Among my ideas was to write a television comedy called City Council using video tape from councils throughout the country. But I could never have made up some of the real actions taken by New York City Councilors described in this article. Cambridge City Council is sane compared to this.
[From article]
de Blasio came into office with an advantage that his recent predecessors lacked: overwhelming support in the city council, whose members, as one lawmaker put it, are like a “cult of true believers,” eager to follow their leader. In New York, the mayor makes most of the news, and it’s easy to ignore the city council. That would be a mistake. Not only did de Blasio himself come from its ranks, where he spent years building alliances; New York’s next mayor may well be a sitting council member today—and, if so, judging by the views of some of the council’s leading figures, the de Blasio years might be ironically remembered for how moderate they were.
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Insiders had considered Mark-Viverito a long shot for the speakership. She
grew up in privilege in Puerto Rico, where her ophthalmologist father, who owned his own dual-engine Cessna, founded a hospital that, after his death, sold for $165 million. She and her family own properties in San Juan and along the coast that provide them with a stream of rental income. Under the auspices of a program aimed at middle-income, first-time home buyers, Mark-Viverito purchased her current home, a three-family structure on East 111th Street, for $350,000, and paid off the mortgage after only ten years. The property is now estimated to be worth $1.2 million. Despite appearing at Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street sit-in and announcing on camera that she belongs to the “99 percent,” Mark-Viverito has the real-estate portfolio of a 1 percenter.
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Melissa Mark added her mother’s maiden name, Viverito, after graduating from Columbia University.
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Including Mark-Viverito as speaker, the caucus, with 18 seats, now makes up more than one-third of the 51-member council and dominates the council politically, holding all leadership posts and most key committee chairmanships. Its members are unremittingly left-wing.
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As a council member, Chin lifted the protective-landmark designation on an early-nineteenth-century wood-framed building on the Bowery, one of the few such historic structures remaining in Manhattan. The 1817 building, owned by a Chinese-American bank that contributed generously to Chin’s campaign, was quickly torn down to allow for the development of a generic, eight-story brick-and-glass structure. Chin defended the erasure of a remnant of New York’s Federal-era past, saying that the new building would offer below-market “affordable office space.” “Affordability” in reference to housing is a legal term pertaining to residents’ income. There is no equivalent term for commercial real estate, so Chin concocted the phrase to give cover to her donors.
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Rather than condemn the violence, [Letitia] James instead chided the restaurant’s owners for “irresponsible” management in holding their promotion on the eve of a school holiday, when the teenagers would be more likely to go out for the evening. “I want this Tuesday restaurant promotion stopped, or the lease of this business revoked,” she demanded.
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Council Member Jumaane Williams of Brooklyn [. . .] sponsored a resolution calling on police to “stop arresting people for committing minor infractions in the transit system.” According to the text of the resolution, being arrested for littering, gambling, or urinating in the subway can be “very disruptive” to the arrestee. Moreover, being arrested is “overly punitive and unfair” and can even cause “financial hardship.” Clearly, Williams’s policy priorities don’t include protecting subway riders from disorderly or violent behavior.
The only reason that Council Member Inez Barron isn’t a Progressive Caucus member is because the group’s politics aren’t radical enough. In January 2014, Barron, a former state assembly member, assumed the seat formerly held by her husband, Charles Barron; he, in turn, will succeed her in Albany this year. A former Black Panther, Charles Barron was known during his time on the council for never standing during the Pledge of Allegiance, for inviting Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe to City Hall, and for saying that he wanted to go up to the next white person and “slap him, just for my mental health.”
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Few council members have much experience of professional life outside politics. Many worked as staffers to council members before becoming council members themselves. One, Progressive Caucus member Richie Torres of the Bronx, said in an interview with The Nation, “Do I look like a politician to you? I’m a 25-year-old college dropout who grew up in public housing. I’m gay. I’m Afro-Latino. I hardly have the characteristics people associate with a politician, but here I am.” Council Member Torres had previously served on the staff of a council member from an adjoining district. He was essentially selected by the local machine to fill a vacancy. So when he asks, “Do I look like a politician to you?” the answer, more or less, is yes.
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The quirky personalities and often zany ideas of New York’s progressive council members can make for amusing reading, but the job of governing a city of 8 million people is no joke.
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In short, the city faces serious challenges and needs serious leaders to meet them. Based on the quality of its political bench, New York could be in real trouble soon.
http://www.city-journal.org/2015/25_1_new-yorks-progressive-council.html
SETH BARRON
Council of Crackpots
New York City’s far-left lawmakers are out of touch with reality.
Winter 2015
