The News: Elect Newell. Dump Silver.

After being endorsed by the NY Times last week, today Paul Newell, trying to unseat NY State's most corrupt politician—Sheldon Silver—received a resounding endorsement from the NY Daily News.

We couldn't agree more. It's time to elect Newell and it's time to dump Silver (and it's time for Luke Henry to pull out of the primary.

Vote on Tuesday the 9th.

Here's the Daily News endorsement:

Dump Sheldon Silver


The time has come for the voters of lower Manhattan to turn Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver out of office.

After 32 years in his seat, including 14 years as the Assembly's maximum leader, Silver embodies the insider's game that has captured the state Legislature, to the detriment of 19 million New Yorkers.

Silver's constituents would serve the cause of open, responsive government - and rock Albany to its foundations - by pulling the lever in Tuesday's Democratic primary for challenger Paul Newell.

Across America in this election year, people are demanding change. Let's have it in Albany, too.

Such a vote could mark the start of a revolution. For dumping Silver would send the unmistakable message that the people of this state want a responsible, deliberative Legislature rather than a boss-run fiefdom.

In the process, the lower East Side, East Village, Chinatown, Wall Street and Battery Park City would gain in Newell a well-qualified representative who is both in sync with the district's political leanings and in touch with grass-roots concerns about traffic, schools, affordable housing and sustainable neighborhoods.

Up against one of New York's most powerful men, Newell, 33, a community activist well-versed in the issues, has been knocking on doors. For the first time in many an election cycle, Silver has had to go knocking, too.

Nothing better illustrates Albany's lack of accountability than that Silver has not faced competition for reelection in 22 years. Only now is he being called to answer for so lowering the Legislature that it was properly branded the worst in the nation.

What happens in the Assembly is a charade. Individual lawmakers are all but irrelevant. They have surrendered their authority to Silver, who rewards loyalists with added pay and pork-barrel grants for their districts. (While dispensing a gargantuan $2 million a year to his own pet causes.)

The rank-and-file do what they are told - to the point that until recently, they were counted as automatically voting yes even though they were not present in the chamber. There are no meaningful hearings, and every bill that comes to the floor passes, as Silver dictates.

The big decisions are made in his inner sanctum, easily accessed by politically connected players who have much at stake in acts of the Legislature. In such a distortion of democracy, it's no wonder the state budget has ballooned beyond proportion.

Nor is it any wonder that in 1999, in order to spare some of his suburban members political discomfort, Silver killed the tax on commuters, costing the city a total of $6.4 billion and climbing. Think of what the money could have meant to the police, parks or schools.

Nor is it any wonder that Silver peremptorily buried Mayor Bloomberg's congestion-pricing plan, along with $350 million in federal mass transit aid - without putting the highly debated proposal to a vote.

His high-handedness was all the more outrageous, representing, as he does, a district overrun by traffic from the three lower East River bridges and the Battery and Holland tunnels.

Then, too, Silver takes full advantage of New York's lax ethics laws to conceal how much money he makes serving as "of counsel" to a major firm of trial lawyers - a group that would be loath to have the Legislature impose any manner of tort or malpractice reform.

There have been times when we agreed with Silver on the merits of an issue. To his credit, he supported raising the minimum wage when it had been frozen in New York for years, and he was a key figure in securing school funding for the city. But those were bright spots in a bleak record.

When they go to the polls Tuesday, Democratic voters of the 64th Assembly District - perhaps 15,000 strong - have the opportunity to bring desperately needed change to all New York. And they have a solid choice in Newell, who displays impressive passion about the quality of life in neighborhoods across lower Manhattan.

Elect Newell. Dump Silver.