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OPED COLUMNIST More Articles in Opinion » Bring On the Tarantulas

By GAIL COLLINS Published: June 10, 2009 TWITTER MOST POPULAR

I am deeply depressed about my state’s Legislature. This is an LINKEDIN EMAILED SEARCHED VIEWED embarrassing thing to have to admit, since it obviously suggests the EMAIL 1. Well: Let's Cool It in the Bedroom lack of a full and meaningful inner life. PRINT 2. OpEd Contributor: The Benefits of Failing at French Still, it’s bad. You may have heard that SHARE 3. Well: Train Like a German Soccer Star 4. Elaine Stritch, Broadwayâ€™s Enduring Dame, Dies New York is currently in crisis because at 89 two Democrats in the State Senate 5. Q&A: Burt Shavitz, the Worldâ€™s Most Famous defected, giving Republicans control. Retired Beekeeper The remaining Democrats turned out 6. Machine Learning: Easier Ways to Protect Email From Unwanted Prying Eyes the lights and locked the doors. 7. Germany Is Weltmeister Ever the optimist, Gov. David Paterson suggested that the 8. OpEd Contributor: The Dangers of Private Planes whole mess might turn into a “great opportunity” to create 9. OpEd Contributor: How the West Chose War in Gaza a new kind of Senate where every important issue is 10. Johnny Winter, Blues Legend, Dies at 70 brought on the floor for a free and open vote. That Go to Complete List Â»

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times apparently terrorized everybody, since within hours word Gail Collins leaked out that one of the defectors, Hiram Monserrate, ELSEWHERE ON NYTIMES.COM was wavering. This is a guy from Queens who is about to go

Go to Columnist Page » on trial for domestic violence. I cannot tell you how inspiring it is to see the fate of the legislative agenda

The Conversation hinging on a person who is under indictment for stabbing David Brooks his girlfriend with a broken glass. and Gail Collins talk As the sun sank in Albany, the senators were fighting about between which side had the key to the door. Lawsuits were columns. threatened. Nobody was happy except the reporters, who Grilled flank steak on ciabatta with red had not seen anything this interesting since Gov. Eliot All Conversations » peppers recipe Spitzer was driven out of office in that sex scandal and Softshell crab toast Paterson marked his succession by calling a press Pan bagnat Readers' Comments conference to confess that he had cheated on his wife.

Readers shared their This is why New Yorkers believe they have the worst state thoughts on this article. government in the nation. Read All Comments (165) » We could be wrong. I keep reminding people that unlike Illinois, none of our governors have been indicted for trying to sell a U.S. Senate seat. And unlike Illinois, none of our governors’ wives have tried to raise money for her husband’s legal defense team by eating a tarantula on a reality TV show.

“Every state thinks they have the worst,” said Ed Anderson of The TimesPicayune of New Orleans. He was reminiscing about a night in Baton Rouge when the State House dispatched troopers to drag absent legislators back to their seats, some in bathing suits from their hotel pools and others in various stages of inebriation.

New York is doing its best to nail down the distinction. The Republicans plan to install Pedro Espada Jr., a muchinvestigated Democratic state senator who has turned breaking campaign laws into a second career, as the new president of the Senate. Also, next in line for governor. Espada represents a poor district in the Bronx, and his sympathy for his impoverished constituents’ hopes and dreams is so great that he sets an example of upward mobility by living in the suburbs.

The coup was engineered, at least in part, by Tom Golisano, a billionaire who has failed in repeated attempts to become governor, even after underwriting his own political party to provide the nominations. Golisano spent several million dollars helping the Democrats get their precious twovote majority. In triumph, he traveled down from Buffalo to share his insights on how to resolve the state fiscal crisis with the new majority leader, Malcolm Smith. To Golisano’s outrage, Smith kept checking his BlackBerry while his patron was talking.

This is a truly shocking story. In this country, even presidential candidates nod thoughtfully while their deeppocketed donors explain how all the nation’s problems can be traced back to the devaluation of the zloty. A sixterm senator with an ego the size of a brontosaurus will sit mute, in apparent fascination, while the heir to an oil fortune reveals his plan to reduce crime by chopping off the fingers of shoplifters. Anybody who has been in politics for more than six minutes knows that the cardinal rule is to look interested when a rich guy is telling you his thoughts.

As awful as the whole saga has been, it is not quite as spectacularly bad as what happened in 2005 in Pennsylvania when that state’s dreadful Legislature voted at 2 a.m. to give themselves an enormous pay raise and promptly left for vacation. The constituents actually took note, tossing out 50 of the 253 lawmakers at the next election. The survivors were so terrified that they passed some serious reforms, including an 11 p.m. curfew. “Before, at budget time, it’d be horrible. We’d be following these guys around all night long,” said Jan Murphy of Harrisburg’s The PatriotNews.

Instead of a quick resolution, I’m hoping for a bigger disaster in Albany, something so outrageously bad that the whole state will rise up the way Pennsylvania did. I want to see legislators raising their own pay in bathing suits while defunding parks in the middle of the night during a sex scandal. If we want to make it better, we may have to be prepared to watch it get worse.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 11, 2009, on page A31 More Articles in Opinion » of the New York edition.

Past Coverage Feeling Slighted, Rich Patron Led Albany Revolt (June 10, 2009) Democrats Plot Strategy as G.O.P. Seeks More Defectors (June 10, 2009) Senate Democrats Try to Reverse G.O.P. Coup (June 10, 2009) ABOUT NEW YORK; Albany Drama Is Tragedy and Farce (June 10, 2009)

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