Free Republic

In an attempt to keep Republican control of the state Senate, Majority Leader Dean Skelos is wooing three rebel Democrats with a proposal to form a "coalition government." Skelos made the offer at a dinner meeting Tuesday night on City Island with the so-called "Gang of Three" - Carl Kruger of Brooklyn, and Pedro Espada and Ruben Diaz Sr. of the Bronx, several sources familiar with the meeting said. The Democratic rebels have thrown the Albany political world into a frenzy by refusing to back fellow Dem Malcolm Smith of Queens for majority leader. Without their votes, the Democrats, who...

Gov. David A. Paterson and legislative leaders failed to reach a resolution on the state’s deepening financial crisis on Sunday, throwing into doubt the chances that an agreement could be reached before an emergency legislative session scheduled for Tuesday. Mr. Paterson met with the Senate majority leader, Dean G. Skelos, and the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, in his Midtown Manhattan office on Sunday afternoon. But by the time the meeting ended, after about an hour, it was not clear that the Legislature would even vote on Mr. Paterson’s plan to close the state’s budget deficit. In a statement issued after...

For years, when Republican state senators met privately in their elegant, high-ceilinged conference room in the Capitol, most senior members clustered around the room’s center table, close to Joseph L. Bruno, the majority leader. But Dean G. Skelos, the hard-driving Long Island Republican and deputy majority leader, sat in a back corner. From there, he studied the scene, taking in members’ facial expressions, their tones of voice and their reactions to other senators’ ideas. “My grandfather taught me a long time ago, be a buyer, not a seller,” said Mr. Skelos in an interview on Thursday. He added: “I like...