Andrew Cuomo

  Maybe there's a way for him to skate past his current troubles. He seems determined to do so. I'd say the smart money, however, is on preparations for the most graceful resignation he can pull off - followed by an avalanche of legal woes.

Before we get to the litany of misdeeds causing his present difficulties, let's put them in a broader context.

He's been instrumental in pushing the Democrat party leftward his entire career. He spent considerable time at the Department of Housing and Urban Development - a cabinet-level body that has done much to foment federal intrusion into American life in its unnecessary 55-year existence - first as assistant secretary for "community planning and development" and then as overall head.

As governor, he spearheaded New York's enactment of a law that made the state the sixth in the nation to completely upend the definition of marriage commonly recognized by the entire human race for thousands of years. He signed the most stringent gun control law in the nation, expanded Medicaid under the "Affordable" Care Act and increased the minimum wage to $15 an hour. 

In his personal life, he was married to a daughter of Bobby and Ethel Kennedy for 15 years and then had a "domestic partner" until 2019.

Is it gratuitous of me to make a point of setting the table with his leftie bona fides? After all, there have been right-leaning elected officials who have landed in hot water.

I think not. Cuomo's whole career has been built on virtue signaling. He's cared, doncha know, about the homeless, those in shoddy public housing, people with exotic sex lives who want to be legally recognized as spouse and spouse, those with concurrent health and financial issues, victims of gun violence and generally anybody who qualifies as beleaguered by life's vicissitudes. 

And it's tempting to permit oneself to be inured to his being beset by sexual-harassment charges. After all, we've seen everybody from Harvey Weinstein to Charley Rose to Garrison Keillor, for goodness sake - along with a slew of guys at Fox News, right up to the late Roger Ailes - fall hard when their ugly ways have come to light. 

But he is a sitting governor with a loud mouth and an air of self-righteousness.

And three women who are pretty adamant that he harassed them have come forward. There's photographic documentation of the wedding-reception situation. (Check out Ms. Ruch's facial expression.) 

What Charlotte Bennett had to say to CBS anchor Norah O'Donnell is pretty detailed and in a pretty damn sordid way:

"He is a textbook abuser. He lets his temper and his anger rule the office, but he was very sweet to me for a year in the hope that maybe one day when he came onto me I would think we were friends or that it was appropriate or that it was okay," Bennett said.

Bennett said their professional relationship took a turn on May 15 when she alleges the governor started asking her about her love life and became fixated, repeating over and over again her history as a sexual assault survivor. 

"I think it's really strategic. I think abusers look for vulnerabilities, previous traumas, the idea that maybe I'm more willing to accept behavior because I have a history of sexual violence. Perhaps I'm not as confident in myself because of my history," she said.

Bennett said she thinks Cuomo was grooming her and says he crossed a line on June 5. 

"He wanted a girlfriend. When he said he was lonely, I mentioned that his daughters had been around. And he also rejected that and said, "Yeah, I love my-- I love my daughters, but that's-- I want a girlfriend.'" Bennett said.

She said he asked whether she'd ever been with an older man. These questions made Bennett feel deeply uncomfortable.

"I thought he's trying to sleep with me. The governor's trying to sleep with me. And I'm deeply uncomfortable and I have to get out of this room as soon as possible," Bennett said.

"And to be clear, what made you think that he was trying to sleep with you?" O'Donnell asked.

"Without explicitly saying it, he implied to me that I was old enough for him and he was lonely," Bennett replied.

Bennett said that as she left work on June 5, she was trying not to cry and assumed she could no longer work for him.

"I'm not doing that again. I'm not engaging in that conversation or any other conversation. I'm not putting myself in a position where he physically comes onto me. It stops here. That's it," she said.

But Bennett said she was called back into the office on Saturday, June 6 and never talked publicly about the event. She said at one point on that Saturday she was the only employee working with the governor in his private office.

"I was terrified. I was shaking. I thought any moment something can happen and I have no power here," she said.

"And what happens when you're with the governor?"  O'Donnell asked.

"He asked me a few questions about how to use his iPhone and then sends me back to wait and then finally, he calls me in and he asks if I found him a girlfriend yet," Bennett said. 

"He asks you again?" O'Donnell said. "Yes. I say, 'Not yet.' I said I was working on it," Bennett replied.

His public statement about this is pretty damn lame:

"At work sometimes I think I am being playful and make jokes that I think are funny. I do, on occasion, tease people in what I think is a good-natured way. I do it in public and in private. You have seen me do it at briefings hundreds of times," he said. "I have teased people about their personal lives, their relationships, about getting married or not getting married. I mean no offense and only attempt to add some levity and banter to what is a very serious business."

Now, at least as serious as the sum total of this is, there's the recent further substantiation that his administration cooked the numbers for nursing-home COVID deaths:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s health department confirmed reports late Thursday that members of his COVID-19 task force altered a state Health Department report to omit the full number of nursing home patients killed by the coronavirus, but insisted the changes were made because of concerns about the data’s accuracy.

The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, citing documents and people with knowledge of the administration’s internal discussions, reported that aides including secretary to the governor Melissa DeRosa pushed state health officials to edit the July report so it counted only residents who died inside long-term care facilities, and not those who became ill there and later died at a hospital.

Both the WSJ and the Times put the decision-making onus on officials just below the governor's level of authority, but - come on.

It's made the Dems in the state legislature skittish enough that they've scaled back his emergency powers considerably:

The New York State Senate passed a bill to repeal Gov. Andrew Cuomo's expanded emergency executive powers Friday. 

The vote split straight down the party lines, with all 20 Republican senators saying the bill does not go far enough to curtail Cuomo's power and voting against it. 

"Today, under this new legislation the governor will no longer be able to issue any new directives, period," said Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins. "In light of recent events, however, it is clear that we need to move toward a system of increased oversight, review and verification between the Legislature and the executive branch, and also limit the powers granted to the governor."

The State Assembly is still in session and is expected to pass the same bill later Friday.

One more bit of context: The governor has a track record, substantiated by the claims of both Democrats and Republicans as a screaming hothead.  

My sense is that his career is close to flatlining.