Why Sweeney’s departure is a crippling blow to the state | Moran

“I’m delighted he lost,” says Sue Altman, of the New Jersey Working Families Alliance. “It shakes free a lot of possibilities for progressive legislating. He’s been clogging up the works for a long time.”

To check that theory, I called Sen. Loretta Weinberg, the liberal lioness of the Legislature, the majority leader with impeccable progressive credentials, who has been on Sweeney’s leadership team for eight years, with a front row seat.

Her verdict: That view is dead wrong.

To her, Sweeney is the guy who skillfully corralled a caucus packed with moderates to pass a long list of progressive legislation. Paid family leave. A higher minimum wage. Paid sick leave. Funding for Planned Parenthood. Offshore wind power. Pay equity for women. College access. And so on.

“This is a diverse state, and we have senators from rural areas of Hunterdon all the way to Jersey City,” she says. “Many of them are reluctant to do progressive stuff, and those are the voices he had to keep in line. I’ve tried to tell progressives for a long time that without the Senate president, we could not have passed all the progressive laws we did. That’s just a fact.”

Sweeney says he’s not done with politics. He won’t say what’s next, but a second run for governor seems a top possibility. “I am not going away,” he said in his concession speech Wednesday.

He was caught napping in this election, beaten by a Trump supporter with no experience, no money, and a Twitter account full of horrifying bigotry. It was an ugly end to his long reign as Senate president, and in a lengthy interview after he conceded the race, he was still in a state of shock.

“Every poll I had showed I was up 16 points, every one,” he said. “And if I had won, there was no opposition, I would have been Senate president again.”

The powers of the Senate president are so vast it might come as a surprise to those who don’t follow Trenton closely. Sweeney could block any bill, single-handedly, and he often did. He could block any appointment that requires Senate approval, and he did that, too.

Chris Christie understood this power dynamic, and a few days after he was elected in 2009, he showed up at Sweeney’s district office unannounced. Sweeney was working in sweatpants and a t-shirt. He invited Christie in.

“Do we want to fight for four years or put some touchdowns in the end zone?” Christie asked. “I can play it either way.”

“He sat there and thought about it,” Christie recalls. “And then said, ‘Let’s put some touchdowns in the end zone.’”

And so they did, at least in Christie’s first term, before White House fever took hold. Their famous accomplishment was to pass a reform cutting pension benefits, which Sweeney steered through the Senate by relying mostly on Republican votes.

It was a cause that Sweeney had championed long before Christie arrived, convinced that it was unfair to require taxpayers to finance benefits that were typically more generous than their own, and that were bound to force politically fatal tax hikes, given the state’s dire financial straits.

The fiscal crisis was rooted in the failure to put promised money into the pension funds, a bipartisan and epic failure of governance. But the public workers unions aggravated the crisis by pressing the Legislature to lower the retirement age and pump up the benefits.

“We just went to war with them,” Sweeney says. “They walked the Legislature right into those things. I just wasn’t going to take that.”

Progressives and public worker unions never forgave him. In 2017, the New Jersey Education Association went for the head shot, spending more than $5 million to take down Sweeney. Sweeney and his closest ally, the political boss George Norcross, responded by spending even more. Sweeney won by his biggest margin ever.

But even then, Sweeney proved to be a hard-nosed pragmatist. He sat down with the NJEA and negotiated health care reforms that saved hundreds of millions of dollars. He sat with the CWA, the union representing state workers, and developed a new system to purchase prescription drugs that saved even more.

“Finding ways to save money is something we’ve done together, and I think that’s good” Sweeney said at the time. “But do you think this would have happened if I weren’t out there banging away?”

Normally, direct negotiations like that are done by the executive branch, not the Legislature. But Sweeney has crossed that line over and over. He created the school funding formula that’s in place today, normally a function of the executive branch. He conceived of the plan to spend more than $1.5 billion to build two specialized ports along the Delaware River, where companies today are building components of the offshore wind farms planned up and down the East Coast. He credits Murphy with allocating the needed funds, but the tools were created by Sweeney in a bill signed by Christie.

“Sweeney saw it as his job to fix the state, period,” says Mark Magyar, Sweeney’s top policy advisor, who has four decades of experience in Trenton. “The Legislature was always secondary to the governor, but under Sweeney the Senate was an equal partner.”

Sweeney has never liked Gov. Phil Murphy, a common sentiment in the Legislature, and he suspects that Murphy was a silent partner to the NJEA during the 2017 campaign. But he made peace eventually, and with the arrival of the pandemic, power shifted back to the executive.

He describes former Gov. Jon Corzine like this: “He is very smart, and a really good person. His communications skills weren’t the best.”

But his relationship with Christie is most memorable. And with the passage of time, some have forgotten that they banged heads as often as they shook hands.

When Christie refused to reappoint Supreme Court Justice John Wallace after his initial 7-year term expired, the legal community exploded in outrage, saying it compromised judicial independence, making justices worry about job security as they wrote decisions. Sweeney vowed that he would never let Christie fill the Wallace vacancy, a promise he kept for years.

Sweeney is proud of his decision, while Christie remains miffed to this day: “I think he was wrong, and he thinks I was wrong, and neither of us will ever change our minds.”

Their most explosive fight came in the summer of 2011 when Christie line-itemed vetoed a series of spending items that were dear to Sweeney, without first calling to warn him.

“He’s a rotten prick!” Sweeney said on-the-record when I called for a routine check-in. “This is all about him being a bully and a punk. You know who he reminds me of? Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life -- the mean old bastard who screws everyone.”

Behind the scenes, I was horrified. I didn’t include the “rotten prick” comment in my draft, but my editors took it from my notes and inserted it. I called Sweeney to talk it over.

“It’s ok,” Sweeney said. “He is a rotten prick.”

The two are close today, and Christie was among those who called right away after learning of Sweeney’s loss. “He’s my friend,” Sweeney says. “We were always personal friends, but it never stopped us from kicking the shit out of each other.”

Sweeney’s most emotional about his daughter, Lauren, 28, who was born prematurely with Down Syndrome. He took two months off from his job as an ironworker to be with her in the intensive care ward, the reason he says he sponsored the state’s pioneering paid leave law. His daughter, he says, is the reason he got involved in politics, and sponsored bills to fund sheltered workshop, to lift the pay of workers at group homes, to fund special education, and to improved access to transportation for the disabled.

“I care more about that community than anything else,” he said, tearing up. “Lauren is absolutely different, but in a way that makes her extra special. She wants to work, she loves going out, and she’s got a boyfriend she FaceTimes with every night.”

He has a few regrets, chief among them his decision to abstain from the vote on gay marriage, for which he later apologized to the full Senate. As soon as the vote was done, the regret flooded over him.

“I was like, ‘What did I just do?’” he says. “I let the fear about what would happen in my district get into my head, that people would be really upset. I’m sitting there wanting my daughter to be treat as an equal, and here I am denying two people who love each other to do what I have the right to do. I was sick about it.”

My guess is Sweeney could win a general election as governor. He’s conservative about taxes and spending, but liberal on most social issues, a good fit. The big challenge would be winning the Democratic nomination, given the hard feelings towards him in the party’s base.

For now, Weinberg and others say they expect that not much will get done, partly because Democratic legislators are scared by the red wave they just witnessed, and partly because Sweeney’s sure hand will be missing.

“He was always the kind of senate president who had big ideas,” Weinberg says. “And legislators are going to be very timid.”

Progressives shouldn’t be celebrating this moment. If Weinberg is right, they are about to discover that Sweeney was an ally after all.