The following appears in the July 2-8 issue of the Long Island Business News:

Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio is calling for New York’s bicameral Legislature to be abolished and replaced with a unicameral version because, in his judgment, the present structure is fatally flawed.

Lazio claims a one-house Legislature would cost less, be more efficient and “lawmakers would be held accountable for blocking good ideas because of partisanship or special interest pressure.”

Frankly, I don’t believe abolishing the existing makeup of the Legislature would improve the mess in Albany. To the contrary, it would make it far worse.

The father of the U.S. Constitution, James Madison, held that men are not angels and, therefore, need government because there are “sown into their nature” human tendencies that can lead to political oppression. To check these appetites he called for the creation of a mixed government consisting of three separate branches of government, including a bicameral Legislature, to balance power and to protect liberties. Madison believed this approach would “protect the people against their rulers” and “against their fickleness and passion.”

To avoid legislative tyranny and to achieve consensus that protects majority and minority rights, the Founding Fathers created a bicameral Legislature precisely because it would encourage gridlock and multiplicity of interests, thus making it difficult to secure a majority and preventing a single interest or a demagogue from dominating and imposing its will.

They agreed with Madison’s position expressed in Federalist No. 10 that by expanding the sphere of the Legislature “you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens … more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength and to act in unison with each other.”

Lazio is right that in Albany things are pretty bad under the present legislative system. One can only imagine how much worse it would be if the Senate were eliminated. The speaker of a one-party dominated house and the public employee unions would call every shot because there would not be another body to stop him or to slow him down.

A unicameral Legislature controlled by Shelly Silver or his successor would afford pro-job creation interests no shelter from the assaults of those pushing for more spending and higher taxes. A unicameral Legislature would deprive reform governors the ability to play one house against the other as Mario Cuomo did in the 1980s.

I disagree with Rick Lazio’s assertion that the problem in Albany is “the very structure of government itself.” New York’s legislative structure, which is fundamentally a clone of the federal one, is sound. The real problem is that many of its members hold office not to promote the common good but to promote what they perceive as their individual good – that which benefits them personally.

James Madison assumed that the Legislature in a constitutional republic, would be dominated by people of high character “whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.”

This is not the case in Albany. The state Legislature is populated by too many hacks interested solely in lining their pockets and those of their cronies. That’s why almost every week there’s an announcement that another legislator is being investigated, subpoenaed, indicted or jailed.

The Legislature can only be as good as the people who serve in it. And until there is a statewide voter rebellion that throws out the bums who are abusing the system, expect self-interest to take precedence over much-needed public policy reforms regardless of the Legislature’s structure.

The following appears in the June 18-24 issue of the Long Island Business News:

Angry voters throughout the nation are coming out in droves to punish incumbents they believe have betrayed them.  Sens. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Bob Bennett of Utah are just two of the political heavyweights that the electorate has sent packing.

A USA Today study released in early June claims that the Tea Party populist movement has also inspired record numbers of political novices to seek public office.  In 33 state primary elections, there has been a 35 percent increase in the total number running for congressional seats.  Of the 1,500 candidates, Republican outnumbers Democrats two to one.  In North Carolina, for instance, 66 people battled it out for house seat nominations – double the number of two years ago.

New Yorkers have also been expressing their wrath at the ballot box.  Last fall they voted out a slew of local incumbents including the Nassau and Westchester county executives.

I have not seen New York voters in such a state since 1970 when James L. Buckley was elected U.S. senator on the Conservative Party line beating Republican Charles Goodell and Democrat Richard Ottinger.  Back then, voters were furious over crime in the streets and college kids rioting against the Vietnam War.  This year their anger is very different; it’s directed toward shameless, corrupt tax-and-spend pols who are captives of public-service employee unions.

Since Democrats control every branch of the state government and every statewide office, one would think that anti-incumbent sentiment would bode well for New York’s Republican Party.  Sadly, this does not appear to be the case.

At their June convention, which was rife with vicious infighting, the Republicans proved they have not recovered from 12 years of Gov. George Pataki’s deliberate smothering of the state GOP organization. Pataki, who abandoned principle in favor of cronyism and patronage, preferred an impotent party to one that would train new talent not subject to Pataki control.

Convinced the GOP political bench was bare, the party’s desperate novice chairman, Ed Cox, talked a Democrat, Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy, into seeking the Republican gubernatorial nomination only weeks before the party convention. Both were humiliated when the convention roll call revealed that Chairman Cox delivered only 28 percent of the vote for Levy, far short of the required 51 percent.  Cox, who was expected to pump new life and funds into his moribund party, has proven to be a political empty suit.

The poster boy for the financially and intellectually bankrupt New York GOP is its designated candidate to face Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand – Bruce Blakeman. In 1998 Blakeman was creamed in his statewide run against Comptroller Carl McCall, receiving only 33 percent of the vote.  The next year, Nassau voters booted Blakeman from his county Legislature seat because he failed to grasp that voting to raise property taxes was not the best way to fix the county’s fiscal woes.

Blakeman, who has been campaigning since last fall and has raised very little money, boasts he is well qualified to sit in the U.S. Senate because he has a certificate in Homeland Security from Long Island University.  I recently learned that anyone can audit this program, including Osama bin Laden, because it’s offered online.

If the Conservative Party Senate candidate, former Congressman Joe DioGuardi, successfully petitions himself into the September GOP primary, expect him to beat Blakeman.  If DioGuardi runs solely on the Conservative line in November, he could very well receive more votes than the hapless Blakeman.

New Yorkers are demanding strong, bold leadership to fix a broke, dysfunctional state.  By failing to meet those demands at their convention, the Republicans have squandered an opportunity to take back control of state government and may have consigned themselves to a permanent minority status following redistricting.  Overtaxed New Yorkers deserve better.

This article I wrote appears in the New York Post on June 14, 2010.

The following appears in the June 4-10 issue of the Long Island Business News:

In a recent meeting held to discuss suburban problems, the county executives of Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester agreed that unfunded state mandates are consuming too big a share of their budgets. Nassau’s Ed Mangano, speaking for the group, said, “None of us can afford one more unfunded mandate. We want to make that clear.”

For years governors and state legislators have been evading the responsibility of funding programs they wanted by ordering municipalities and school districts to provide and pay for a host of services. To comply with these unfunded mandates, local governments are forced to raise billions in taxes. This, in part, explains why New York’s local per capita taxes are the highest in the nation.

Studies have revealed that New York imposes more mandates than any other state – over 2,000. These mandates consume on average 60 percent of county government budgets.

The Citizens Budget Commission has explained that the main reason for the crippling level of taxation is state policies on Medicaid, education and collective bargaining between unions and local governments.

The Manhattan Institute’s E.J. McMahon agreed: “What this underscores is that the problem we have is a four-letter word: cost. The costs are driven primarily out of Albany, by the state Legislature and the governor. But though the costs are dictated by Albany, Albany does not have to foot the whole bill; that’s the main problem. All they do in Albany is cash the campaign contributions from all the interest groups that benefit from their spending, primarily the unions.”

Medicaid is the poster child for unfunded mandates. Created during the “Great Society” heyday, Title 19 of the Social Security Act of 1965 established guidelines for a Medicaid program that states could adopt to provide medical services for the poor. The federal government would cover half the cost and the states would have to pay the other half.

New York quickly signed on to the program, added numerous amendments that made dependency a way of life and decreed that Albany would pick up only half the state’s portion of Medicaid costs; the rest of the financial burden would have to be shouldered by local governments. As a result, today the average New York county devotes about half of its property taxes to covering its imposed share of Medicaid costs. In Nassau County, the local share of Medicaid is nearly $250 million annually, in Suffolk $230 million – roughly 30 percent of their property tax collections.

The other cause of local government’s skyrocketing cost: New York’s public sector labor laws.

With employee salaries and benefits accounting for about 75 percent of municipal and school district operating expenses, possessing the power to effectively negotiate fair contracts is essential. Unfortunately this is not the case in New York. Over the years the state Legislature, succumbing to the demands of public employee unions, has enacted legislation that puts municipal employers at a disadvantage at the bargaining table.

Here are a few examples: The Public Employee Relations Board hinders municipal employers from implementing cost-saving policies such as subcontracting of services. The Triborough Amendment forbids employers from altering “terms and conditions of employment” after a contract has expired. As a result, teacher unions, for example, have no incentive to seriously negotiate since their members are guaranteed pay increases even in the absence of a contract.

These and scores of other laws, rules and regulations that favor municipal unions explains why the average salary of government workers is higher than private sector employees and why government benefits exceed those in the private sector.

Because time after time Albany’s “powers that be” have, for short-term political advantage, forced mandates without regard to potential consequences, New York’s local governments and school districts are on the edge of a fiscal abyss.