Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, two weeks into the Vito Lopez groping scandal, now says publicly that his beleaguered Brooklyn colleague needs to resign.
Way to change the subject, Mr. Speaker.
Piping up at the Democratic National Convention over the holiday weekend, Silver says that he’s been counseling Lopez to toss in the towel for some time now.
But in private.
Which is pretty much par for the course for the second-most-powerful elected Democrat in Albany.
Let’s not mince words: Lopez is a recidivist molester, a pig who should’ve packed it in long ago.
But the real scandal is the Silver-orchestrated, publicly-funded coverup of Lopez’s sexual misconduct — the $100,000-plus in damages secretly approved by the speaker and checked off on without comment by Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Comptroller Tom DiNapoli.
They’re all Democrats, of course — convening now in Charlotte, NC, to help fellow Democrats condemn the “Republican War on Women.”
Without a trace of irony.
Indeed, Silver formally heads the New York convention delegation — declaring yesterday the Lopez/payoff scandal is “not systemic to the system. The members of the Assembly are hard-working members.”
Where to begin?
Let’s start with Silver’s bizarre suggestion that Vito Lopez is the only serial sexual harasser to come out of the state Assembly.
Take, for example, Silver’s own one-time chief counsel, Michael Boxley, who in 2003 plea-bargained his way out of a rape charge leveled by a 22-year-old intern — after which it was learned that another staffer had charged Boxley with sexually assaulting her two years earlier.
The first victim’s suit was also settled using public funds.
That’s the Silver pattern: Deny, sweep everything under the rug and use public money to make it go away.
Lopez is a serial groper.
But Silver is the Assembly’s enabler.
Pious public declarations of the “Lopez must resign” sort — fully two weeks into the scandal — are meant simply to change the subject.
Not good enough, Mr. Speaker. Not now.