Vote with the Monroe County Republicans — or be punished
As I was looking at Friday’s LTEs in the D&C, this one caught my eye:
Voting with your conscience, heart
Congratulations to Monroe County Legislator Robert Colby, R-Ogden, for his position on voting on the issue of the county budget submission date for the upcoming year. Colby chose to vote his conscience rather than to support party lines. Monroe County residents are very fortunate to have someone with his level of integrity representing the Monroe County voters.
—EDWARD J. DOAN, HAMLIN
What was the vote on, again? Oh yeah– it was to push making the county budget public until after the election. It’s easy to see the real reason behind all the fancy city lawyer reasons they used to justify moving the date– voters might get mad, and actually hold the County Lej accountable. Heaven forbid!
What the letter doesn’t mention is that Colby and Ciaran Hanna, a Republican county legislator from Perinton, got spanked for breaking ranks with the Republican 17-12 majority in the lej, and voting against the move:
The republican majority removed Colby from the post of chairman of the legislature’s Agenda and Charter Committee.
Colby lost the $1,700 dollar-a-year stipend that went with it.
The Spencerport farmer was taken off the Transportation Committee and also no longer serves as vice chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee.
“I knew the vote had consequences, that it had the potential loss of the leadership roll I had,” Colby said.
Legislator Hanna lost his position as vice chair of the Recreation and Education committee.
“I’ve been around politics since I was 8-years-old, so it’s nothing that was a surprise to me and it really didn’t upset me much,” said Hanna.
It seems kind of petty, especially in light of Majority Leader Bill Smith’s justification for punishing them:
Majority Leader Bill Smith compares it to running a successful business.
“Typically people don’t get promoted to leadership positions in the company who have not supported the goals of the company in the past,” said Smith.
Ok, Bill, if you want to use the “party as company” analogy, what you just did was punish your sales reps for doing what the customer wanted instead of screwing them to benefit “the company”, as you wanted. Paging Ted Nixon! Ted lost to Bill Smith in 2005 by a mere 300 votes– 5% of all votes cast for county lej in his district. Bill was worried enough that I saw Maggie Brooks walking door to door with him in Pittsford village on election day 2005.
I’m always a little skeptical of Republican infighting, it’s often like kabuki theater, where there’s grand gestures and detours but the end is always the same. For example, the fake “GOP Civil War” over the torture bill recently where McCain and a couple others were allowed to look like “mavericks” but ended up essentially toeing the line:
The Supreme Court nullified Bush’s initial system for trying detainees in June, and earlier this month a handful of maverick GOP senators defied the president by forcing him to slightly tone down his next proposal. But they struck a deal last week, and the president and congressional Republicans are now claiming the episode as a victory.
Here’s hoping that Hanna and Colby are for real and not just playing along like good kabuki samurai, to be quietly reinstated or rewarded later.
This situation pales, though, beside the fact that the Republican Majority in the County Lej has punished Dems since being in power by shutting out all but a handful of Democratic proposals.
Related posts:
- City Paper on Monroe County Republicans “Collaborating”
- Monroe County Republicans caught in unfair campaign practices
- Check out the outdated Monroe County Legislature Website
- The Politics of divisiveness - Politics as practiced by Monroe County Republicans
- Monroe County Leg meeting tonight to vote on budget
[...] Anyone who’s watching can’t help but notice how John McCain is being positioned as a “maverick”, hoping to capitalize on voters’ disgust with partisanship.ÂÂ Anyone who’s watching closely can’t help but notice that McCain’s “maverick-ness” is, like Will Shakespeare said, “full of sound and fury and signifying nothing”.ÂÂ He says good sound bites to the cameras, then goes back in and toes the party line. [...]
[...] Look at the 2 Monroe County Legislature Republicans who voted with Democrats not to shift budget approval past Election day. Gee, what an idea to allow voters to assess candidates on budget issues BEFORE an election. What happened to them? They were stripped from their committees. Punished. [...]
[...] Recall that the there was a debate over when the Budget proposal should be released.  Before or after an election (read open or closed government). The Republican position was to release it after the election so here we are. [...]
[...] “Eleventh hour attack”? Cry me a river. The Republicans on the Leg are the ones who voted to move the budget unveiling date until after the election. (With a couple notable exceptions.) So, yeah, moving the date from the 2nd Tuesday in October to November 15 means you get 3 weeks– a month less than before– to go over a 700 page document. [...]
[...] Free thinking apparently being frowned upon, they were stripped of their committee assignments as punishment for crossing party lines. [...]