Feature the fight that will unfold starting today in Albany. People have been calling Governor Pataki a lame duck for months now, but for a duck, lame or otherwise, our governor is showing an impressive amount of backbone. The drama that will unfold is more than the annual posturing over the state budget. It has the makings of a constitutional battle that will decide whether New York State is governable. On one side are the entrenched members of the state Senate and the Assembly, the lobby representing the state’s health care industry, and the union representing hospital workers. On the other side are Governor Pataki – and the voters of New York.

The voters had their say on these issues as recently as the election of November 2005. Here in New York City, Mayor Bloomberg triumphed over the hospital workers’ union candidate, Fernando Ferrer, by a wide margin, 59% to 39%. In a statewide ballot referendum, known as Proposal One, voters resoundingly rejected statewide, 65% to 35%, the legislature’s attempt at a power grab over budget authority. It couldn’t have been clearer. The health-care workers union, 1199/Service Employees International Union, backed Proposal One, as did their lackeys in the legislature, but voters recognized it as a way to destroy the power of the governor of New York.

Mr. Pataki’s vetoes have been crafted to illuminate what is wrong with how Albany does business. He vetoed the legislature’s attempt to spend half a million on the New York State capital defender’s office – in a state where the death penalty has been struck down by the highest court. He vetoed $1.3 billion in additional Medicaid spending proposed by the legislature in a state in which Medicaid spending, in a widely acknowledged scandal, already costs more than Florida’s and California’s combined. He vetoed $200 million in “member items” that don’t even go through the public legislative process but instead are parceled out by individual legislators to be spent on low-priority public needs like an upstate cheese museum.

No wonder that, according to a poll by New Yorkers for Term Limits, 77% of New Yorkers favor limiting members of the legislature to eight years in office. Popular discontent over earmarked wasteful spending in Washington crystallized last fall in the fight over the $223 million “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska. The capital defender’s office, the Medicaid increases, the cheese museum – these are New York’s bridges to nowhere, and they help explain why New York has one of the highest state and local tax burdens in the nation.

Governor Pataki’s attempt to draw the line has generated a campaign of attack ads against him by New York’s hospital industrial complex of the trustees and the unions. In 2005, the voters saw through a similar ad campaign in favor of Proposal One, proving with their decision that they trusted Mr. Pataki on the budget more than the legislature and the labor unions. This is why Mr. Pataki’s current battle is more important than ever. The legislature may override some of his vetoes. But he can know that the public is on his side.

He has a few other things, too. He has the bargaining tactic of offering the senators and assemblymen a raise. He may press for an increase in the limit on the number of charter schools in the state or for a tuition tax credit that could ameliorate some of the destruction that has been done to the city’s Catholic schools by the dramatic increase in spending on government-run schools. And the gubernatorial candidates – John Faso, William Weld, Eliot Spitzer, and Thomas Suozzi – will be watching Mr. Pataki’s veto battle over the budget with interest. If Mr. Pataki loses, the next governor of New York, whoever he is, will be a mere doormat for Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno.

But this fight is about more than just the powers of the governor’s office once held by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Alfred Smith. It is about the future of New York state. On one side is the boom represented by the surge in homeownership and property values in New York City that was encouraged by the Bush tax cuts, Mayor Bloomberg’s modest restraint on spending, and the success in the fight against crime achieved under Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg and their police commissioners and district attorneys. On the other side are the many New Yorkers who are fleeing to lower tax states and to states where a free market makes housing more affordable than New York’s system of price controls and subsidies. And the loss of manufacturing jobs in upstate New York that led Mr. Spitzer to compare the state to Appalachia.

These are the things to remember as the showdown over the budget begins today. It may take several days before it is all sorted out. Mr. Pataki is fighting for all who want to stay in New York and be part of the boom, who want to extend the boom in the city into the upstate economy, and who resent having their taxes allocated to hospitals and unions that turn around and use the money to lobby for more taxes and outlays. And, insofar as this is a constitutional struggle, Mr. Pataki is fighting for the standing of all leaders, Republican or Democrat, who aspire to hold the office he will soon be vacating.