Perhaps the biggest political scandal in America right now is playing out in New York, where Governor Andrew Cuomo is in a lot of trouble — and rightly so. The Democratic governor did not merely wildly mismanage his state’s response to the COVID-19 emergency, while netting himself a lucrative book deal and an Emmy. He did something worse.

In the middle of a public health emergency, he used his office to help one of his largest political donors shield itself from legal consequences as fifteen thousand nursing home residents died from COVID-19 — and then he and his administration underreported that death toll, helping the same donor.

We had been covering the story for months before it exploded this week. The scandal is a cautionary tale of hubris, megalomania, and corruption that left a literal mountain of preventable COVID-19 deaths in its wake. Now we are about to see whether a blue state’s democratic institutions can hold wrongdoers accountable, or whether America’s culture of impunity can once again protect the powerful from facing any consequences at all.