Amid Democratic Outcry Over LaSalle, Hochul Turned to Republicans

But the stakes were a lot higher than courtesy. Unlike with the other nominees, LaSalle’s only path to confirmation relied on Republican votes. His nomination had provoked an unprecedented open revolt from Senate Democrats, many of whom viewed his judicial record as evidence that he’d continue the court’s recent conservative turn. A week earlier, Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins had told Gotham Gazette that “the realities are that in my conference, the numbers are not there.”

So Hochul tried getting the numbers elsewhere, emails obtained by New York Focus through a public records request suggest.

Democratic legislative leaders, who wield supermajorities in both chambers, generally don’t allow anything that relies on Republican votes to pass. Hochul had initially been reluctant to break that precedent and work around her party: Senator Robert Ortt, the Republican minority leader, complained that Hochul had “refused to reach out to me or to engage in a conversation” about the nomination.

Just a few days later, that changed. On January 13 and 16, the emails show, the governor’s team arranged a Zoom meeting between LaSalle and Ortt, and another between LaSalle and Senator Anthony Palumbo, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Vincent Bonventre, professor at Albany Law School and an expert on the Court of Appeals, said the governor’s outreach to Republicans was striking, though not inappropriate.

“You have a Democratic chief executive, and instead of ensuring that there’s support for her nominee from her own party, she had to go seeking support from the opposite side of the aisle,” Bonventre told New York Focus. “How often do you see that, if at all?”

On January 18, two days after the meeting with Palumbo, LaSalle had his hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Many Democrats harshly critiqued his record, while Republicans mostly praised him. “His reputation clearly speaks for itself,” Palumbo said. When the committee rejected his nomination in a 10–9 vote, most Democrats opposed it and all Republicans were in favor.