24 November 2021: Opinion - It’s Not Too Late to Punish Andrew Cuomo for His Covid Atrocities

It’s Not Too Late to Punish Andrew Cuomo for His Covid Atrocities

This opinion piece appeared in The New Republic, of all places. We've excerpted the following three paragraphs (emphasis ours):

An inveterate plotter, Cuomo will undoubtedly continue to seek revenge on his perceived enemies and rivals. But a report released Monday by the New York State Assembly as part of its impeachment investigation should be the final nail in his political coffin. The result of an eight-month investigation, it is a damning account of the myriad ways in which the governor abused his power. Much of the press coverage has unsurprisingly focused on the lucrative deal the governor signed for a book about his leadership during the pandemic and the report’s finding that “the former Governor’s challenges to the allegations” of sexual harassment cannot “overcome the overwhelming evidence of his misconduct.” But its most damning contents revolve around the cover-up of nursing home deaths in the early months of the pandemic—an indelible moral failing that the ex-governor still has not been held accountable for....

Per the Assembly’s report, the administration went to great lengths to ensure that only nursing home residents who died of Covid-19 in nursing homes were counted—residents who died in other facilities were not counted as nursing home deaths, deflating the number, even though it’s highly likely that many of those contracted the virus in their residences before dying in different medical facilities. Nationwide, more than 170,000 nursing home patients have died in the pandemic—the Covid Tracking Project estimated that one in ten nursing home residents have died of the virus—and more have died in New York than in any other state. While the true number of nursing home deaths is still cloaked in mystery, an investigation from the state attorney general’s office in January found that “published nursing home data reflected and may have been undercounted by as much as 50 percent,” suggesting that the figure could be higher than 15,000....

The Assembly’s report has revived talk of impeachment—although the fact that Cuomo has left office makes that prospect unlikely. Still, given the severity of the allegations and the fact that they have now been corroborated multiple times, there is a strong case for taking action to hold the former governor accountable. “The impeachment process, I don’t believe, is just to remove someone from office,” Democratic Assemblyman Angelo Santabarbara told Spectrum News. “It’s also to reject this behavior, reject what this governor was doing and was using his office for. We also have to set an example here.”

It would seem to stand in Cuomo's successors interests to put him away, once and for all. What will the dealmakers in the NY Assembly do?