Update: Whitney Houston May Be Honored by New York State
Update, 5:30 pm: PolitickerNY's Hunter Walker quotes New York Senate GOP spokesman Mark Hansen as saying that Houston may be honored. "We didn’t do it today, we felt the timing was inappropriate because we just had legislation and a public hearing that dealt with overdoses of prescription drugs that included parents who lost their children to overdoses of prescription drugs... But we never sought to block the resolution and it’s something that we’ll take up when we return.”
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Original: Bills honoring the famous and recently deceased -- routine resolutions state and federal legislatures pass all the time -- only really draw attention when they're rejected, which is what happened in the case of the New York State Senate and Whitney Houston.
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The New York State Senate turned down a request by Brooklyn's Sen. Eric Adams to formally honor the late pop royalty. Though there may be something to Adams being a politically ambitious Democrat and the senate being controlled by the GOP that caused them to butt heads, the reasons Republicans cited to reporters for the rejection -- that Houston isn't from New York proper and that "there was uneasiness about doing a tribute for someone who may have died of a drug overdose" -- don't seem unreasonable. Clearly the senate would have avoided any fuss by quietly passing the seemingly uncontroversial bill and prevented Adams from offering quotes like “I was outraged. For us to focus on how she died rather than how she lived is an insult" to the Daily News.
