The great rolling circus that is the Brooklyn Democratic Party has been on an incredible run the past few months. After reformers finally won enough district leader seats in the party primary in June to unseat party Chair Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn and the party establishment that backs her, Bichotte Hermelyn undertook a brazen autogolpe, driving through a rules change that would allow her to pack the party's executive committee with loyalists and thereby retain control of the party indefinitely.
The reformers sued to block the new rules, and won. Bichotte Hermelyn and her backers appealed, and while the appeal was pending, they convened a gloriously chaotic party meeting, using the rules already tossed out of court to elect new party officers. Bichotte Hermelyn and her lame-duck leadership team lost their appeal as well, with a ruling last week all but putting the nail in the coffin of their hopes of clinging to power.
As a final indignity, the party establishment realized that, in their inept meeting, they had inadvertently allowed their sworn enemy, Congressmember Nydia Velázquez, to be elected chair of the county committee, and, with the rest of the executive committee seats still unfilled, Velázquez promptly told the lawyers from the party's law firm, Abrams Fensterman, that they were no longer authorized to represent the party in court.
With all that, you probably assumed that the show must finally be over—Bichotte Hermelyn and her supporters would surely have to pack it in.
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