By Chris Satullo
Accountability is coming for Andrew Cuomo and I, for one, would be happy to see it arrive.
Never been a fan, I admit.
But that’s not why I hope that, if these cascading allegations – about sexual harassment and a cover-up of COVID deaths at nursing homes – hold up, Cuomo will soon be out of the New York governor’s mansion on his ear.
It will mean that at least one of America’s political parties is occasionally able to put principle before partisanship, to find that some hypocrisy sandwiches are just too huge to swallow.
The Democrats, after all, are the folks who’ve spent the last few years styling and profiling as champions of the #MeToo movement and of truth-telling about the pandemic – easy to do when such sentiments served as a handy hammer with which to beat Donald Trump over the cranium.
It becomes a heavier lift when it means defenestrating one of the Blue Team’s biggest names, scion of a legendary liberal legacy.
Evidence of Cuomo fiddling with the stats on nursing-home deaths is pretty clear.
Sexual harassment claims are by their nature murkier.
That said, any woman who levies such a charge against a powerful man risks nasty abuse and career damage. This lends prima facie credibility to her claim. And so it is here with Cuomo’s accusers.
Yet, let’s not forget the sad case of Al Franken, ridden out of the U.S. Senate on slim and dubious charges in the first heat of #MeToo reckoning. That reminds us that the specific facts of each case do matter, that blanket judgments can mislead, that it’s vital to establish for each allegation the relative degrees of truthfulness, fault and harm before choosing a form of accountability.
Equally vital, though, in the case of elected or appointed officials, is to recognize this: While innocent until proven guilty is (supposedly) a core American principle, its main application is to criminal trials – where a defendant’s life, liberty or property can be at stake.
None of those are at risk in cases where powerful officials get accused of conduct unbecoming their office. Innocent until proven guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt is not the standard, for example, when deciding whether someone deserves a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court or should remain in control of the nation’s nuclear football.
Or should continue as chief executive of a powerhouse state of 29 million souls.
Being governor of New York is not a right or a possession. It’s a trust, a responsibility and a privilege. If you violate the trust badly, misuse the power grievously, even if the offense is not technically a crime, the trust can be withdrawn, the privilege revoked by those who granted it: the People, who are, in theory at least, sovereign.
If the women’s allegations hold true (and the smart money predicts they will), Democrats with one voice should tell Cuomo he has to resign.
We already have one party that will spindle the truth, deep-six its principles and gaslight its grass-roots to suit the egos of its leaders and their lust to cling to power; one party that will castigate and censure the brave remnants of its caucus who stand for principle, who hold to truth-telling and revere constitutional duty.
If the Democrats cannot summon the guts to say that what was wrong when someone with an R after their name did it is still wrong when one of America’s most famous Ds does it, then we really are doomed as a nation.
The Dems blew it, big-time, back in the ‘90s when they did not instruct William Jefferson Clinton to resign, when they made all manner of special-pleading excuses for behavior that today would get any Fortune 500 CEO fired in an instant.
With that failure, remember, Clinton’s apologists helped buy the nation 9/11, the Iraq War, the Katrina fiasco and the whole, devastating 1,460-day agony of the Trump Administration.
The Cuomo situation looks like one smaller-scale but telling shot at a do-over.
Let’s pray they don’t fumble it.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia