New York lawmakers move to strip Gov. Cuomo of emergency Covid powers as sexual harassment, death data scandals roil state

• New York state lawmakers began debate over a move to strip Gov. Andrew Cuomo of emergency powers he invoked last year to deal with the Covid pandemic.
• The effort came as the Democratic governor dealt with two major scandals: a cover-up of coronavirus nursing home death data by his administration and accusations by three women that he sexually harassed them.
• Cuomo earlier this week refused to resign over the harassment allegations but apologized for acting "in a way that made people feel uncomfortable."

New York state lawmakers on Friday began debate over a move to strip Gov. Andrew Cuomo of emergency powers he invoked last year to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic.

The effort came as the Democratic governor dealt with two major scandals: a cover-up of Covid nursing home death data by Cuomo's administration and accusations by three women that he sexually harassed them.

NBC New York reported earlier this week that the Democratic leaders of the state Senate and Assembly had reached a deal to revoke Cuomo's emergency powers that would allow issues such as Covid lockdowns to be determined by local authorities.

The bill could pass as soon as today. Cuomo has suggested he is willing to sign it.

Cuomo has issued nearly 100 orders related to the coronavirus pandemic, according to debate in the Senate on Friday morning.

Sen. Andrew Lanza, R-Staten Island, on Friday complained that the bill would not prevent Cuomo from acting unilaterally and imposing many if not all of the directives he has issued under the emergency powers authorization.

Lanza, who said he will vote against the bill for that reason, blasted "one-man rule" and the effects from "when you have one man have absolute power over your lives" since last March.

"If I would have told anyone two years ago that we were going to stand by and let a governor to tell student athletes that they couldn't play" or tell students they could not put on a play "people would say, you're crazy, no way, no how is that happening," Lanza said.

Still, the move to strip Cuomo's powers underscore what has been a growing rift between the governor and lawmakers from his own party.

Cuomo for years has been able to enforce his political will with less effective pushback from the Senate and Assembly than his predecessors faced.

On Thursday night, The New York Times reported that top aides to Cuomo last June rewrote a state Health Department report to take out the fact that more than 9,000 nursing home residents as of that month had died of the coronavirus. The move came as Cuomo was starting to write a book about what at the time was his widely praised handling of the pandemic.

The Times report contradicts the recent claim by Cuomo's aides that the death data was suppressed to keep the information from being used as a political weapon by the Justice Department, which at the time was under the control of Attorney General William Barr, a loyal ally of then-President Donald Trump. The Justice Department's query for the data, however, came months after the Cuomo aides removed it.

The suppression of the nursing home data has perplexed many because it did not change, in any way, the official death tally for Covid in New York. Instead, the move undercounted deaths related to nursing homes while reporting those deaths elsewhere.

"Not only did they withhold the information, they changed the information," Lanza said Friday.

"A lot of bad things happen when you give power to one man," he said.

The governor earlier this week refused to resign over claims by two former aides and a woman who worked in the Obama White House that he sexually harassed them.

But the embattled Democrat said in his first public comments on the women's allegations, "I now understand that I acted in a way that made people feel uncomfortable. It was unintentional."

Both the nursing home data suppression and the women's allegations are under investigation.

This is breaking news. Check back for updates.

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