One hundred and forty laws that almost were
By New York Focus, NYFocus.com
For the first time since she took office in 2021, Governor Kathy Hochul won’t be taking a stack of unsigned bills with her into the Christmas holiday. This year, she has already either signed or vetoed all but two of the 856 bills that passed the state legislature. (One of them is the controversial Medical Aid in Dying Act, which she’s promised to sign; the other would add two judicial districts in western New York, and is still up in the air.)
She’s moved quickly in part by vetoing more bills than usual: 140, or more than 16 percent of those the Senate and Assembly passed. Last year, she vetoed fewer and negotiated over more. The only year Hochul issued more vetoes was 2022, when lawmakers passed a whopping 1,010 bills — the highest number in at least three decades — and the governor axed 166 of them.
This year’s vetoes range from predictable (like the Grieving Families Act, nixed for the fourth time in a row) to confounding, like a bill to protect a corporate transparency law Hochul championed in 2023. As Chris Bragg writes below, the law is now poised to be crippled by new federal rules, just when it was set to take effect.
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