A Brooklyn appellate court on Tuesday has once again tossed out much-criticized new rules that would help the leaders of the Brooklyn Democratic Party stay in power.
The decision could upend a scheduled vote for Tuesday night, where the party’s leadership was expected to select a new chairperson. The outgoing chair, Assembly Member Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, unexpectedly bowed out of the race on Monday night in an interview on NY1’s “Inside City Hall.”
But prior to that, she orchestrated a rule change to expand the party’s leadership in a move widely interpreted as giving her re-election bid a boost.
A panel of five appellate judges in Brooklyn, in part, affirmed a lower court ruling that found the rule changes to expand the party’s leadership from 42 to around 100 people were invalid. In the opinion, the appellate justices found: “Viewed in that holistic manner, the Party Rules plainly tie the status of those who ‘were elected as State Committee members’ to the most recent primary election. Here, that primary election occurred in June 2026. Consequently, by August 25, 2026, the outgoing members no longer held the status of individuals who ‘were elected as State Committee members.'”
The rule changes were first proposed after a group of so-called reformers won a majority of district leader seats in Brooklyn during the June primary. The reformers put forward their own candidate for the chair of the party, Julio Pena.
It was then that Bichotte Hermelyn and others acted to change who could vote for that position.
An attorney for the reformers was back in the lower court on Tuesday afternoon, hoping to prevent the vote on the county’s new chair from taking place Tuesday night.