ALBANY—The Senate coup has a new acronym!
In a press conference just now, Democratic State Senate Leader John Sampson said that Republicans "care more about what I call T, triple-P."
That is, Titles, Power, Pork, and Patronage. It's unclear whether Sampson was deliberately making a reference to The Music Man, but the song pretty much writes itself. ("We've got trouble, right here in the Capitol city, with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for Pork…..")
"We can no longer hold 19.5 million people hostage. You can't use this legislation as a lever," Sampson insisted.
He repeated his pledge that the Senate will gavel into a regular session today and attempt to pass 24 noncontroversial fiscal bills. They are different than the 100-plus bills they passed last week during the coffee-run coup.
Asked if any Republicans would join him, he replied: "You've got to have faith."
Sampson insisted this was not a distraction from ongoing negotiations over the leadership, and of the discussions between some Democrats and Senator Pedro Espada Jr.
"Colleagues can meet with colleagues," he said.
He also took the time to get into a tiff with Fred Dicker over his column this weekend, which described Democrats as "thuggish."
"I got a disturbing call from my father yesterday, and he said, ‘Your mother would be turning in her grave; Fred Dicker called her son a thug,'" Sampson said.
