In this episode of the Monday Morning Minute, Joanna Pasceri and Jack O’Donnell discuss the current political landscape in New York, focusing on Governor Hochul’s leadership amidst challenges, the controversy surrounding congestion pricing, ongoing budget talks in Albany, and the looming federal budget negotiations that could lead to a government shutdown. They also touch on cultural insights from baseball that relate to political strategy.
Summary of this Episode
Guests
- Joanna Pasceri: Director of Communications at O’Donnell and Associates.
- Jack O’Donnell: Managing Partner at O’Donnell and Associates.
Major Topics Covered
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- Governor Hochul is showing a more assertive leadership style.
- The lieutenant governor’s departure may not significantly impact Hochul’s position.
- Legal challenges are expected regarding congestion pricing.
- Budget negotiations in Albany are currently less contentious than in previous years.
- Federal budget negotiations are fraught with potential for a government shutdown.
- The Economic and Revenue Consensus Forecasting Conference highlighted both positive and negative budget outlooks.
- The importance of coalition-building in political strategy is emphasized.
- Cultural references, like baseball, can provide insights into political maneuvering.
- The unpredictability of political decisions can lead to significant consequences.
- The podcast encourages listeners to stay informed about political developments.
Full Transcript of the Episode
Note: This is a generated transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Joanna Pasceri (00:01.73)
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to our Monday Morning Minute, the podcast version of Monday Morning Memo, our award winning newsletter. This is when we take a deep dive into the issues featured this week with Jack O’Donnell, managing partner of O’Donnell and Associates and author of our Monday Morning Memo. Governor Hogan’s headaches are the top story this week from the problems with the New York City mayor to the uncertainty in D.C.
And now the public breakup with the lieutenant governor, Governor Hochul has a full plate. So let’s bring in Jack to talk more about this chaotic time. Jack, welcome to the podcast.
Jack O’Donnell (00:41.181)
Hi Joanna, yes, yes, interesting times as they say.
Joanna Pasceri (00:46.335)
a lot for Governor Hochul to juggle right now. So first off, I’m just curious what you think. How do you think she is handling it all?
Jack O’Donnell (00:55.938)
Well, I think on some of it, certainly on some of the substance and how some of these things work out, only time will tell. But my first reaction is that she’s thriving. We’ve really seen, especially around a lot of the Trump stuff, the congestion pricing stuff, the Eric Adam stuff, we’ve seen a feistier fighting, Kathy Hochul,
Joanna Pasceri (01:18.828)
Yeah.
Jack O’Donnell (01:25.366)
We’ve seen her a lot more sort of natural exposure on some of these issues and leading on some of them. And I think a lot of folks like the fighting Kathy Hochul.
Joanna Pasceri (01:36.552)
Well, after several public splits with the governor, the lieutenant governor now is giving her another headache, officially announcing he won’t be on the ticket in 26. How damaging is this to the governor? And should she give him the X? Can she do that?
Jack O’Donnell (01:52.758)
Yeah. You know, at the end of the day, I don’t know that it has a real impact on the governor. I do think that when people go to vote, they vote for the governor and not so much the ticket. think politicos spend a lot of time, how do you balance your ticket? What does this person bring? You know, creating coalitions and that can be helpful in state party conventions and things like that.
But I think the real focus is on the governor. And we’ve seen several other governors. Governor Pataki had a lieutenant governor who ran against them. Governor Kerry had some huge problems with his first lieutenant governor. So a lot of smoke about these things, but I don’t know at the end of the day, it has a big impact.
You know, I don’t know exactly, you know, the governor does have the power to do a lot of different things. I don’t know that she can actually fire her lieutenant governor. And that said, she’s taken some measures, cutting his staff, cutting his appearance, the substance, the policy things he was working on have been removed from him. you know, I think she’s putting some pressure on him.
But if you hear him, if he’s saying that he doesn’t, is unhappy with what she’s doing and how she’s running the state, the logical conclusion of that is to resign. And we’ve heard that, we talked about that in the memo highlighted some of the editorials, some of the other calls. I’ll tell you, and this is again, more in the nuance of public policy, but that the daily news new york daily news also had an editorial that said it’s it’s time to to stop electing lieutenant governor just let the governor of pick someone and and and appoint them on rather than have them on the ticket I I think that’s worth a look.
Joanna Pasceri (04:02.161)
Interesting, yes. So how do you think this would affect the lieutenant governor’s candidacy if he indeed decides to run against the governor in 26?
Jack O’Donnell (04:14.358)
Well, it remains to be seen. mean, he has said very clearly that he’s unhappy with the direction of the state. He’s unhappy with some of Governor Hockel’s leadership, but he hasn’t offered his own version. He hasn’t told us what he would do differently, what he would do better. We need to start hearing that if he’s going to be a candidate for anything.
Joanna Pasceri (04:41.392)
Another controversy surrounds congestion pricing. Governor Hockel standing firm, saying she won’t end it despite the federal government telling her she has to. So what happens now?
Jack O’Donnell (04:53.24)
Well, what happens now is the same thing we’re seeing kind of across the board with a lot of the early Trump administration decisions and directives is that it’s going to go to court. The MTA sued immediately to stop the halt, I guess you would say. And so we’ll sort of see where that goes. And in the meantime, you know, a big, big war of the words from from the president, the governor, and kind of everyone in between.
Joanna Pasceri (05:25.926)
Any prediction of how that court case would go? Which way?
Jack O’Donnell (05:30.136)
It’s really interesting because from a constitutional question, usually the federal government triumphs on most of these things. But here, what the court case is challenging is not a federal government decision because that original decision was to approve, was to allow the tolling. And now it’s a revocation of that.
That’s just really unusual. we don’t see, you we don’t have a lot of court decisions on that, at least prominent ones that I’m aware of. So that’ll sort of play out. I mean, there is a longstanding legal dictum that one legislature can’t find another, right? That the legislature this year can’t say this is what’s going to happen, right? To basically allow the new legislature when they’re elected the prerogative to change policies because that’s that’s how government works and you know following that you know you would like the federal government’s chances at the same time you know people need to the there was an approval it’s in place and you know it’s hard to just say well we changed our minds so I suspect that’s something that will not be decided in district court, but will go to a much higher court and maybe even the United States Supreme Court.
Joanna Pasceri (07:01.86)
Interesting. Well, in the memo this week, you touch on budget talks in Albany. Yes, they’re going on, but they tend to get buried with all this other news happening. And there was a meeting last week of the Economic and Revenue Consensus Forecasting Conference, a pretty big name. What is it? And what were some important takeaways from that meeting?
Jack O’Donnell (07:24.32)
Yeah, that’s that’s sort of a big deal. It is a big name. know, New York’s budget process, as we’ve covered and as most people have experienced, can be a little a little wild west. And there aren’t so many rules and regulations. And so a number of years ago, the state Comptroller Alan Hevesy, who I worked for at the time, who was a great, state controller in spite of other things that may have happened. You know, he really proposed a system to try to professionalize much of the budget and this committee and this meeting was a big part of that. You know, we used to have budgets. We had some that dragged on through the summer, through the fall, and usually that was a fight about how much money the state would have and how much, you know, expected revenue was to come in. So, the idea of this is it gets together all the smart people from the tax and budget committees, from the state controller’s office, from the governor’s division of budget, so they can come together on kind of a number. You know, that is less, as a result of that and a few other processes, that is less at risk and at, you know, dispute.
But what we heard this year, and at least the revenue side of the budget is pretty straightforward this year. What we heard is that, you know, state tax collections are on track. They may have even gotten a little better. The national budget picture has improved slightly. But there’s a dire warning there of really dark clouds out in the horizon. And that’s whether that is on the federal budget, whether that is the impact of tax cuts, the impact of tariffs, just sort of the uncertainty on what all of what may happen there. Right. think even the president who’s pushing his economic policy has conceded there. There may be plenty of pain in between. Right. There are disputes about whether anyone agrees that that that will lead to prosperity afterwards, I think there’s understanding that there may be some hard times in between and that was the conclusion of the committee.
Joanna Pasceri (09:51.52)
A warning, so to speak. You are in Albany right now. How are budget negotiations going so far?
Jack O’Donnell (10:00.408)
Quietly, slowly. Again, this is perhaps on track to be the least contentious budget in 10 or 15 years. Of course, that can change in a dime here and there’s uncertainty out there. Decisions in Washington could change that. But right now, they’re on track and I would really hope an on-time budget may be too much to wish for in New York a relatively on time budget seems within everybody’s grasp.
Joanna Pasceri (10:34.495)
Sounds good. And speaking of budgets, the deadline to prevent a federal government shutdown, March 14th, it’s coming up fast. So both the House and the Senate have now approved their competing budget plans. And what happens next now in D.C.?
Jack O’Donnell (10:50.444)
Well, what happens next is they need to find a way to agree and iron out some of the details. mean, we’ve heard a lot of alarm from Democrats about the resolution that the House passed on party lines that House Republicans voted for about an impact on Medicaid.
That said, the House resolution doesn’t mention Medicaid and just calls for future cuts in the areas that include Medicaid. So, you know, to finally resolve something, they need to actually put some black and white around that. And that becomes a lot harder for some folks to vote for once you finally have to get down and make these decisions. There’s also big some big differences around the potential tax cuts. The Senate is saying that these Trump tax cuts should be permanent. The House resolution does not, in essence, fund those for permanency, so they would need to make some other cuts to do that. So a lot of that needs to be resolved. then, you know, they’re trying to do this budget for something called reconciliation, which is a really arduous process where the…Parliamentarian has a lot of say over what goes in and what goes out in a process called the birdbath, which I suspect we’ll write about in the memo sometime soon as we get closer to reconciliation. But I doubt any of these things are done by March 14th. And so that’s why we’re hearing whispers about talks on a continuing resolution, which would buy us some more time. That could be a week, two weeks or they’re definitely whispers about six months and trying to do that. But to do that, you need democratic votes likely in the House. And right now Democrats are saying they won’t do it without a commitment that the White House is going to actually abide by whatever is in the congressional budget. And that’s an agreement that not only our House and Senate Republicans loathe to make.
Joanna Pasceri (13:01.436)
Stay tuned, we’ll be following that closely. Favorite read this week in our news links?
Jack O’Donnell (13:08.952)
Certainly one that the White House would be reluctant to make. So I think things are going to get messy over the next two weeks. And I think people should absolutely be prepared for government shutdown.
Jack O’Donnell (13:27.874)
Well, I’ll tell you, one of the articles in there is about Earl Weaver, the great baseball manager from the Baltimore Orioles. I’m a Yankees fan myself, but he was a great manager. It was all about his uncle being a bookie and learning from the bookie kind of how to foresee things in baseball, how to kind of run the numbers and do some of that moneyball stuff.
Know, a generation before folks had computers doing it. I found that really fascinating and frankly found some of it applicable to our political and governmental worlds here. So I really enjoyed that.
Joanna Pasceri (14:08.546)
A great read for some baseball fans and it gets us geared up because opening day just a few weeks away. Here comes spring, right? All right. Right. Well, Jack, thanks for the deep dive into this week’s Monday morning memo. If you are not receiving our memo in your inbox each week, don’t miss out. Stay up on the issues that could affect you or your business. To sign up, just head to our website at odonnelsolutions.com.
Jack O’Donnell (14:17.778)
Absolutely. Can’t come soon enough.
Joanna Pasceri (14:36.727)
That’s odonnellsolutions.com. Thanks for joining us for our Monday Morning Minute. We’ll be back from the lobby with Jack O’Donnell.
