It’s late October in Albany. The leaves on the trees framing the Capitol have turned a rust orange and the constant, steady wind barreling down the Empire State Plaza is an ever-present reminder that the quiet which overtakes the capital city for six months out of the year is quickly evaporating ahead of the start of a testy legislative session in January.
Another reminder for the limited number of reporters, employees and staffers who rattle around the Capitol in the offseason could be that we’ve been gifted with an additional round of Hochul vs. Skoufis this week, in the form of potential institutional retaliation against Gov. Kathy Hochul during the upcoming session over her recent vetoes of legislation sponsored by State Sen. James Skoufis.
The ongoing feud, which started over the senator’s harsh rebukes of the governor, and what other lawmakers do or don’t have to say about it, is highlighting the dynamic between the governor and Democratic majorities in both houses of the legislature going into a tough budget season when all of them are up for reelection.
Skoufis told Spectrum News 1 that “discussions” among some senators have included talks of attaching adversarial names to executive driven bills and potentially causing trouble for the governor’s nominees before the Senate, while indicating that he would like to see additional Senate oversight of agency implementation of the state budget and legislation.
“You could provide program bills to folks who are being disrespected by the administration, obviously there are nominees who come through the Senate, and the Senate has to confirm the governor’s preferred nominees to all sorts of boards and commissions and agencies,” he said. “There are a lot of levers and a lot of conversations happening.”
It came on the heels of Deputy Senate Majority Leader Mike Gianaris musing to Politico on Wednesday that the Senate could retaliate over the vetoes by putting Skoufis’ name on executive priorities that must pass the legislature if the majority leader approved, though Gianaris later expressed an openness to moving on and ensuring an effective working relationship with Hochul.
“I wonder what would happen if he was the sponsor of one of her program bills that gets sent to us,” he said. “It’s not my call, it’s the leader’s call. But it’s an interesting thought experiment given the circumstances.”
It’s a back and forth, which while rooted earlier, got Albany insiders buzzing in May after Skoufis accused Hochul of acting like a “monarch” in a fiery floor speech after she held up the state budget for weeks to ensure her legislative priorities made the final package in an acceptable form. It came back to mind as Skoufis led the investigation into the state’s troubled CDPAP transition — Skoufis has pressed forward over accusations of bid-rigging, while the governor’s office has accused him and State Sen. Gustavo Rivera of being “obsessed” with what they describe as a necessary move for the program — and switched into another gear when Hochul, on a Friday morning in early October, vetoed a slew of bills with Skoufis’ name on them, with a few more vetoes trickling in the following week.
While the official response was that Hochul reviews bills “on the merits” there was acknowledgment of the tone from a source close to the governor’s thinking who told Politico at the time that Skoufis shouldn’t be “surprised” by the vetoes.
“This is offensive, childish, and unbecoming, Trump-y behavior,” Skoufis told Spectrum News 1 on Thursday.
Kara Cumoletti, Hochul’s Albany press secretary, reiterated in response that “Governor Hochul evaluates all bills on the merits.”
A source with knowledge of the situation confirmed that discussions are taking place within the Senate over potential avenues to respond, but two other sources familiar with the inner workings of the Senate majority seemed uninterested in touching the issue, implying that Skoufis’ Senate floor speech and subsequent comments were executed in a manner in which a tactical rebuke from the governor shouldn’t have come as a surprise, and that he’s going to have to figure out how to effectively work with Hochul on behalf of constituents in a state Capitol in which she holds the cards, thanks to New York’s heavy executive lean.
Skoufis was far from the only lawmaker who was frustrated with Hochul over the budget this spring. Several lawmakers revived discussions over a potential constitutional amendment to rein in the governor’s power over the executive budget process, and he told Spectrum News 1 that he “suspects” those conversations to continue at the conference’s annual December retreat.
But even in a world where a governor or a lawmaker do have a legitimate grievance with another official and are pondering a vengeful veto or tanking a nominee, Blair Horner, senior policy advisor for good government group NYPIRG, cautioned that on either side, a tactical rebuke is not ideal.
“They’re there to do the public’s bidding, nothing else,” Horner said. “The public would be unhappy to find out that problem solving is getting kicked to the curb over disputes between elected officials. Humans are humans, they get mad at each other, the system is sort of designed to be adversarial between the executive and the legislative branches, but what should not happen is that the public’s business suffers because that’s what they’re supposed to be doing.”
Horner said that in the old days of divided government in Albany and budget fights that extended into August, personal, bitter fights over policy were to be expected. He said with one-party rule, infighting takes on a different form.
“What you’d expect is when you have a unified government where everyone is on the same team that there would be less of it, but then it becomes more personality-driven. Former Governor Andrew Cuomo, for example, was a pretty rough character when it came to some of the fights he had with members of the legislature, Former Governor [Eliot] Spitzer did, too; those things happen.”
That intraparty spat comes just under a year before the entire state legislature is up for reelection, and Hochul faces a tough race herself.
Skoufis, at least for now, is unbothered. He said with lawmakers only elected to a two-year term — there is no time to hold back, even if it means taking on a governor of your own party.
“We’re in 2025. I cannot be thinking, and no one should be thinking, including the governor, about saying things, doing things differently about a November 2026 election that we are 13 months away from,” he said.