ALBANY — Until recently, the acid rain of dissent
that has nagged the young presidency of Donald J. Trump — the rallies
and marches, the town-hall heckling, the phone lines jammed with calls
from irate constituents — was aimed mostly at those in Washington, with
no room to duck, even for the likes of Senator Elizabeth Warren.
On Friday, it found a far more obscure target.
“Traitor! Traitor!” a crowd of more than 100 protesters screamed outside a town-hall meeting
held by State Senator Jose R. Peralta of Queens. They were louding
venting at an assiduously uncontroversial state legislator who, as a
Democrat in New York City, had been accustomed to cozier treatment.
“You are empowering the Republicans — everyone in this room knows it,” one woman inside told Mr. Peralta
as protesters shut out of the meeting banged on the windows. “Your
constituents are angry. We are probably going to vote you out.”
The mathematics of power in Albany resists simple divisions. There are
Democrats. There are Republicans. There are the Independent Democrats, a
breakaway group
of eight legislators who control the State Senate in partnership with
Republicans — an arrangement the Independent Democrats say empowers them
to sway legislative priorities to the left, but that mainstream
Democrats blame for blocking a more uniformly progressive agenda. And
there is State Senator Simcha Felder, a Brooklyn Democrat whose
alignment with the Republicans has supplied them with a fragile majority.
For many liberal New Yorkers who assumed their state was thoroughly
blue, the Independent Democratic Conference’s very existence has come as
a nasty, if galvanizing, surprise.
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Source: The New York Times (via The Empire Report)
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