Last week when Attorney General Letitia James released a scathing report detailing the Cuomo administration’s deceptions and failures in our nursing homes over the last year, it was regarded as a bombshell.

Bombshell reports get a lot of attention. It checks that box.

However, bombshell reports are usually something else - surprising. Unfortunately, the attorney general’s findings confirmed what our Conference has been saying publicly for months: the administration intentionally undercounted nursing home deaths and forced embattled facilities to admit COVID-19 positive seniors.

The report outlines the sort of unconscionable, premeditated wrongdoing that shakes confidence in our institutions and erodes public trust. As lawmakers, it’s our job to do everything in our power to restore it.

The process starts with removing the governor’s emergency powers. For months, Assembly Minority has been imploring our friends on the other side of the aisle in both houses to promote checks and balances and restore regular government order. It was the right thing to do then. After the attorney general’s report and a New York Times investigation that found nine top health officials resigned after the governor demanded that their professional guidance match whatever arbitrary political decision, he’d just pronounced at his press briefing, it’s even more obvious now.

I’m pleased that top Majority legislators are echoing our concerns and stating publicly that they’re seriously considering joining us in stripping the governor of his emergency authority.

Once we restore our full legislative power, we need to use it to promote transparency, provide oversight and demand accountability. It means holding full bipartisan hearings. It means using subpoena power to compel the administration to hand over documents and testify in public. And it means using the attorney general’s report as a road map to dig deeper and uncover the whole truth.

 Did private nursing home and hospital executives influence the administration’s decision to grant them legal immunity? Did the administration undercount deaths simply for rosier optics, or did they have more sinister intentions? Thousands of families who lost loved ones across the state deserve to know what happened and why.

Getting these answers is part of our duty to the constitution and to our constituents. Minority and Majority members in the Legislature need to put political differences aside and work together to earn what the administration has squandered: the trust of millions of New Yorkers. They want state government to provide oversight and accountability. They want us to work hard to ramp up vaccine distribution, and they want us to get our economy moving in the right direction. Let’s deliver for them.