By Simon Garron-Caine
[photo is of Brooklyn Democratic Party leader Vito Lopez]
Former City Councilwoman Margarita Lopez-Torres’ 2004 lawsuit against the state Board Of Elections challenging the quid pro quo selection method of Supreme Court judgeships in the city could have been a wake up call.
U.S. District Court Judge John Gleeson, ruling in her favor, declared the state’s system was unconstitutional and unworkable. In his decision, which could have been a siren-like warning, Gleeson made it clear that the State’s unique method of appointing trial judges by closed, partisan convention essentially robs New Yorkers of their right to democratically elected judges.
So former Democratic Party Chairman Clarence Norman’s arrest and conviction for selling Supreme Court judgeships, for the whopping sum of $25,000 a piece, shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it should have been signal that something was rotten in the land of Brooklyn.
In lieu of a discussion about the strong-arm politics that pervasively define the machine that is Brooklyn’s local Democratic party, a new rat- this one named Vito Lopez- merely jumped to the head of the ship and kept driving it in the same direction, using the same processes and stacked decks that Norman employed for years. At this point, one can hardly hope that corruption indictments for Don Vito will act as a wake up call.
Although young idealists like the New Kings Democrats seem to offer a hopeful vision of the future of the Democratic Party in Brooklyn, the most likely outcome of this looming Party decapitation is that a similar quantity rises in Lopez’ place and recycles the same processes and stacked decks that Lopez inherited from Norman.
After all, local political mechanisms were created to serve late 19th century New York City, and have merely been tailored over the next century to strengthen the entrenchment of the group in power.
Take for instance, the Judicial Nominating Convention, a low-key body of elected officials who theoretically vet the best candidates for the bench, but in reality rubber-stamp the decisions of their party bosses and appoint judges to the ballot (who then run unopposed). It’s group most New Yorkers have never even heard of, but also the very same organization Justice Gleeson railed against as anti-democratic and based on patronage. A 2006 NY Times Op-Ed, on the heels of Gleeson’s decision, said of the Convention and its method of selection: “[it’s] the last bastion of the clubhouse. Judges ascend to the bench as a result of loyal work for a party or friendship with a political powerbroker.”
But to get a completely circular picture of how poor the system is, we’ve got to take a look a look at the mechanism by which the Party bosses ensure their people win the Judicial Nomination Convention seats (theoretically, that is, as the convention’s obscurity, and the fact that its members don’t do anything but rubber stamp the party’s choices for judgeships keep it almost entirely off the radar): the system of petitioning to place candidates on various ballots.
A hundred years ago, it made sense that someone running for local office would have to first pass their neighbor’s smell test. Today, in many, many ways, the signature requirements act as a restrictive barrier to grassroots campaigns, favoring the already organized political machines and their armies of petitioners (many of whom, not-so-coincidentally, also work election-day jobs doled out by the parties).
Even when upstart challengers do hit the street and accrue enough signatures to get themselves on a ballot for a City Council seat, a District Leader/County Committee position, or even in the powerful-but-quiet Judicial Nominating Convention, the usual outcome is the challenger being tripped up, or at least heavily challenged, in court by the incumbent’s party bosses.
Those being the same party bosses who appointed the very judges before whom they’re arguing their technicality-based cases to get an opponents’ signatures invalidated!
Just this past primary election, Lopez went to court to get New Kings Democrat Esteban Duran tossed off the ballot. In perhaps the clearest signal yet that the writing is on the wall for Lopez, he failed miserably, although the tactic has often been successful.
But hey, don’t worry if organizing a petition-drive against a standing local party and their team of lawyers seems daunting. In local politics you can always just buy your way in via what’s known as a Wilson Pakula: a unique to New York method of a political party’s authorizing (read: selling) a non-party member to run on the party line.
A source who was at the meeting in which the Brooklyn Republican Party gave a nod to Mayor Bloomberg’s Wilson Pakula to run as a Republican recalls several party members openly asking some form of the question: “What do we get out of this?”
(The answer was $125,000; the Brooklyn Republican Party sells itself cheap).
So while the news is periodically dotted, as it has been during this election season, with feel-good stories of grassroots campaigners trying to reconnect ordinary citizens with the local political machine that roars around them, it’s not hard to see that these young idealists will meet only sporadic success as long as the rules in place continue to tilt the playing field in favor of the establishment. Until the archaic system that’s been tailored to protect the strength of the Parties by solidifying the power of the Party Chairmen is fundamentally changed, the leaders of the establishment will remain in place…at least until criminal probes turn into federal indictments.
Since you call yourself a journalist, maybe you should check your facts a tad better. You made a major error in the very first three words of your article. Margarita Lopez Torres was NEVER a City councilwoman, which would be painfully obvious had you actually bothered to read Judge Gleason's decision. She was a Civil Court judge, and is now Surrogate Judge in Kings County.
Posted by: yauper | 10/21/2010 at 10:14 AM