New York Values

During one of the many Republican debates leading up to the 2016 Presidential Election, then-candidate Trump and Senator Ted Cruz sparred over the meaning of the phrase “New York values.”  Cruz attempted to contrast the views of the folks in New York City with the views of Americans in the rest of the country: “everyone understands that the values in New York City are socially liberal, are pro-abortion are pro-gay marriage, focused around money and the media.”  Trump refuted Cruz’s claim by bringing up the city’s response to the 9/11 attacks. 

Long before I began publishing my work on the internet, I experimented with writing some pieces.  I developed a framework for an article called “New York: A Slant to the Left,” which would have highlighted the state’s extremely liberal politicians as well as the state’s continued march to the left in Presidential elections.  I began writing this article before the 2016 election.  I would have noted that New York found itself one of only a handful of states where President Obama improved on his performance in 2012, when compared with his performance in 2008. 

Obviously, the calculus changed following the 2016 Presidential Election.  President Trump improved on Mitt Romney’s performance in the state.  Romney had only carried three of the state’s 27 congressional districts; all of them upstate.  Trump, on the other hand, managed to carry two of the four Long Island-based districts and the Staten Island-based 11^th District, while carrying the three districts Romney won by even wider margins.  President Trump narrowly won the 18^th District, located in the westernmost suburbs of New York City; New York’s 19^th Congressional district, more on that later; and the sparsely populated 21^st District, home to a majority of the counties in the state that flipped from Obama to Trump. While Romney would have lost Upstate New York in 2012, President Trump only lost it by 0.17 percentage points.  Had Upstate New York imitated West Virginia and declared independence from the city and its surrounding suburbs, President Trump might have actually bothered to campaign there.   

Even though New York swung towards President Trump in 2016, my point about the state’s extremely liberal elected officials still holds water. Take a look at all of the state’s elected officials.  Governor Andrew Cuomo, first elected in 2010, has faced primary challenges from the left twice despite the fact that he once suggested that “extreme conservatives” who believe in the sanctity of life, traditional marriage, and the Second Amendment “have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.”  Cuomo faced a strong challenge from actress Cynthia Nixon in his re-election bid last year.  Perhaps keeping this in mind, he dismissed the premise of President Trump’s signature slogan, “Make America Great Again,” instead offering another thesis that made the most anti-American forces cheer: “America was never that great.”  He also described Immigrations and Customs Enforcement as “thugs” in a debate with Nixon after she had suggested abolishing the agency. 

But in no way did Cuomo expose his radical true colors until last month, when he signed the Reproductive Healthcare Act into law.  New York’s abortion laws have always served as a stain on the state’s reputation.  Prior to the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, New York found itself among one of three states that had legalized abortion. Now, it has perhaps become one of the most radical states when it comes to abortion. One of the provisions of the Reproductive Healthcare Act erased a part of the state’s penal code that declared it a felony to “engage in conduct which causes the death of a person or an unborn child with which a female has been pregnant for more than 24 weeks.”  In other words, had Scott Peterson committed the barbaric act of murdering his pregnant wife and unborn child in New York in January 2019, as opposed to committing the crime in California in December 2002, he would not have faced double homicide charges. 

Liberals have fantasized about passing this law for more than a decade, going all the way back to when Democrat and prostitution enthusiast Eliot Spitzer won the governorship in 2007, following the retirement of longtime Republican Governor George Pataki.  However, Republicans or a coalition of Republicans and moderate Democrats, have controlled the Senate…until this past year.  The American people should take note of the Democrats’ biggest legislative priorities the second they gain a “trifecta” (or control of all three branches of state government).

Democrats can pretend that they will focus exclusively on pocketbook issues such as healthcare all they want but every time they take complete control of government, whether at the state or federal level, they immediately begin signaling their support for abortion.  State lawmakers in New Mexico have looked into passing their own radical abortion bill now that Democrat Michelle Lujan Grisham has replaced the term-limited Republican Governor Susana Martinez. For the past few decades, Republican and Democratic Presidents have played a game of musical chairs when it comes to the Mexico City policy.  The Mexico City policy, first signed into law by President Reagan, bans federal funding to non-governmental organizations that “perform abortions overseas or lobby for legalizing them in foreign nations,” according to Life Site News.  The Mexico City policy remained into effect until January 1993, when President Bill Clinton, who branded himself a “new Democrat,” as opposed to a Massachusetts liberal like Michael Dukakis, rescinded the policy.  Eight years later, his Republican successor, President George W. Bush reinstated the Mexico City policy; only for President Obama to rescind it eight years later.  The cycle continued in 2017, when President Trump reinstated the Mexico City policy.  The next Democratic President, whether he or she takes office in 2021, 2025, or some time in the distant future, will surely follow the lead of Presidents Clinton and Obama. 

Not surprisingly, Catholic bishops have expressed disgust that Cuomo, a Catholic, would sign into law a bill that has such blatant contempt for the sacrosanct Christian concept of respecting life from natural conception to natural death.  Bishop Edward Scharfenberger of the Diocese of Albany wrote an open letter to the Governor, telling him “your advocacy of extreme abortion legislation is completely contrary to the teachings of our pope and our church.  I shudder to think of the consequences this law will wreak.  You have already uttered harsh threats about the welcome you think pro-lifers are not entitled to in our state. Now you are demonstrating that you mean to write your warning into law. Will being pro-life one day be a hate crime in the state of New York?”  Scharfenberger and all the other bishops in the State wrote a letter condemning the bill, lamenting the fact that “our beloved state has become a more dangerous one for women and their unborn babies.”  The letter also pushed back on Cuomo’s notion that the radical new abortion law constitutes progress: “progress will be achieved when our laws and our culture once again respect each unrepeatable gift of human life, from the first moment of creation to natural death.”

While his father, the late former Governor Mario Cuomo, tried to justify his position for abortion by telling people he personally found it abhorrent but he did not want to impose his beliefs on others, his son seems to feel no remorse at all for his position.  He ordered several landmarks in New York City to light up in pink in support of the new law.  Unfortunately, this shade of pink did not represent support for breast cancer awareness. 

As for the other statewide elected officials in New York, the Attorney Generals have prided themselves on making life as difficult as possible for the Trump administration.  Attorney General Eric Schneiderman took an almost sadistic pleasure in going after the Trump Foundation.  He had to resign from his job last year after he faced credible allegations of abuse from former girlfriends. His temporary successor, Barbara Underwood, and his permanent successor, Letitia James, have gladly picked up where he left off. 

Ten years ago, Kirsten Gillibrand represented New York’s 20^th Congressional District in Congress.  The district, now numbered as New York’s 19^th Congressional District following redistricting in 2012, voted for President Trump in 2016 after voting for President Obama twice, and contains the northernmost and westernmost suburbs of New York City as well as some suburbs of Albany and a few counties in the Southern Tier.  She represented the district kind of well for a Democrat, she had an A rating from the NRA, opposed driver’s license for illegal immigrants and supported making English the official language of the United States; an idea which today’s Democratic Party would frown upon as xenophobic.  She flushed all of her moderate credentials down the toilet the second Governor David Paterson appointed her to fill the vacancy in the Senate caused by Hillary Clinton’s departure to become Secretary of State.  She moved to Long Island, voted against more of President Trump’s cabinet nominees than any other Senator, and jumped on the abolish ICE bandwagon.  Not surprisingly, she did all of this ahead of a Presidential run, which she announced last month.

New York found itself in the news again last week when Amazon announced that it would scrap plans to build a new plant in Queens that would have employed ten thousands of people because the new face of New York, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, would not stop whining about the $3 billion in tax incentives given to the company.  In response to the company’s decision to pull the plug on the new plant, Governor Cuomo slammed “(a) small group (of) politicians (who) put their own narrow political interests above their community…which poll after poll showed overwhelmingly supported bringing Amazon to Long Island City…”  Fox News’s Sean Hannity accused Governor Cuomo of doing the same thing by banning the “fracking of natural gas that would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in Upstate New York.”

Based on these recent developments, now seems like a good a time as any for Upstate New York to go the way of West Virginia and break free from the NYC-based tyrants that have essentially proclaimed abortion a sacrament while denying the residents of Upstate New York badly needed jobs by sucking up to the environmental lobby. Don’t get me wrong.  A lot of great people live in New York State.  Conservatives such as William F. Buckley, several Fox News personalities, and even President Trump trace their origins back to the Empire State. I used to live there myself.  But the people who run the state have run it into the ground and the people who represent the state in the United States Senate embarrass the great men and women of the Empire State. These people and any other politician who subscribes to “New York Values” as described by Ted Cruz will run the country into the ground the second they obtain the Presidency.