The Brooklyn Democrats’ Brawl Is Far From Over

Photo: Cindy Schultz/The New York Times/Redux

After years of outwitting her opponents at every turn, Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, the first woman to chair the Kings County Democratic machine, is stepping down as leader of the party. But that doesn’t mean the civil war has ended.

“I am now up to my next chapter in life,” she told me Monday evening, announcing that she will not be a candidate for the chairmanship and declining to confirm rumors that she is backing an ally, Assemblywoman Nikki Lucas, as her successor. “This will be an open process, and we’re very excited for the change.” Later, she wrote in a New York Daily News op-ed that she has a fancy new title: “Brooklyn Democratic Party Chair Emeritus.”

The New Kings Democrats, part of a reform coalition that has been trying for years to oust Bichotte Hermelyn and take control of the party, immediately cried foul. “The Party Chair attempting to pick her own successor after she lost an election isn’t democracy,” the group said on social media. On Tuesday afternoon, a judge granted a temporary restraining order to block that night’s planned vote to select Bichotte Hermelyn’s successor, one of two court victories for reformers that have thrown a wrench in the outgoing chair’s plans.

The heart of the fight is Bichotte Hermelyn’s recent move to expand the party’s 42-member Executive Committee by adding 26 seats to the group — positions that would be filled by appointees loyal to Bichotte Hermelyn, who engineered the expanded group to head off the possibility of being voted out as chair. A group of reformers sued to block the expansion and earlier Tuesday won a ruling by the state’s second-highest court, the Appellate Division, which struck down an August 25 vote to expand the committee as “null and void” and blocked a scheduled vote for a new chair.

“Democratically elected District Leaders must pick who chairs the party next. Anything less will be a fight. We won’t back down,” tweeted City Councilwoman Sandy Nurse, who is a District Leader. But as she’s done before, Bichotte Hermelyn attempted a partial end run around the district leaders by steering matters to the much larger County Committee, which has as many as 5,000 slots, most of which are unfilled. Until now, by securing written proxies of hundreds of committee members, Bichotte Hermelyn and her allies have been able to keep control of the party and change its rules as she chooses.

Brooklyn has seen these battles before. In 2005, shortly after the party’s leader, ex-assemblyman Clarence Norman Jr., was convicted of accepting illegal campaign contributions and falsifying business records, party leaders met in the back room of a diner on Cadman Plaza to pick a new boss from five candidates. It was a cagey affair: “I was talking with another leader about who’s supposed to be committed to who,” District Leader Ralph Perfetto told me at the time. “We came up with 80 votes, even though there’s only 41 district leaders.”

The party settled on Assemblyman Vito Lopez, who spent seven years as leader before resigning after being censured by the legislature amid allegations that he sexually harassed female staffers. A few years into Lopez’s tenure as Brooklyn boss, in 2010, a then-unknown Bichotte Hermelyn, pulled off the unlikely feat of knocking an incumbent district leader off the ballot and starting her own rise in politics. That same year, in the middle of a fight for control, Lopez told me in passing that he had quietly changed the party’s rules by adding five hand-picked, at-large district leaders to the Executive Committee to fend off any possible insurrection. (His fellow bosses in the other boroughs had similar contingencies in place, Lopez  noted.)

The purpose of all the machinations is to control the jobs, money, and respect that come with leading one of the nation’s largest Democratic organizations. Brooklyn’s boss helps people land jobs at the Board of Elections and the state courthouses and get the lucrative gigs staffing poll sites on Election Day. They receive friendly, fawning phone calls from candidates for every conceivable position, from City Council to State Supreme Court judge to the presidency.

And when good-government types denounce the grip that insiders have on politics, bosses like Bichotte Hermelyn drive reformers crazy by beating them to the punch, implementing some version of the changes the outsiders called for. “I modernized the organization. I brought technology into a party stuck in the past. I created service days. I opened doors to communities long ignored. I made judicial screening transparent, diverse, and reflective of Brooklyn — Muslim, Jewish, Caribbean, gay, Asian,” Bichotte-Hermelyn wrote in the News. “I created opportunities for members from every corner of Brooklyn to participate meaningfully in our democracy — including mobilizing buses for weeks into Pennsylvania, Upstate New York, and Long Island to support national candidates. We showed discipline, unity, and strength. That is what real grassroots power looks like.”

The fight rages on in the courts, and there will surely be contentious meetings to pick the next boss of Brooklyn; some of NBK’s district leaders are also certain to face challenges when the positions come up for a vote in 2028. “I think sometimes people continue to challenge me just to stay relevant,” Bichotte Hermelyn told me. “It’s like, ‘Damn. She did it again. She did a great thing.’”

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