ALBANY—After yet another failure to hash out an agreement on how to bail out the M.T.A. this week, State Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith declared that it was no longer about the merits, but purely about “what gets us there with the votes we need to get it passed.”
It was probably his most explicit public admission that his narrow majority and the disparate agendas of his members are making it next to impossible to complete the state’s business. At this point, it’s not just the M.T.A. deficit—it’s also same-sex marriage, gun control measures and rent regulations, among other items.
What this means, as an increasingly gruesome backlog of the state’s most urgent business piles up in the non-functioning Senate, is that no one even knows who to talk to anymore about possible solutions.
