Arrogant, cocky Cuomo cornered by own party

The New York Post reports a growing number of state lawmakers are calling for Gov. Andrew Cuomo to pay a price for the cover-up. The scandal began to unravel in late January after New York’s attorney general, after investigating nursing home deaths, reported they are as high as 50% more than state officials had reported.

Ron Kim, a Democrat assemblyman, says Gov. Cuomo demanded in a phone call that he help the governor lessen the political fallout from the scandal or face political retribution for failing to do so.

Kim, instead, went public in a Newsweek op-ed that says Cuomo should be impeached for the scandal.

According to the same story, weeks after the attorney general report was released, an aide to Cuomo admitted in a phone call with Kim and other state lawmakers that the governor hid the nursing home death toll because he feared an investigation by the Trump administration. 

“This is no longer about Cuomo,” the assemblyman told the Post. “It’s about protecting the sanctity and integrity of the legislative bodies against an executive who is trying every day to rope us into his lies and cover-ups involving 15,000 families who lost loved ones in nursing homes."

Jesse Kelly, a Texas-based radio show host, suggests in a Twitter post that the powerful governor appears to be in political trouble but points out that Democrats rarely attack their own. Cuomo likely angered someone "higher on the food chain" than himself and now he's a target, he says. 

Gary Bauer of the Campaign for Working Families tells One News Now it is amazing to witness Cuomo fight for his political life after the media held him up as an example of a competent leader in the worldwide fight to beat back the virus.  

“Gov. Cuomo was being held up by the national media as an example of what President Trump should be like,” Bauer recalls. “It was so unbelievably obnoxious and obviously untrue, and now it's all unraveling."

Cuomo, in fact, boasted last year that his hard work helped COVID-19 cases drop in the hard-hit state, and he suggested also who didn’t deserve credit.

“The number is down because we brought the number down,” he told reporters. “God did not do that. Faith did not do that.”

Yet it is also true that Cuomo ordered the state’s nursing homes to re-admit recovered COVID-19 patients, which spread the virus among other vulnerable residents, only to blame non-existent federal guidelines when the blame finally fell on him. 

He also threatened the nursing homes if they refused to follow the state mandate. 

In a fiery Fox News segment from January, co-host Jesse Watters pointed out that Cuomo published a book about leadership, and was awarded with an Emmy award, at the same time fatalities were being hidden from the public.

Although it remains to be seen if the powerful governor will face political punishment, Bauer tells One News Now it is encouraging to watch Cuomo finally be held accountable for his actions.

“It ends up that virtually everything he did on Coronavirus was wrong,” Bauer says, “with the exact opposite of what you should do.”