Coney Island sideshow: Kings County’s Democratic Party stumbles forward

Daily News Editorial Board, New York Daily News
·2 min read
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“I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat,” said Will Rogers. The Brooklyn Dems under Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn are trying their best to prove Rogers right.

The biannual organizing meeting of the party’s county committee, the vast body that can have thousands of members, imploded Wednesday night. The gathering planned for later that night of the 42-member executive committee (which now illegitimately but legally has 44 members due to four Brooklyn voters on a Red Hook houseboat being swept into a Staten Island-Manhattan Assembly district) never convened, and thus no leader was chosen.

So much for Bichotte Hermelyn’s reelection to a second term as county leader, which she announced, anticipating an easy victory.

The county committee, which two years ago needed a pair of 13-hour Zoom sessions, must resume its proceedings and finish by Oct. 6. They’ve broken other rules, so why not break that one?

The fight that derailed Bichotte Hermelyn for now is over the filling of county committee vacancies, with most of the thousands of party positions presently empty as no one ran for the spots in June’s primary. In the past, vacancies were filled near the end of the organizing meeting. This time, Bichotte Hermelyn’s allies, County Committee Chair Arleny Alvarado-McCalla and the notorious former boss and defrocked Surrogate Judge Frank Seddio, tried to fill vacancies at the outset, to be able to then rely on those newly seated members to help with votes on officers and the all-important rules.

Both Alvarado-McCalla and Seddio were wielding fistfulls of proxy votes, making even more critical reformers’ proposal to limit the number of proxies held by a single person to 10, which is how the House of Representatives works. But that wise rule change was never voted on.

The squabbling took so long that the Coney Island Amphitheater had to close for the night. After the PA system was turned off at 11:15, someone shouted a motion to adjourn and it was approved. Will Rogers was a lot funnier.