Pressure is mounting on Brooklyn Democratic Party leadership to cancel an executive committee vote planned for Tuesday night that could dramatically reshape the size and composition of that committee.<\/p>\n
In a NY1 interview and in a video on social media<\/a> last week, Party Chair Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn billed the changes as reforms to make the party more representative of the more than one million registered Democrats in Brooklyn.\u00a0<\/p>\n But the move has been slammed by reformers<\/a>, who denounced it as an attempt to stack the executive committee so that Bichotte Hermelyn can maintain control of the party by adding new members loyal to her.<\/p>\n In June\u2019s primary election, reform-oriented district leaders won a majority<\/a> for the first time in nearly two decades of organizing against the county establishment, claiming enough seats to flip the leadership to district leader Julio Pe\u00f1a.<\/p>\n In the days since Bichotte Hermelyn unveiled the proposals, the chair of the state Democratic Party Jay Jacobs<\/a>, New York State Attorney General Letitia James<\/a> and Minority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives Hakeem Jeffries<\/a> have all called on her to reconsider.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Reformers filed a lawsuit Monday Hell Gate first reported<\/a>, asking a judge to block Tuesday\u2019s vote with a temporary restraining order<\/a>. But the first judge assigned to the case recused themselves, saying they may seek re-nomination from the Brooklyn Democratic Party.<\/p>\n Brooklyn\u2019s Democratic Party plays an outsized role in nominating and selecting judges<\/a>, one of the areas reform-oriented district leaders had been hoping to tackle<\/a> if they gained control of the party.\u00a0<\/p>\n Bichotte Hermelyn and the Brooklyn Democratic Party have not returned requests for additional comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n The executive committee is slated to vote on the proposed changes at a closed-doors meeting Tuesday evening at the Thomas Jefferson Democratic Club in Mill Basin, run by Frank Seddio, the former Assembly member and Brooklyn Democratic Party boss who still serves as a district leader in the 59th Assembly District, which spans parts of Canarsie, Flatlands, Mill Basin and Marine Park.<\/p>\n A copy of the proposed changes reviewed by The City Reporter, which Bichotte Hermelyn sent to district leaders last week, would add more than two dozen members to the executive committee who could then vote on party leadership, followed by an additional representative from each assembly district in the borough.\u00a0<\/p>\n While these new executive committee members would technically be voted on by the larger county committee, reform-oriented district leaders fear Bichotte Hermelyn could easily consolidate proxy votes from the county committee and stack the executive committee with loyalists.<\/p>\n Another change would give former party chairs like Seddio a lifetime vote on Brooklyn Democratic Party leadership \u2014 even if they\u2019re voted out as district leaders.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s an honorarium,\u201d Seddio said asked about the proposal, calling it a\u00a0\u201cvery appropriate thing.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere ain\u2019t much of my life left, so I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s gonna matter,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Seddio defended Bichotte Hermelyn\u2019s proposed changes to the party rules, though he said he understood the optics of the proposals being introduced now, as she was about to lose control of the party.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t see it as a grab for power. I see it as an opportunity to make us more progressive,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know that she will stay in power as a result of those changes,\u201d Seddio said. \u201cMaybe it\u2019s time has come. Is there ever a good time to make a change?\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pressure is mounting on Brooklyn Democratic Party leadership to cancel an executive committee vote planned for Tuesday night…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":328649,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-328648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328648\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/328649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}