Suffolk GOP chairman John Jay LaValle at the Suffolk Republican...

Suffolk GOP chairman John Jay LaValle at the Suffolk Republican election night headquarters in Patchogue. Credit: Barry Sloan

Daily Point

LaValle’s taking the call

From time to time the White House reaches out to local Republican leaders and influencers to help spread the word about its agenda.

With the border wall fight in Washington, the stakes are big. Suffolk GOP chair John Jay LaValle, along with a few hundred others (he was #257), was on the late-morning Wednesday call with Vice President Mike Pence, who wanted to stress the “substantial health care assistance” and other humanitarian aid contained in the administration’s funding plan.

He said Pence and other senior officials said the fight was more than just about building a barrier and also provided talking points to note that Sen. Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama all supported physical barricades along the Mexican border at one time and Democrats had once agreed to spend $48 billion to make it more secure.

LaValle said the administration told the influencers to stress that the crisis at the border was the reason more illegal drugs were pouring into local streets. Pence also said that “public opinion is starting to turn on the Democrats” now that more information on Trump’s plan is being understood.

“It was very helpful for people advocating for the president’s policies to have a more coherent argument in favor of it,” LaValle told The Point.

Apparently, Trump’s meeting with Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Wednesday afternoon at the White House was not as upbeat as the talking points might suggest.

Rita Ciolli

Talking Point

Cuomo makes House call

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Tuesday told Democrats in the NY Congressional delegation that restoring the state and local property tax deduction was his "No. 1-2-3 priority” in Congress. The governor told the representatives that the $10,000 cap on local taxes put in the 2017 Republican tax bill will dramatically affect home values in the suburbs.

He met for more than an hour in a subcommittee room of the House Foreign Affairs Committee (Bronx Rep. Eliot Engel chairs Foreign Affairs and is co-dean of the delegation) with U.S. Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand and all but two of NY's House Democrats (Sean Patrick Maloney and Antonio Delgado).

While setting his federal priorities, Cuomo also heard from members about their concerns. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is worried that a proposed citizenship question on the upcoming U.S. Census will undercount the population of her district that straddles the Bronx and Queens. Other members spoke of funding for city housing agency NYCHA, as well as water and infrastructure projects in their districts.

Cuomo also told the delegation that he expects the new Democrat-controlled State Legislature will remove some of New York’s arcane voting laws to encourage more participation in elections. Others told him to try to make the state and federal primary process more rationale, possibly having them on the same day.

Regardless of the support for lifting the $10K cap in the House, and Cuomo’s insistence that the issue be kept front and center in Washington, the odds of it passing in a GOP-controlled U.S. Senate are about 25 percent right now.

Rita Ciolli

Pencil Point

Time out

Gary Varvel

Gary Varvel

For more cartoons, visit www.newsday.com/opinion

Final Point

No vacancies

One local effect of the government shutdown? Lynne Patton, regional administrator of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, has not moved into a New York City Housing Authority apartment.

Patton, a former aide for the family of Donald Trump and the Eric Trump Foundation, made waves when she said in November that she’d move into a NYCHA unit to “fully understand” the issues at the troubled authority.

Patton told The Washington Post that her plan had been “conjured up . . . while sitting in her Trump Plaza apartment watching a movie (‘Crazy Rich Asians’) with her boyfriend and her Shih Tzu, Winston (after Winston Churchill). A New York Post headline on the plight of public housing residents blared from her coffee table.

‘It hit me like a ton of bricks that this is no longer OK,’ ” she told The Washington Post.

Alas: Patton tweeted earlier this week that she couldn’t move into NYCHA as planned due to the dysfunction of the federal government. “The Anti-Deficiency Act (31 USC 1341) prohibits federal officials from performing certain duties. The move-in is considered acting in my official capacity,” she wrote.

An email to a HUD spokeswoman for more details elicited the usual shutdown out-of-office boilerplate.

Patton was still tweeting, though, buttering up expert NYCHA reporter Greg B. Smith upon his move from the Daily News to The City, a new journalism outfit.  

Smith’s reporting on NYCHA was cited in Judge William H. Pauley’s landmark rejection of a consent decree for NYCHA last year, in which Pauley forced local and federal officials to come back to the table and find a plan to fix NYCHA, whose conditions are “[s]omewhat reminiscent of the biblical plagues of Egypt,” the judge wrote.

The negotiations are ongoing despite the shutdown, according to Patton. Unlike her move-in, they are an “excepted” activity and the search for a deal continues.

NYCHA residents are still waiting for that, too.

Mark Chiusano

SUBSCRIBE

Unlimited Digital AccessOnly 25¢for 6 months

ACT NOWSALE ENDS SOON | CANCEL ANYTIME