Courts

The New York Judiciary Nomination Debacle Is Finally Over. For Good.

The nomination of Hector LaSalle is *finally* over.

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If you’ve felt like Alice in Wonderland constantly muttering “curiouser and curiouser” every time Kathy Hochul kept on pushing for her CLEARLY losing candidate for the chief judge of the New York Appellate Court, Hector LaSalle, you aren’t alone. Watching the Democrat governor of New York, fresh off of a too-close-for-comfort election, continuously go to the mat for the judge with a problematic record on labor, civil rights, and reproductive choice has been baffling.

From jump it seemed obvious that LaSalle wasn’t going to fly in front of a Democratically controlled state senate. Now a savvy politician might have pulled the LaSalle nomination over the holidays and hoped most of her constituents wouldn’t clock the blunder, but that’s apparently not Kathy Hochul’s style. She doubled down. Her attempt to characterize the opposition to LaSalle as fringe progressives failed spectacularly, culminating in an embarrassing attempt to hijack Martin Luther King Jr. Day and turn it into a LaSalle stump speech.

On January 18th, LaSalle’s nomination failed to secure the necessary votes to get out of the Judiciary Committee. And you’d have thought the spectacle of the nomination was over then. But there were rumors Hochul would file a lawsuit to force a full senate vote. Ultimately, New York Senate Republicans carried that pail for Hochul, filing a suit on February 9th to force a full vote. Rather than deal with the litigation process — and the potential of a legal precedent — Senate Democrats just said “bet.”

Yesterday, in a vote of 39-20, LaSalle’s nomination was officially rejected.

…And the process starts all over again, with Hochul saying in a statement, “Now that the full Senate has taken a vote, I will work toward making a new nomination.”

If the inverse of the old political adage “winners win” is true, and losers lose… well, none of this bodes well for the rest of Hochul’s term.

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @Kathryn1@mastodon.social.

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