The New York Times: "Playing a Game of Legislative Fantasy"

Liz Krueger

Sen. Krueger was quoted in Michael Powell's New York Times column, which assesses the Senate's "one-house" budget.

Powell writes:

None of this fun is remotely real. The governor and the Legislature are weeks away from a final budget. Most senators had not even seen the underlying budget documents when they voted at 3 a.m. (It’s a reliable rule of thumb that early-morning votes bear a close relationship to hallucinogenic results.) State Senator Liz Krueger, a Democrat, played spoilsport.

“At best, this is a shopping list with no budgetary legitimacy,” she wrote in her official statement. “More realistically, it is a classic Albany scam designed to make everyone think they should be happy, without answering any of the important questions, like ‘How will we pay for this?’ ” I called her the next day.

“There was Monopoly money available for anything and everything you could imagine,” she noted with the bemused tone of a liberal Democrat who keeps finding herself dressed in conservative sack cloth in Albany. “No one even pretends the numbers add up.”