Matthew Hamilton reports in Capitol Confidential that Gov. Andrew Cuomo kept pushing Dec. 21 for a special session of the legislature between Christmas and New Year's that would consider hurried bills on ethics reform and pay raises for legislators. Cuomo spoke with both Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan Dec. 21, and said, “These are actually fairly straightforward issues. These are not complicated bills. You could read it in a matter of a half an hour." Cuomo also said the next state budget will include cuts because of a shortfall in revenue. “So the budget is going to be tighter than in past years,” he said. “Past budget years the difficult came from the abundance of options. We had funding, what’s the best thing to do with the funding? ‘I think education.’ ‘I think economic development.’ … This discussion is going to be a harder conversation where we won’t have enough money to do everything we all jointly agree that we want to do.” Read the full story in Capitol Confidential.