A majority of the New York state Senate voted down Justice Hector LaSalle, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s nominee for chief judge of the state’s highest court, on Wednesday, making official a stinging defeat for Hochul that had been all but assured since mid-January.
This marks the first time the state Senate has rejected a nominee for chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals in the 46 years since it became an appointed role subject to Senate confirmation.
The partisan breakdown of the state Senate vote was highly unusual, as was the legislative wrangling that led up to it.
Although Hochul is a Democrat, her fellow Democrats’ opposition ensured LaSalle’s defeat on the state Senate floor. These Democrats objected to LaSalle’s judicial record in the areas of union rights, civil rights and abortion rights.
The Senate ultimately rejected LaSalle in a 39-20 vote. Just one Democrat, state Sen. Monica Martinez, voted for LaSalle, and one Republican, state Sen. Mario Mattera, voted against him.
In fact, LaSalle would likely not have even received a floor vote were it not for the state Senate’s Republican minority.
State Senate Democrats considered the matter closed after narrowly defeating LaSalle’s nomination in a Judiciary Committee vote on Jan. 18. The majority party argued that a committee hearing and vote were sufficient to fulfill its constitutional responsibilities to provide “advice and consent” on the governor’s appointees.
Hochul ― and state Senate Republicans ― maintained, though, that the state constitution required a vote on LaSalle’s nomination by the entire Senate. Hochul even kept open the possibility that she would sue for a floor vote on LaSalle.
In the end, state Senate Republicans, rather than Hochul, forced action on LaSalle’s nomination. State Sen. Anthony Palumbo, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, sued his Democratic colleagues on Feb. 9 to force a floor vote on LaSalle’s nomination. Oral arguments were scheduled to be heard in the case this Friday.
State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D), who notified members of the floor vote hours before it began, said in a statement before the vote on Wednesday that the chamber’s ruling Democrats were seeking to end an “ongoing distraction” for the legislature and head off a potentially lengthy legal battle.
“This court case, if allowed to continue, would’ve dragged on for months and stymied our judicial system,” she said. “It’s time to put this matter to rest.”
In his remarks on the floor, Palumbo accused Democrats of springing a floor vote on the GOP minority to avoid having to make their case in court and suffer a potentially embarrassing, precedent-setting defeat.
He noted that two state senators who were absent on Wednesday ― Luis Sepúlveda and Kevin Thomas ― were among the few Democrats who backed LaSalle’s advancement out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. (A third Democrat, Jamaal Bailey, who had voted to advance LaSalle out of committee in January without stating a preference on his actual confirmation, ended up voting “no” on LaSalle’s confirmation on Wednesday.)
“The chief judge of the highest court in a state of 20 million people is not a distraction, and neither is the constitution,” Palumbo said.
LaSalle is “an incredible jurist, who calls balls and strikes,” he added. “And he’s a plain old liberal Democrat, which apparently isn’t good enough.”
Palumbo and other Republicans relished the opportunity to shame Democrats for going to such lengths to stop the first Latino nominee for the top judicial post. In an effort to rebut charges that LaSalle has an anti-union record, at least one GOP lawmaker also noted that he came from a family with many union members.
But Democrats insisted that they were within their rights to reject a nominee based on a judicial philosophy that they considered unduly conservative, especially at a time when New York’s judiciary has the chance to offset the influence of the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.
“It’s not enough to say someone can call balls and strikes. It matters how you view the strike zone,” said state Sen. Andrew Gounardes, a Brooklyn Democrat. “And in case after case, I found significant concerns with how Justice LaSalle views the strike zone.”
The process for naming a new chief judge now starts anew, at a time on the legislative calendar when budget negotiations are likely to slow down a final confirmation vote. Before that begins, New York’s Commission on Judicial Nomination must draft a new list of seven potential nominees from which Hochul can choose her new nominee.
Beyond the judiciary, Wednesday’s vote, which locked in a short-term progressive win, could scramble party politics in the Empire State in ways that might have an unpredictable effect on the left in the future.
Hochul’s informal alliance with the state Senate’s Republican minority recalled an earlier era when other moderate Democratic governors collaborated more explicitly with Republicans in the state Senate. Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) was even accused of propping up a breakaway faction of centrist Democrats that helped keep the chamber in Republican hands from 2013 to 2018.