A second comes first: The lieutenant governor must pick a second when she ascends to the top job

In nine days, when Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul takes the oath and drops the Lt., one of Gov. Hochul’s very first acts should be to appoint a new lieutenant governor. It’s a power that’s not written in the state Constitution or even explicitly in any law, but did appear in these pages as an op-ed a dozen years ago.

When Jeremy Creelan wrote that the governor had the authority to appoint a lieutenant governor in the case of a vacancy, it wasn’t an academic point. Lt. Gov. David Paterson had taken over the top job when Eliot Spitzer resigned in a prostitution scandal on St. Patrick’s Day in 2008. Like every lieutenant governor before him who acceded upward, Paterson had no lieutenant governor, and the temporary president of the Senate served as the acting lieutenant governor.

However, the Senate erupted in chaos on June 8, 2009, with a GOP-led coup in cahoots with four turncoat Democrats (three of whom would later be convicted felons). By the time that Creelan offered his plan, the temporary president of the Senate (and acting lieutenant governor) was the notorious, and future felon, Pedro Espada, putting that horrible and dangerous man one heartbeat away from the governor’s chair.

Paterson was convinced and on July 8, 12 days after Creelan wrote, he appointed the eminently qualified Dick Ravitch as LG. The state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, upheld the move on Sept. 22.

The attorney general at the time said that the governor did not have the authority to name a new lieutenant governor. His name was Andrew Cuomo. As the high court correctly determined, he was wrong. While he was governor, Cuomo never had the need to fill a lieutenant governor vacancy midterm, but thanks to Cuomo’s misdeeds, Hochul will.

And unlike Paterson, she won’t have to wait to make her selection. She needs to immediately find someone who can step in as governor, for as we’ve seen, sometimes that needs to happen.