This is what happens when you embarrass Dad in public.
On Monday, state Democratic Party Chairman Eugene DePasquale gave outgoing Lackawanna County Democratic Machine Chairman Chris Patrick the swift spanking he earned by throwing a temper tantrum befitting a belligerent toddler protesting his bedtime.
The official clapback was couched in polite but firm verbiage, but the underlying message was clear:
“Quit crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.”
Disgusted by Patrick’s attack on democracy, state party leadership voted to step in and tell Patrick to get stepping. On an as yet undetermined date, the local party’s reorganization will be supervised by adults who respect the will of voters. It’s a low bar, but somebody had to clear it.
Sore about losing his crown as county “kingmaker,” Patrick betrayed the animating ideals of representative democracy in a pathetic attempt to preemptively purge 76 duly elected Democrats.
Patrick backed down in a lengthy statement issued Tuesday afternoon, but characteristically tried to widen the blast radius. Incredibly, Patrick claimed that DePasquale gave him his blessing to send certified letters disqualifying the elected Democrats.
“While I respect the decision of the state committee and will accept it, I fundamentally disagree with it,” Patrick said.
“In the interest of full transparency, I believe Democrats deserve to know that I communicated directly with State Chairman Eugene DePasquale before these letters were sent. At that time, he indicated that he agreed with my position and gave his blessing for the letters to be issued. He later informed me that, after hearing from elected officials, he had changed his position. While I appreciate his honesty, I believe that change illustrates the very concern I have raised from the beginning: when pressure from elected officials overrides the consistent enforcement of party rules, the integrity of those rules is diminished.”
My deadline passed as I awaited a response from DePasquale’s camp. If Patrick’s claim is true, this fiasco may be a bigger problem for the party.
That Patrick chose to poke his own party in the eye in tandem with the 250th birthday of American democracy is as ironic and on-brand as the Machine’s failed coup attempt on rebellious Democratic Commissioner Bill Gaughan last year.
Patrick’s latest backfiring blunder shows he learned nothing from what should have been a profoundly humbling experience. All of his political and reputational wounds are self-inflicted. Last week, Patrick said the 76 members he targeted would be excluded from the reorganization meeting, which was scheduled for July 7. Earlier Monday, Lackawanna County Judge Terrence R. Nealon granted a preliminary injunction blocking the Machine from reorganizing before appeals prescribed by both county and state party bylaws were processed.
Patrick is all about bylaws.
“We are a country of laws,” he said last week. “Our bylaws are our law.”
The Machine is welcome to its “law,” but the bylaws of a political organization don’t supersede the rule of law writ large. The Democrats Patrick plotted to cheat out of their seats were elected in a free and fair election. If a departing party hack and backroom apparatchiks were allowed to unilaterally nullify the results, the Democratic Party would have no credible claim to its name.
A timely heads up for area Republicans reveling in the Dems’ intraparty intrigue: Machine politics is an interparty enterprise when it suits both sides. Until last week, MAGA Republican Commissioner Chris Chermak was simultaneously a candidate for the top job at Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport and chairman of the governing board tasked with making the hire.
Chermak announced his leave of absence from the board, prompting the first official acknowledgement that he is a candidate for the job, which Chermak will almost certainly land after the board sifts the results of a “nationwide search.” If (when) Chermak gets the job, the board should rename the facility Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Intramural Airport.
A while back, I opined that the Machine is experiencing an “extinction burst,” ramping up self-destructive behavior as the “rewards” it once rendered rapidly diminish. Patrick did himself in. The Machine will never surrender a system that benefits its operators at the eternal expense of everyone else.
A strategy session for insurgent Democrats on Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Voodoo Brewing in Scranton will likely have the atmosphere of a victory party. Dems celebrating Patrick’s fall should not mistake it as anything more than an early skirmish in a civil war that will only escalate over the rest of this mean season. Patrick is out, but the Machine remains deeply entrenched and determined to stay that way.
In a statement issued Monday, Lexie Kelly, the elected Democratic committeewoman for Newton Twp. and a candidate for committee chair, said the state party leadership’s intervention marked “a turning point for Democrats in Lackawanna County.
“It restores confidence that fairness, due process, and the will of Democratic voters come before politics. This is a major step forward for the good guys.”
Agreed, but it’s gonna be a long march to Nov. 3.
CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, has thrown a few tantrums in his time, too. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook; and @chriskellyink on Bluesky.