Jon Corzine - Governor of New Jersey

Governor of New Jersey

Corzine officially declined his $175,000 salary in 2006.

After taking office in January 2006, Corzine's approval numbers were very low. Many polls seemed to indicate that much of this negative polling was a result of the 2006 New Jersey State Government shutdown. An April 26, 2006, polls from Quinnipiac University Polling Institute showed Corzine at a 15% approval with a 72% disapproval. A February 28, 2007, poll from Quinnipiac University showed Corzine at 50% approval with 34% disapproval. When Corzine released a controversial plan to monetize the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway, his approval rating fell to 30% in January 2008. In conjunction with this fall in approval rating, an initiative to recall the Governor was started for the first and only time ever in New Jersey history. The recall effort failed after gathering less than the required 1.2 million signatures.

Corzine had long insisted that state employees must bear part of the cost of their health benefits after retirement. As of July 1, 2007, in agreements with the Communications Workers of America, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, and the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, active State employees in those unions (as well as certain other non-union employees) are now required to contribute 1.5% of their salary to offset health care costs. State and local employees’ contributions to the two largest pension systems increased by 10%, from 5% to 5.5% of their annual salaries and increased the retirement benefit age for new public employees, from 55 to 60 years. In 2008, Corzine approved a law that increased the retirement age from 60 to 62, required that government workers and teachers earn $7,500 per year to qualify for a pension, eliminated Lincoln's Birthday as a state worker holiday, allowed the state to offer incentives not to take health insurance and required municipal employees work 20 hours per week to get health benefits.

As part of his attempt to balance the budget, Corzine has decreased funding to most programs and localities including state universities and colleges. The first of these decreases came with the 2007 budget. Rutgers University and other New Jersey state universities have raised tuition, cut hundreds of sections of classes, and several sports teams. With the latest decrease in funding for 2009, most state institutions have funding that is less than the amount they had a decade ago.

Corzine has been the only New Jersey Governor in recent Democrat memory to make any headway in addressing the crisis of municipal funding. While not directly touching the third rail of New Jersey governance – property taxes – Corzine's reform of the school funding formula (passed and signed in January 2008) resulted in significant relief to many New Jersey towns with outsize school costs but limited tax base. The plan survived a legal challenge and was declared constitutional by the New Jersey Supreme Court on May 28, 2009.

Corzine has championed expanding government health and education programs. He planned to require every resident to enroll in a health plan and have taxpayers help pick up the tab for all the welfare low and middle income residents. In June 2008 state legislators voted for the first phase of that program mandating heath care coverage and Corzine signed it into law in July.

Corzine spent some $200,000 of New Jersey money on advertisements to promote a referendum on the 2007 New Jersey ballot to borrow $450 million to fund stem cell research. The referendum faced strong opposition and was rejected despite the fact that $270 million had previously been approved to build stem cell research centers.

Corzine, a death penalty opponent, as Governor supported and presided over abolition of the capital punishment in New Jersey and replacing it with life imprisonment. After the legislature passed and he signed it into law, New Jersey became the first state to legislatively eliminate capital punishment since 1965. Although the bill was not passed until late in 2007, New Jersey had not executed any criminals since 1963. Because the penalty was never used and often reversed upon appeal it was viewed as a form of extended suffering for victims' families by some supporters of its abolition. Before the enactment of the new law, he commuted the death sentences of all death row inmates to life in prison. Corzine also has supported early New Jersey efforts at gun control.

Corzine was one of several United States Governors – including Martin O'Malley of Maryland, Mike Beebe of Arkansas, and Eliot Spitzer of New York – who were early supporters of Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. He raised $1 million for her campaign. He, Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, Chuck Schumer, and Charlie Rangel co-hosted Clinton's October 25, 2007 60th-birthday party. He remained a committed Clinton superdelegate late into the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primary season. In the event the Democratic National Committee would have decided to recontest the Michigan and Florida primaries, Corzine and Ed Rendell were prepared to spearhead Clinton's fundraising in for those races. Towards the end of the primary season in April 2008, Corzine made it clear that although he was a Clinton supporter, his superdelegate vote would be determined by the popular vote. After her win in the April 22, 2008 Pennsylvania Democratic primary and a calculation of popular votes that excluded caucuses and included the controversial Michigan and Florida Democratic primaries, Corzine reaffirmed his support for her. Once Barack Obama became the presumptive nominee, Corzine became a prominent spokesperson for Obama's agenda.

Corzine was among a group of big (in terms of population) state governors, such as Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, who moved his state Republican and Democratic primaries to February 5, 2008, the date of Super Tuesday, 2008. He was also among a group of prominent Democrat politicians (that included Ted Kennedy and Barack Obama) who received political contributions from Norman Hsu that he ended up donating to charity.

In November 2008, in response to the ongoing economic downturn, Corzine proposed an economic recovery package consisting of additional massive spending, accelerated capital improvement spending and reforms and cuts to the corporate income tax. As of December 2008 many elements of the plan had been approved by the Democrats in the NJ Legislature. On January 2, 2009, Corzine joined the governors of four other states in urging the federal government to provide $1 trillion in aid to the country's 50 state governments to help pay for education, welfare and infrastructure as states struggle with steep budget deficits amid a deepening recession.