“Our elected officials are not going to step up and pass any new laws to prevent actual corruption,” concluded Dick Dadey, the executive director of Citizens Union, a reform-minded group.

Mr. Dadey and others had sought support for tighter ethics laws this year, including a push to clean up the contracting process in the wake of a bid-rigging scandal that ensnared two former aides to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo: Joseph Percoco, whom the governor has described as a brother, and Todd R. Howe, whose connection to the Cuomo family goes back more than a quarter-century. Mr. Howe is cooperating with prosecutors, and the case against the other defendants, also brought by Mr. Bharara, is to go to trial later this year.

On Thursday, Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, also seemed uncertain about the ramifications of the decision in Mr. Silver’s case, saying after an event in Buffalo that people would need to “wait to find out what the final disposition is.”

Asked whether he thought that the continuation of Mr. Silver’s case might give rise to more ethics reform, the governor demurred. “I don’t know what people will find, and argue, about this,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll have people on all sides seeing what they want to see in this situation.”

Among Mr. Silver’s former Democratic colleagues in the Legislature, there were stronger sentiments. Senator Todd Kaminsky, who was a first-term assemblyman when the charges against Mr. Silver arose in 2015, said the case illustrated the overreliance on federal prosecutors to police the state government.

Regardless of the eventual outcome of Mr. Silver’s case, the state can no longer afford to count on a United States attorney to solve its problems, said Mr. Kaminsky, a former federal prosecutor who represents a portion of Long Island. “It is well past time that our state Legislature enact real anti-corruption measures and empower local district attorney offices to bring corruption cases.”

Yuh-Line Niou, the Democratic assemblywoman who now holds Mr. Silver’s former seat, also called for the passage of new ethics measures, such as closing the L.L.C. loophole, a proposal that has previously passed the Assembly only to stall in the Senate. “New Yorkers deserve an honest and transparent government,” she said.