EDITORIAL: Cuomo should put governance before politics

May 14--Since taking office in 2011, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has made a troubling habit of using the authority of his office to make political gestures. Some have been harmless, but his recent effort to grandstand at the expense of the gun industry may have provoked an unnecessary, potentially costly distraction.

The National Rifle Association announced Friday that it is suing Cuomo and the state Department of Financial Services over their recent initiative to pressure banks and insurers from doing business with gun manufacturers. The gun-rights group claims Cuomo and DFS Superintendent Maria Vullo have attempted to "blacklist" the gun industry through a "campaign of selective prosecution, backroom exhortations, and public threats."

The lawsuit comes after the Vullo's office on May 2 fined insurance broker Lockton Cos. $7 million for underwriting NRA-backed "Carry Guard" liability insurance policies, which cover criminal defense costs for gun-related crimes. The state also banned the ethically dubious scheme -- dubbed "murder insurance" by critics -- from which Lockton had already withdrawn voluntarily in November.

Cuomo fired back at the NRA with a written statement Friday, saying "we won't be intimidated by frivolous court actions." That may be so, but Cuomo's history shows that he isn't above the occasional frivolous action of his own.

When North Carolina passed a controversial law in 2016 requiring transgender people to use bathrooms corresponding to the gender on their birth certificates, Cuomo responded by imposing a ban on non-essential state-funded travel to the state. Critics at the time noted that a few months earlier, Cuomo had taken part in a trade mission to Cuba, a country with a long list of human-rights violations that includes LGBT persecution.

The travel ban may have more effective as political pandering in New York than as a relief to the LGBT community in North Carolina, but it wasn't entirely without consequence. The ban threw a wrench into the schedules and budgets of State University of New York sports teams, which were forbidden from traveling to North Carolina, and later Mississippi after it enacted a similar law.

For SUNY Albany, this meant canceling a men's basketball game against Durham, N.C.-based Duke University. Duke, a private institution, is among several perennial basketball powerhouses known for scheduling so-called "buy games," in which inferior opponents get paid significant money to serve as sacrificial lambs. Such games can be a practical way for mid-major programs such as SUNY Albany to subsidize the athletics department -- as long as you're OK with them potentially being adjacent to lawmakers who might not be in lockstep with our governor's politics.

Cuomo made a similar move in June 2016 to single out companies affiliated with the "boycott, divestment and sanctions" movement, which aims to pressure Israel through nonviolence to resolve its conflict in the Palestinian territories. When Cuomo's Office of General Services later compiled a list of 13 violators, no U.S. companies were included, and many of those named denied any affiliation with the movement.

It's difficult to see how such posturing comports with Cuomo's role as a state executive, but the political ramifications are obvious in a state with strong pro-Israel sentiment. Such reasoning likely spurred Cuomo's announcement last week that he's planning to visit Israel in a show of "solidarity" as its conflict with Iran escalates, despite the questionable necessity and significant security risks of such a trip.

When asked about the incessant speculation that he's preparing a presidential campaign, Cuomo always insists that he is focused solely on governing New York. If that is indeed the case, he should stop picking fights that seem to have more to do with raising his national profile than with sound governance.

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