The Brennan Center Responds to Senator Dale Volker (R-59)

Senator Volker doesn’t even seem to understand what the Brennan Center (he calls it the “Brennan Commission”) is. It’s the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law – not some kind of anti-upstate lobbying group for downstate business interests, as Volker alleges.

I contacted the Brennan Center today to get a reaction to Senator Volker’s wildly misguided rant directed at Channel 2’s Scott Brown. Here’s what the Brennan Center’s counsel, Lawrence Norden, wrote:

Senator Volker’s main complaint about the Brennan Center’s studies of the State Legislature appears to be that we are located in New York City. We must confess, the Brennan Center at NYU Law School is, in fact, located in New York City! Since we are being honest, we might as well come clean and state that we are located in the heart of darkness, Greenwich Village.

I think it’s worth pointing out however, that the Amherst Chamber of Commerce (Amherst), Buffalo Niagara Partnership (Buffalo-Niagara), Center for Governmental Research (Rochester), Citizens for Better Government in New York (Rochester), Plainville Farms (Plainville), and the National Federation of Independent Businesses (Albany), among many, many other upstate organizations, have endorsed the findings and recommendations of our most recent report on the State Legislature. And none of them are located (or even have outposts) in New York City.

Somehow, they still managed to become fed up with Albany’s lack of transparency, deliberativeness and accountability. I am not aware of any of these groups having any agenda to soak upstate with high taxes or other nefarious schemes.

Senator Volker’s second major point appears to be that the Manhattan Institute is also located in New York City. On this point, he is slightly off. E.J. McMahon, who endorsed our report, and has done so much to point out problems with the Legislature, is a fellow with the Manhattan Institute, but also Director of the Empire Center for New York State Policy. He is based in Albany.

If you’re a legislator in Albany and you don’t even have the common decency to acknowledge that there are deep, systemic problems with the way Albany does business, your days in office ought be numbered.