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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> NY Right to Repair bill was sabotage plain and simple

I've been out of New York politics for over a year. Who sabotaged it? And who is the constituency with pull in New York opposing right to repair?

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Just to add some background, the Right to Repair bill passed in NY legislature and went to the governor. Kathy Hochul then amended the bill heavily before signing it into law. As far as who is opposed to right to repair in NY, take your pick, everyone from Apple to John Deere have to fighting against this for years.

NY allows statewide ballot measures, this would be a better vehicle for passing it

> take your pick

Someone exerted influence. It would be useful to know whom. I’m failing to think of an obvious in-state employer with the motivation and pull to demand this.

TechNet was one of the trade groups lobbying on right-to-repair, https://www.technet.org/our-story/members/

Hmm, Honeywell, HP and CDW, possibly GM or Toyota, look big enough. Wonder if any had their registered lobbyists taking meetings with the Governor in the days before the amendment.

Apple and Samsung are members. Smartphone repair shops are affected.

Is there a record of the names of the people in the meetings leading up to the amendment, and a record of which companies those people lobby for?

Yes, but currently only through September [1]. The law was signed last month [2]. We should have more clues by April.

[1] https://www.governor.ny.gov/governor-hochuls-past-schedule

[2] https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-signs-digit...

I didn’t know governors could make changes to the law before signing it. Because they can’t. What they CAN do is threaten to veto it and ask the legislators to change it and vote again on it. I kind of wish they had stuck with it and made her go on the record why she’s vetoing it, but of course they have to play nice to get anything done. Ultimately, not enough important people cared about it so it was DOA.

Governors often have a line-item veto [0]. They can strike text out of a bill during signing, including in ways that change the meaning.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-item_veto

It's maybe the dumbest possible idea, no sensible government should allow it.

I agree. This is problematic in so many ways. So essentially 43 states (according to wikipedia article shared) have no fruitful division of political powers. If executive power has legislation power, how that can go wrong I wonder -- looks at history book...

a line item veto makes sense in the case (as the name implies) of line items of a budget bill, deleting budgetary line items. It was initially intended to fight pork barrel politics.

The New York governor is a very powerful executive because the governor can tightly control the budget process and introduce budget legislation. In the 90s there was an infamous stalemate situation where the republican senate and democratic assembly would block budget bills for months. Subsequent court cases put control of the process in the governors hands.

The advocates for this bill pushed it in the wrong year. With political circumstances of 2022, it unfortunately got neutered by the many interests against it.

She also sat on it for seven months so that it wouldn't affect her election bid. She knew all along it was going to be gutted and didn't do her job when it would have hurt her.

Hochul has also been sitting on the pay range transparency law. It is clear she is for sale and has no problem siding with business.

The video "Governor Hochul sabotages NY right to repair bill, right on schedule"[1] from Louis Rossmann (guy who fought for the right to repair for 7 years), while emotional, explains it in detail.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xGBB-717AI

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