A New York state judge is siding with disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in his fight to hang onto a $5.1 million payout being investigated by a state ethics commission—a panel the judge ruled unconstitutional in a Monday decision that all but kneecaps its operations. In a 26-page ruling, Albany Supreme Court Justice Thomas Marcelle essentially called the new Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government too independent to function constitutionally, saying its 11 members were “urban academics” not politically beholden to the public. The watchdog group and its predecessor, the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, had demanded Cuomo give back the profits from his pandemic-era memoir, American Crisis: Leadership Lessons From the Covid-19 Pandemic, after it found he’d committed ethical violations in writing and publishing it. “Truth and reason won, mob rule lost today,” a spokesman for Cuomo told The New York Times. Gov. Kathy Hochul’s press secretary told the newspaper that the decision “undermines” the commission, and that her office will work with the ethics body to craft an appeal.