NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo is facing censure, a call for impeachment, and an effort to strip him of emergency powers over his coverup of nursing home deaths. Are, as the media would say, “the walls closing in on him”?
Summary
Latest polling shows New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s support slipping in the wake of his coronavirus nursing home scandal.
- Cuomo’s approval rating is down 17 points according to polling conducted after one of his aide’s admitted to tampering with coronavirus data to hide the large number of New York nursing home residents who died from the virus.
- The governor’s excuse of not wanting to “double count” deaths does not hold up to scrutiny as multiple other states confirmed they were able to more accurately report their pandemic numbers.
- Amid Cuomo’s shifting answers and bullying of New York state elected officials, the FBI has opened an investigation into Cuomo’s handling of nursing homes at the height of the pandemic.
- New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik said answers from President Biden’s Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland about preventing a conflict of interest in investigations like these were “not good enough.”
- Pressure from the state legislature is also growing as a group of lawmakers are attempting to strip Gov. Cuomo of some of his emergency powers and one Democrat lawmaker who faced Cuomo’s wrath is calling for his impeachment.
- Liberal New York paper NY Daily News ran an op-ed detailing the list of scandals close to Cuomo and the path for NY Republicans to take him down in the 2022 elections.
- The New York Times reported Cuomo has a long history of bullying and threatening staffers, reporters, and colleagues, which was played up for laughs at the beginning of the article.
- In a podcast interview with Wall Street Journal’s Jimmy Vielkind who covers Albany politics, Slate did its best Vox impression by discussing how difficult it is to discern just how much of an impact Cuomo’s directive on returning coronavirus patients to nursing homes had on the state’s death toll.
- Townhall.com pulls no punches, saying Cuomo and his gang are “liars, bullies, and some of them may be psychopaths” when recounting a story from fellow journalist Morgan Pehme of a menacing phone call from a Cuomo aide (the same aide who admitted to state lawmakers they manipulated death data) threatening to destroy her career.
- According to an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, questions are being raised as to whether Cuomo forced residential facilities for people with developmental disabilities to accept coronavirus patients, potentially opening up another scandal.
- Rich Lowry writes in the New York Post about the irony of coronavirus coverage, saying the media spent all last year venerating Cuomo while casting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as the villain.
© Dallas Gerber, 2021