For years, Brooklyn Democrats have lectured the rest of us about democracy. Donald Trump, they insisted, was an existential threat to it. Republicans were enablers and anyone who disagreed was somehow complicit.
Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, the chair of the Brooklyn Democratic Party, said in 2022 when Trump announced another presidential run that “he is a dangerous threat to the core of our democracy and the American people.” She has repeated variations of that line ever since, calling his actions “lawlessness,” “authoritarian” and a “rogue power grab.” I have heard versions of this sermon for a long time.
As a longtime Brooklyn Republican leader who ran for City Council in 2009 and again in 2017, I have often tangled with the Democratic machine. They never liked outsiders questioning their control of judicial nominations, party resources or the quiet deals that keep the same faces in power. Their message was always the same: Republicans threaten democracy, Democrats defend it. In fact, I still remember participating in a City Council candidate forum in 2017 at a Bay Ridge senior center and being scolded by a local Democrat as a “tyrant supporter” because I defended some actions of Trump.
This past June, Brooklyn Democrat voters elected a slate of reform-minded district leaders. The Brooklyn Can’t Wait coalition, backed by groups like the New Kings Democrats, secured a majority of the 42 seats on the party’s executive committee, which is the body that chooses the county chair. Those 22 reformers pledged to replace Bichotte Hermelyn with Julio Pena. The organizational meeting was set for September. The voters had spoken, at least within the Democratic Party’s own rules. Bichotte Hermelyn’s response was to expand the executive committee from 42 to 68 members by adding county committee officers, assembly district representatives and other “duly elected” people who will be selected under processes she still controls.
Of course, the new members would vote in the upcoming leadership contest. The reformers’ majority would evaporate. Bichotte Hermelyn frames it as inclusiveness. “We want to create a perception of inclusiveness,” she said on NY1. “We are expanding our executive committee to include more duly elected county committee members.” For any fair-minded person this is obviously just packing the committee to keep the status quo. Even House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, no Republican, has opposed the plan.
The irony is almost too rich to believe. The same party that spent years warning that Trump’s attempts to challenge election results or consolidate power threatened the republic is now watching its own Brooklyn chair rewrite the rules after an election did not go her way.
I have watched this machine operate for decades, having worked for both Republican congressmen and a Democratic borough president. I saw how obscure district leaders control who becomes a judge, how money is spent and which candidates get the party’s quiet blessing. When reformers finally win enough of those seats to force a change, the response is not to accept the outcome and compete under the existing rules. It is to change the rules.
Brooklyn Democrats control the largest county organization in the state. Their decisions shape courts, local races and the tone of politics across the borough. If the executive committee can be expanded at the last minute to dilute a majority elected by voters it means the will of the people is only sacred when it produces the preferred result.
I am not defending every Republican or every action of Donald Trump but merely highlighting the selective outrage. For years, the Brooklyn Democratic leadership told us that democracy itself hung in the balance whenever Republicans won races or Trump refused to concede. Now the party chair faces the prospect of losing her post and responds by enlarging the committee that will decide her fate. These same people who spent a decade calling others a threat to democracy are demonstrating exactly how power works when the rules no longer favor the incumbents.
Brooklyn voters deserve better than lectures about democracy from leaders who rewrite the bylaws the moment those lectures become inconvenient.
Capano has been an adjunct political science professor for 25 years, and has worked in senior positions for Republican and Democratic elected officials in NYC.
X: @bobcapano
