Silver's Choice

Quite a drama is shaping up in respect of choosing a new state comptroller, and the question as we see it is this. Why in the world would the speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, who is vested by law in making the choice in consultation with his colleagues, limit his choices to the three names advanced by a cabal of former comptrollers? It is true that Mr. Silver agreed to the idea of gathering the former comptrollers to suggest candidates. But the understanding — it is clear to Mr. Silver, if not to the governor — was that the former comptrollers would offer five names. Instead they came up with but three, pointedly excluding anyone from the Assembly.

The cabal of ex-comptrollers decided to narrow its offering of candidates, moreover, after much lobbying by the very governor whose administration and agencies are going to be audited by the new comptroller. And the list they did come up with turns out to include a close crony of the governor, William Mulrow, an individual with whom the governor reportedly takes vacations. It was on a private jet of Mr. Mulrow's partner, Richard Fields, a casino tycoon, that the governor took his controversial loop-de-loop during the campaign. The idea seems to be that no member of the 150-person Assembly or 62-member Senate is worthy to be comptroller.

This is all the more strange since two members of the cabal of former comptrollers are former members of the Legislature, Harrison Goldin and H. Carl McCall. Where do they come off deciding peremptorily that no member of the Legislature, Republican or Democrat, is worthy of being comptroller of New York State. Mr. McCall himself, moreover, wasn't even elected to the comptroller's office the first time. He was appointed by the Legislature. He'd been working as a lobbyist for Citicorp. The last person he backed for a top executive job was … why, it was Richard Grasso. The only reason Mr. McCall stayed out of litigation over the New York Stock Exchange governance was because of the trusting nature of the state attorney general, Eliot Spitzer.

We don't carry a brief here for any particular candidate for comptroller of New York. Maybe, if one wanted someone who could keep an eye on the governor and his administration, it should be Mr. Spitzer's archnemesis, Kenneth Langone. What we do have a strong view about is the notion that the process of choosing a comptroller should follow the law. The law is unambiguously with the Legislature. It doesn't place restrictions on what the Legislature can do, except restrict it from applying a religious test. Mr. Spitzer is said to be furiously lobbying the Legislature directly now in hopes of gaining a comptroller from among the three whose names have been offered up. It's hard to see, however, why the speaker should feel under pressure. The interests of New Yorkers are with the widest possible search for the best possible candidate.