Richard Brodsky, the Legislature’s brashest champion

ALBANY — The coronavirus pandemic has taken away a champion of the state Legislature — former Assemblyman Richard Brodsky died at the age of 73 on Wednesday after displaying signs of Covid-19.

“Lots of my colleagues downstate are coping with dire circumstances,” stated Assemblyman Kevin Cahill (D-Kingston), who sat subsequent to Brodsky in convention for a decade. “We’re keenly delicate to that. However the Meeting can be a household, and Richard was a member of that household.”

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“He was maddening and in addition good. I simply can’t think about the New York firmament with out him,” stated Marathon Methods’ Liz Benjamin. “So many individuals taken from us, and also you don’t need to diminish anyone … however a political world with out Richard Brodsky’s a tricky one.”

Brodsky, a Democrat who represented the Westchester aspect of the Tappan Zee from 1983 by means of 2010, was some of the seen members of the Legislature all through his tenure and one in every of its loudest advocates after he left workplace.

He was brash, foul-mouthed and argumentative.

“He drove individuals loopy, as a result of he was at all times provocative,” stated former Assemblyman Jim Brennan, who recounted being handled to lunches by his future colleague when Brodsky was a freshman and he was a poorly paid staffer.

However he was additionally identified for his “unbelievable humorousness,” as Brennan put it. He had the “finest humorousness in politics,” stated Assemblywoman Cathy Nolan (D-Queens), and was able to connecting each incident in Albany to a quote from the Mel Brooks traditional “Blazing Saddles,” in line with Cahill.

His pals took particular notice of his intelligence. He was “the form of inventive thoughts New York wants after we transfer ahead from this catastrophe,” Nolan stated.

“He was his personal particular person and he was not afraid to toot his personal horn, however he was additionally uniquely clever. There was nearly no dissent from the concept Richard Brodsky is likely one of the smartest males to have ever served within the state Legislature,” Cahill stated. “He’s not in that dissent, both.”

Brodsky made waves within the early 2000s, when he was chair of the Companies, Authorities and Commissions Committee.

It was “a committee that no one handled or heard of earlier than he took the reins,” stated SUNY Empire State Faculty President Jim Malatras, who labored for Brodsky from 2000 by means of 2007.

He utilized his subpoena energy greater than every other fashionable committee chair.

“He tormented the company world in New York — the utilities, the cable firms,” stated Brennan. “He tormented Mayor [Mike] Bloomberg on many issues.”

The themes of his torture included the New York Yankees. He spent the tail finish of his tenure investigating how the Bloomberg administration helped finance a brand new stadium within the Bronx, uncovering details such as a deal by which Metropolis Corridor was given a luxurious suite in trade for parking areas given to the baseball workforce.

In 2007, he was the loudest voice towards Bloomberg’s push for congestion pricing, and helped persuade his convention to kill a plan that had the help of each the Senate and governor.

However his longest-lasting legacy will possible be on the kinds of wonky points that almost all voters don’t even know exist.

“Brodsky believed in authorities, he advocated for a way the internal workings of presidency work, and I feel that’s what he’ll be remembered for,” stated Barbara Bartoletti, the previous legislative director of the League of Girls Voters of New York State.

He spent years advocating for reforming the state’s authorities, which he famously dubbed “Soviet-style bureaucracies.” In 2009, he succeeded in passing laws that imposed important new oversight and transparency mandates on a “shadow authorities” that had been uncontrolled because the days of Robert Moses.

However he was no starry-eyed reformer. Bartoletti recalled assembly with him as she was lobbying for laws to ban any presents to lawmakers value greater than a cup of espresso.

“He introduced us into his internal workplace and we sat down, and the very first thing he stated to me is ‘Barbara, can I give you some corrupt cookies?’” she stated. “Apparently, any person had given him cookies … And he was strongly making his case that what we had been asking for was simply nonsense, {that a} legislator couldn’t be corrupted by the providing” of such a small reward.

And that speaks to what maybe has been his most important function in New York’s political discourse in current many years — he was one of many loudest advocates for the significance of the Legislature as an establishment. He was at all times prepared to function a counter to those that argued that the Meeting was essentially corrupt and often warned of the hazards of the governor’s powers over the funds.

“He liked the Legislature, even after he left it,” stated Benjamin. “And he would defend it to the top of the earth.”

“In some ways, he was an institutionalist as a lot as he was a Democrat,” Malatras stated. “He very a lot was a scholar of republican types of democracy, from Montesquieu to the Founders … He essentially believed within the energy and the independence of the Legislature as a result of he thought that was the closest to the individuals, and that was in his core. It wasn’t a political factor, it wasn’t a calculation, it was basic to his worldview.”

That worldview also can clarify his give attention to points like authorities: “Once you create these different constructions which might be insulated from that dynamic … it’s a harmful precedent, in his thoughts,” Malatras stated.

Brodsky sought greater workplace a number of occasions towards the top of his profession. He introduced his candidacy for the 2006 legal professional normal main that Andrew Cuomo finally received, however dropped out to become a kidney donor for his daughter. The next 12 months, he was one in every of a number of individuals who vied to fill a gap within the state comptroller’s workplace, an appointment that was ultimately given to Tom DiNapoli. And his Meeting profession ended when he once more sought the legal professional normal’s workplace in 2010, ending fourth in a five-way main received by Eric Schneiderman.

“An ideal progressive champion,” in Brennan’s phrases, he labored as a lawyer for the Working Households Occasion for years. He received a landmark case stemming out of the 2004 Albany County district attorney contest that allow the WFP spend cash in Democratic main races, paving the best way for the WFP’s future involvement in campaigns just like the one run by Cynthia Nixon within the 2018 gubernatorial marketing campaign.

On March 12, the day that Cuomo started to place New York on lockdown in response to the disaster, he won a WFP challenge towards guidelines created by the Public Financing Fee that threatened to destroy the state’s minor events.

Ten days later, he penned one in every of his weekly columns for the Occasions Union. This one, the next-to-last that might bear his title, centered on how the pandemic would change the best way points like supply-side economics and immigration are seen.

“We’ll get previous the an infection and its financial fallout,” he wrote. “The world that survives shall be profoundly intellectually and politically completely different from the one which died.”