WNY firms and organizations spent $5.4 million on lobbying in 2019

Budget-wise, things have been getting tight in Albany recently and the prospects for 2021 and beyond are distressing.  The urge to spend state money by new state legislators from New York City in 2020 was tempered by the realities of diminishing tax revenues as well as Governor Andrew Cuomo’s interest in continuing to hold down the growth in spending.  It will get worse before it gets better.

Nonetheless, determining how state resources will be used continues to feed a large segment of the business community that tries every year to get a new or larger piece of the pie.  Lobbying was alive and well in New York State in 2019.

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Standing up for the rule of law in troubling times

Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.

Voters, not lawyers, choose the President. Ballots, not briefs, decide elections…  The ballots here are governed by Pennsylvania election law. No federal law requires poll watchers or specifies where they must live or how close they may stand when votes are counted. Nor does federal law govern whether to count ballots with minor state-law defects or let voters cure those defects. Those are all issues of state law, not ones that we can hear. And earlier lawsuits have rejected those claims. Seeking to turn those state-law claims into federal ones, the Campaign claims discrimination. But its alchemy cannot transmute lead into gold. The Campaign never alleges that any ballot was fraudulent or cast by an illegal voter. It never alleges that any defendant treated the Trump campaign or its votes worse than it treated the Biden campaign or its votes. Calling something discrimination does not make it so here.

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