A CAST OF CHARACTERS: Jamaal Bowman, Mike Lawler, Zohran Mamdani and Joe Borelli all walked into a bar.

Well, really, it was a panel on CNN’s 10 p.m. prime time slot.

Thursday night, the globe’s “most trusted name in news” became a petri dish for a motley crew of New York politicos whose names and histories likely mean little to the rest of this country, but so much to us.

On one side of the table: The Republican congressman Lawler, sporting a tightly-wound orange necktie, spewed grievances about congestion pricing and cashless bail as he looks to run for governor in true-blue New York without grating against his party’s MAGA-Musk mania.

Inches away sat the barrel-chested and boisterous Bowman, a former Squad House member who was booted from his Lower Hudson Valley seat after his criticism of Israel found him in the crosshairs of AIPAC. (Let’s not talk about the fire alarm.)

Across the table, DSA star Mamdani sat, eager to emphasize his mayoral campaign’s success on Hillside Avenue and Fordham Road on a show broadcasted everywhere from Alaska to Aruba.

And next to him was the City Council’s former GOP Minority Leader Joe Borelli, delightfully retired from city government and enjoying his time riding the cable news circuit. (Mamdani and Borelli were separated by DNC and DOJ alum Xochitl Hinojosa, the odd one out.)

It was a spectacle, to be sure.

“New York news is national news, it has always been national news,” Borelli told us after it aired.

But the politics on the show delved into the extremely local.

Lawler was put in the uncomfortable position of having to answer for the planned shuttering of Westchester’s only Social Security Office after it landed on Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency cost-cutting list.

He said he’s pushing for the Trump administration to delay its closure so his constituents can use the soon-to-be reopened Rockland office. There will be a protest tomorrow outside the office, anyway.

Zohran also slammed former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s hesitance to issue a statement on the detention of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil. And Bowman insisted that Democrats would win more if party leaders stepped aside and let Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (whom Lawler points out grew up in Yorktown) take the helm.

The opposing pols found common ground when Lawler touted his own six-and-a-half-point win in a district where voters voted for Kamala Harris for president.

“Yeah, but you ran against a cornball candidate!” Bowman protested.

(Mondaire Jones, Lawler’s opponent, had a very public falling out after Jones endorsed Bowman’s challenger in a primary).

“He was your friend,” Lawler countered. “— He was not my friend!” “— He was your friend long ago,” Lawler replied.

TAX FLAK: The Business Council of New York today warned Hochul and state lawmakers not to raise the payroll mobility tax to leverage funding for the MTA capital plan.

“More taxes on private-sector businesses cannot be the solution to addressing the MTA’s ongoing budget issues,” said Heather Mulligan, the president of the influential private-sector lobby group. “The businesses that have chosen to stay have to balance their own budgets while facing routine rate, fee and tax hikes from a state government that regularly increases spending year after year.”

Increasing the payroll tax is among the options state officials are considering as they try to piece together a funding package for the $68.4 billion capital plan to shore up the region’s decrepit mass transit infrastructure.

Playbook reported Thursday lawmakers and Hochul have discussed a tax hike on city employers with $10 million or more in payroll.

Hochul is in delicate negotiations with the Trump administration to prevent the dismantling of the congestion pricing toll program, which is expected to generate $1 billion in annual revenue to be leveraged for $15 billion in bonds for infrastructure improvements.

Hochul — generally leery of raising taxes — told reporters today the MTA needs revenue.

“I think it’s clear that there has to be a funding source, or multiple funding sources, to fund the next capital plan, without a doubt,” she said. “That’s the nature of a capital plan.”

Tax increases can be politically ruinous: A payroll tax hike in 2009 has been seared in the memories of many Democrats and contributed to the party losing the state Senate a year later. Republicans have signaled they want to capitalize on any tax increase.

HOUSING GROUPS FIGHT HUD CUTS: New York housing advocates and politicians rallied at City Hall today against impending cuts to federal housing initiatives, as DOGE takes aim at HUD.

Led by the Supportive Housing Network of New York, the advocates and officials warned of dire consequences from Musk’s plans to slash funding and staff at the federal housing department and close field offices.

“We’re here today because the federal government is attacking the very programs that keep millions of Americans housed,” said Rachel Fee, executive director of the New York Housing Conference. “We need Congress to step up and stop this reckless attack on housing.”

Attendees lamented cuts to homeless assistance, fair housing enforcement and rental vouchers — citing HUD’s announcement that it will end future emergency housing voucher payments, jeopardizing assistance to some 5,500 New York City households.

City Comptroller Brad Lander, a Democrat running to unseat Mayor Eric Adams, brought up the upheaval at the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

WHERE’S CUOMO? Mamdani planted a lectern outside Cuomo’s Manhattan apartment building this morning, declaring he would take questions from the press, even if the former governor-turned mayoral candidate won’t.

“When are you going to find your spine?” Mamdani said, when asked what he’d say to Cuomo if he exited the building. He slammed Cuomo in particular for not standing up for Khalil, the legal U.S. resident and recent Columbia graduate student whom the Trump administration detained and is seeking to deport.

“What we’re seeing from this disgraced former governor is an inability to open his mouth with any word of critique when it comes to Donald Trump, and part of that is because he’s funded by $120,000 from Republican donors across the country.”

Unlike most of his rivals, Cuomo hasn’t made himself available to a scrum of reporters since March 9 — though he’s talked to individual outlets.

Mayoral candidate state Sen. Zellnor Myrie also zeroed in on Cuomo’s relative silence on Trump at a press conference Thursday. “Is Cuomo unwilling to speak up and stand up for New York because he’s cozying up to Donald Trump?” he asked. “What happened to New York Tough? We look soft.”

FRETTING FOOD CUTS: Spending reductions for school lunch programs and canceled food bank deliveries have drawn concerns from Lawler, who urged Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to consider the impact on poor people.

“These changes could profoundly affect American families in my district who rely on these programs not to go hungry,” Lawler wrote in a letter obtained today by Playbook.

The Department of Agriculture halted millions of dollars in deliveries to food banks and cut $1 billion meant to help schools and food banks make purchases from local farms.

The Hudson Valley Republican, who is weighing a gubernatorial campaign in deep blue New York next year, is trying to strike a balance with these concerns to Trump administration cuts: He acknowledged some of the spending moves are meant to address pandemic-era budgeting, but added any changes should consider the impact on food security and supply chains.

“As we look to improve these programs, we must consider efforts to reduce fraud and ensure the integrity of food assistance initiatives,” he wrote in the letter. “We need to protect the vast majority of participants while also improving our prevention of waste, fraud, and abuse.”

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