including that legislative pay raise, and the three officials haggled over topics, terms and conditions still unknown.

The Senate did unanimously pass Pataki’s plan for sex predators, but Silver’s Assembly never gave it so much as a vote. Instead, after a decade of refusing even to consider civil confinement, Silver’s Democrats stuck with a counterproposal with poison pills that Pataki and the Senate could never swallow.

Spitzer takes office in 16 days, and he has famously promised that everything changes on Day One. His reforms must include gubernatorial resolve never to engage in backroom deal-making with the Legislature. And never to mush issue upon issue upon issue into a giant megadeal in which nothing stands on its own merits. The era of this kind of haggling - you give me charter schools and I’ll give you an economic development project but you have to let me crack down on drunk driving - must be over…..