Was Cuomo railroaded – and if so, should we care?

Not so long ago, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was a political rock star, with sky-high approval ratings, a fawning press corps and even an Emmy Award for his supposedly impressive COVID-related diatribes. Cuomo had his critics, but his political armor was, in those halcyon days, more than strong enough to repulse any and all attacks.

Now, Cuomo's popularity, his legitimacy and his credibility lie in tatters. He is a soon-to-be ex-governor, instead of a larger-than-life super-governor. It begs the question: How did we get here?

Primarily, it was sexual harassment allegations, made by at least 11 women, that made Cuomo's position untenable. It was the sheer number of these allegations, and of Cuomo's accusers, that decided his fate – not necessarily the seriousness of the charges, or their incontrovertible truthfulness. It was the "pile-on" effect, most of which occurred in March, that did the trick.

To be clear, Andrew Cuomo has never been charged with any crime. Only recently did one of his accusers decide to pursue a civil suit against him. He was never formally impeached, and he was certainly never tried in the state Senate to determine his guilt. Instead, a report issued by New York's attorney general – who is strongly suspected of coveting Cuomo's job – was sufficient to push public outrage over the edge. Cuomo himself made the decision that he could no longer govern effectively, and so he quit.

This confirms what is now a regular pattern in American politics: Almost never do charges against a prominent politician result in arrest and criminal prosecution. Almost never does a legislature make it all the way through the process of impeachment, trial, conviction and removal. Instead, a barrage of charges – of greater or lesser veracity, and of greater or lesser seriousness – pepper the accused until he (it's almost always a "he," after all) either resigns in disgrace or girds himself to "power through" and emerge on the other side of the media firestorm. Whether the latter strategy is viable depends first and foremost not on the man's guilt or innocence, but on the degree of support he retains in his own party. President Trump, for instance, although he was accused of countless crimes and misdeeds, before, during and after his presidency, was never abandoned by mainstream Republican voters nor by most GOP elected officials, and thus he survives as the effective leader of his party.

The problem, however, is that, while most of us may want to believe that Cuomo, for instance, is guilty of sexual harassment, because it is so easy to think ill of a man so widely disliked, this does not necessarily make him guilty of any crime or "misdemeanor" in point of fact. He can be a jerk without being a criminal jerk. The distinction matters.

Keep in mind that, toward the end of "Cuomo-gate," Democrats in New York wanted Cuomo to be guilty, because if he were, then he could be removed – as a political liability to Democrats. Republican politicos likewise wanted Cuomo to be guilty, because their conservative constituents would never have forgiven them if they did not vote to impeach and remove such a hated figure on the right.

For different reasons, therefore, politicians of both parties in New York agreed on Cuomo's preferred fate – it was resignation or removal, period/exclamation point – but the nature of the accusations and the amount of hard evidence underlying them never made much difference to anyone's political calculus.

Cuomo's position was a little like that of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Hussein stood accused of the possession of weapons of mass destruction, of which he was in fact innocent. No one outside of Iraq had the temerity to defend Hussein, however, or even the imagination to suggest that he could be innocent, and thus his goose was cooked.

Let me be clear: as a conservative, I won't miss Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the least. He was and is a terrible man and an awful leader of my home state.

Be that as it may, I am troubled by the fact that the most well-corroborated allegations against Cuomo were, by and large, the least serious ones. The most extreme wrongdoing of which he stood accused – groping a woman in the Executive Mansion – amounts to a case of "he said, she said."

In all likelihood, none of these accusations will ever come to trial, and thus a "jury of his peers" will never have an opportunity to decide whether Cuomo is guilty or innocent of criminal acts. Nevertheless, the allegations, in themselves, sealed Cuomo's fate, due to their number, their odiousness and the wall-to-wall coverage the media chose to give them.

Did Cuomo really harass 11 women, or were those charges merely a convenient means by which the New York political establishment could rid itself of a man who had become "dead weight" and an impediment to Democratic electoral success in 2022 and beyond? We may never know the answer to these questions, and that is highly unfortunate.

There is another thing about this affair that ought to concern us. The mechanism of impeachment and removal, which used to be reserved for very rare and flagrant violations of the public trust, is now increasingly becoming the default means by which politicians try to effect the removal of their most troublesome colleagues.

President Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives in January 2021 without the presentation of any evidence, without the examination of witnesses and without meaningful deliberation. Democrats just screamed "Insurrection!" and pulled the trigger.

Just recently, there was talk in the New York State Assembly of impeaching Cuomo with similar haste and carelessness, because the political imperative of removing him was so compelling – and, it was said, if he were given time to defend himself, there was a danger that someone might listen to what he had to say. No kidding!

In the years to come, we can expect more and more invocations of the "nuclear option" in our political life: the use of impeachment and public trial (or the threat thereof) for the purposes of ending the careers of elected officials – or, to be more blunt, for the purposes of destroying one's political enemies. And that is an inherently dangerous development: it presages more and more allegations, of varying credibility, and more and more show trials, with less and less connection to the first principle of American justice: "innocent until proven guilty."

Seen from another perspective, our political elite – officeholders, party bigwigs, news editors, pollsters and the like – are attempting to arrogate to themselves veto power over the ability of any politician to serve out his term of office. Ordinarily, after all, it would be the voters who got to decide who would be, for instance, governor of New York, and all New Yorkers would be bound, for better or worse, by their choice. Taken to an extreme, however, our new penchant for scandal- and impeachment-based governance will prevent the American people from choosing their leaders, and will substitute for the people's judgment that of "our betters" in the political and media establishment. The new paradigm will allow our leaders, in effect, to choose themselves. That is hardly what the Founders had in mind.

Cuomo's ouster thus serves to remind us that the defining feature of 21st century American political life is its ugliness – and its growing detachment from time-tested democratic norms. And the smart money says it will get considerably worse before it gets better.

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