National Review
Cuomo Chaos: NY Dems consider revoking emergency powers as cover for nursing homes
Democrats in the New York State Assembly will weigh the rescission of Governor Cuomo’s emergency powers, while one of his top aides tries to retract the surprising admission that the government has covered the true number of deaths in COVID nursing homes to avoid being attacked by the Trump administration. Democratic lawmakers plan to hold a conference on Friday morning to discuss the governor’s removal of the emergency powers granted to him last year, when the pandemic began, the local NY1 media reported. Governor Melissa DeRosa’s secretary recently admitted that the Cuomo administration covered up the actual data on deaths in nursing homes from coronaviruses in New York to hide the magnitude of the issue from federal officials, the New York Post reported. She apologized to Democratic state legislators during a recent videoconference, saying “we froze” for fear that the true death toll “would be used against us” by federal prosecutors. The state was tabulating the deaths of nursing home residents who died after being transported to hospital as hospital deaths, making it difficult to determine the actual number of residents who died. In September, the state Senate sought to obtain more accurate figures from the state health department on the number of patients in nursing homes who died of the virus. At the same time, former President Trump transformed the deaths in New York’s nursing homes into “a giant political soccer ball” and urged the Justice Department to investigate the government and “basically, we froze,” said DeRosa. “So we apologize,” DeRosa told Democratic lawmakers in New York. “I understand the position you were placed in. I know it’s not fair. It was not our intention to put you in that political position with the Republicans. “On Friday, DeRosa tried to clarify her comments, saying she was simply” explaining that when we received the DOJ inquiry, we need to temporarily void the legislature’s request to deal with the federal request first. ” “We informed the houses about this at the time,” said DeRosa in a statement. “We were comprehensive and transparent in our responses to the DOJ, and then we immediately had to focus our resources on the second wave and the launch of the vaccine.” However, a bipartisan group of New York lawmakers is already calling for a full investigation of the matter and some have called for Cuomo to be prosecuted criminally. Some Democrats specifically called for the legislature to reconsider the permission of Cuomo’s emergency powers, granted to him in March. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who often fights with Cuomo on local issues, said he agreed “100 percent” to remove Cuomo from the emergency powers. State Senator Andrew Gornardes, a Democrat, said Cuomo had committed “a betrayal of public confidence” and urged the legislature to “reconsider his broad grant of emergency powers to the governor”. “There needs to be full responsibility for what happened,” wrote Gornardes in a tweet. Cuomo traveled to Washington on Friday to meet President Joe Biden on the Democrats’ COVID relief bill, as the reaction against the cover-up for the nursing home increased.