Assemblyman Jack Quinn has thrown his hat into the SD-58 ring, joining an already-crowded primary race to unseat Volker-with-a-”D”, Bill Stachowski from the state senate.

The Republican Quinn has been in the Assembly since 2004, and his site lists legislation he’s sponsored, most of which has to do with schools (e.g., ensuring that school districts sit on IDA board), crime & safety (e.g., making cell phone use a primary violation, year-round school session), and governmental reform such as reducing the senate to 40 members, and the assembly to 100.

To a great degree, when you poke around what junior Albany legislators do there all day, it doesn’t amount to a whole lot. Quinn is parroting that tired old upstate-Republican-state-senator refrain: those mean downstate Democrats!

“The only way we are ever going to change Albany is to change the one-party system we have right now, and that one party is all from New York City,” he said. “The only way to better Western New York is provide for some split system, and the only way to do that is to take back the Senate.”

I don’t know how increasing the justice court civil suit jurisdiction from $3,000 to $6,000 worked to reduce the influence of downstate Democrats, and I don’t know how creating the crime of “manufacturing drugs in the presence of minors” will improve upstaters’ lot in life, either.

But the depressing part is that under our current system, who wins – whether Stachowski, Kennedy, Quinn, Cooney, or Kuzma – absolutely nothing will change. The state senate is not a democratic entity comprised of citizen legislators who advocate and legislate on behalf of their constituencies. It is a unified entity where every vote is pre-arranged, and what the leader says, goes.

The anti-downstate Volkerist rhetoric is just taking a page from a tired, unpersuasive script.

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