14 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021
DEPT.OFI NSI N UATION
CUOMOOFFB ROA DWAY
A
ll politics is performance, but New
Yorkers seem particularly suscepti-
ble to shtick. Rudolph Giuliani milked
the role of America’s mayor for more than
a decade before fading into mascara-
streaked ignominy. It was New York’s tab-
loids that first made a star of Donald
Trump. And then there’s Andrew Cuomo,
whose televised coronavirus briefings were
so popular that he won a special Emmy—
only to have it revoked nine months later,
when he resigned in disgrace. “I never
thought it would last,” Hank Morris said
the other day, of Cuomo’s brief national
run as leading man. “I flipped him on for
five minutes and went, ‘Give me a fuck-
ing break.’” Through the years, Cuomo
has provided good cause for Schaden-
freude to many people, but there may be
no one with as elaborate a rationale as
Morris. “If anybody asked what happened
to me, I would basically go, ‘You wouldn’t
believe me if I told you,’” he said. “So in-
stead I turned it into a musical.”
In 2010, Morris, a former political
consultant, pleaded guilty to a violation
of New York securities law, for a multi-
million-dollar kickback scheme involv-
ing the state’s pension fund. “I spent two
years, two months, two weeks, and two
days upstate in prison,” he said. “But
who’s counting?” The man who put him
there was Cuomo, then New York’s at-
torney general. To hear some tell it, Mor-
ris may have been railroaded into tak-
ing the plea—yet he would never say
this, at least not on the record, because,
per his plea agreement, he’s not allowed
to. (The script for the musical contains
a legal disclaimer: “This work is ...
a fictionalized story inspired by true
events.... The author also does not deny,
either directly or indirectly, any provi-
sion or statement of his Plea Agree-
ment.”) “You go through this whole pro-
cess, you’re on the cover of the New York
Post in handcuffs, but you never really
get to have your say, because the law-
yers are always telling you to keep your
fucking mouth shut,” he said. The
show—which he wrote under the pen
name 11R0731, his inmate number—is
his say, in two acts.
Morris was walking down Forty-first
Street, white hair flapping in the wind.
He ducked in the stage door of a black-box Off Broadway theatre, took a seat
in the fourth row, and opened a binder
titled “A Turtle on a Fence Post: A New
Musical Comedy.” Morris had hired
two recent graduates of the Tisch
School of the Arts, Austin Nuckols
and Lily Dwoskin, to write twenty-
three songs ranging from tearjerker
ballads (“Alone in the Dark”) to campy
cabaret numbers (“Kangaroo Court,”
“Jewish Guilt”). Morris wrote the book,
letting his characters, including one
named Hank Morris, insinuate what
he can’t. (Such as: “Cuomo wanted to
run for governor and needed a scalp, a
notch on his political belt.”) “I proba-
bly should have told this story sooner,
before people forgot who I was,” the
real Morris said.
Morris’s friends in prison included
the rapper Ja Rule (“friendliest guy
you’ll ever meet”) and the wide receiver
Plaxico Burress (“I’m as against guns
as anyone, but the only person he shot
was himself ”), but his best friend was
a non-celebrity who went by the name
Q. In the musical, Q largely forms the
basis for Z, a prisoner with biceps of
steel and a heart of gold. Onstage,
David Aron Damane, who plays Z,
and Garth Kravits, who plays Morris,
were rehearsing a scene: Z’s going-awayother things, challenge election offi-
cials. Bills that restrict voting access
have been passed in at least seventeen
other states this year. Meanwhile, Re-
publicans in Wisconsin and in Penn-
sylvania have initiated investigations
along the lines of the Arizona recount—
representatives from both states paid
visits to Maricopa County. (Similar ef-
forts in Georgia and in Michigan re-
sulted in no changes to the election
outcomes.) Most bizarrely, the Texas
secretary of state’s office announced
that it will conduct a review of the 2020
results in Dallas, Harris, Tarrant, and
Collin counties, even though Trump
carried the state by more than six hun-
dred thousand votes. Last week, county
recounts in Idaho conducted after Mike
Lindell, the MyPillow C.E.O., alleged
fraud, found slightly fewer votes for
Trump than were initially reported.
The 2000 Presidential election came
down to disputed results in Florida, and
was resolved by a Supreme Court rul-
ing, in Bush v. Gore, whose partisan im-
plications were regarded by many peo-
ple as a judicial coup, but whose pre-
scriptions were nonetheless adhered to
by the Democrat who had won the pop-
ular vote but lost the Presidency. Now
consider a scenario in which a Demo-
crat wins the election, and Republi-
can-controlled legislatures dispute the
results in their states. The dangers are
obvious and, given the precedent of Jan-
uary 6th, include the potential for vio-
lence. It’s not encouraging that one of
the lessons of the Republican-led op-
position to vaccine mandates and other
public-health measures is that, in mo-
ments of crisis, not even the logic of self-
preservation can be relied on. (Early in
the pandemic, the lieutenant governor
of Texas, Dan Patrick, said, in defiance
of shutdowns, “There are more impor-
tant things than living.”)
All this Trumpist fervor points to
the importance of the Democrats in the
House and the Senate taking full ad-vantage of their control of those cham-
bers. Countering voter-suppression ef-
forts, more than twenty-five states have,
in fact, passed bills expanding access to
the ballot. These measures desperately
need to be augmented by federal voting-
rights legislation that is currently being
held hostage by the debate over filibus-
ter reform.
In an op-ed for the Washington
Post, published in June, Senator Kyrsten
Sinema, Democrat of Arizona, justi-
fied her support for the filibuster, say-
ing that it forces legislative minorities
and majorities to find compromises
on legislation. But Senate Republicans
have used it to prevent the For the Peo-
ple Act, which Sinema co-sponsored,
from even coming to the floor for de-
bate. Sinema’s own state is the clearest
example of what is at stake. We may yet
avert a full-fledged constitutional cri-
sis, but, should one arrive, we can’t say
we never saw it coming.
—Jelani Cobb