NYC Council radicals join wave of pols doing activism—not their jobs
Something strange happened the other night in New York City.
A nine-person board appointed by the mayor met to determine how much rents on so-called “stabilized” apartments could be increased next year.
The meeting was interrupted when protesters stormed the stage chanting and shouting “Housing over profit,” thereby disrupting its good working order.
Protests at a meeting to discuss rent hikes aren’t strange.
Here’s what was: Among the demonstrators Tuesday night were five elected members of the New York City Council — Chi Ossé, Tiffany Cabán, Sandy Nurse, Shahana Hanif and Alexa Avilés.
Together they make up close to 10% of the council.
As such, they have agency here.
The city created the Rent Guidelines Board in 1969, but a 1983 state law transferred regulatory control to Albany.
These councilmembers could lobby state legislators to change the law and make it more tenant-friendly.
They could go to the mayor and use their electoral authority and negotiating power to have him appoint different people to the board who hew to their views more closely.
They could even attempt to make a home-rule case and pass a local law in contradiction to the state law and see how Albany reacts and what will result.
Instead, they acted as though they weren’t elected officials at all — but rabble-rousers with no power whatsoever aside from the power of their lungs, their rudeness and their willingness to create chaos.
This is exactly how elected officials should not behave because they have so many other tools at their disposal the rest of us don’t have.
But it is increasingly the case that committed leftists in the United States who have risen to office after time spent in street-level and community activism are actively seeking to make a mockery of their new jobs when they cannot get their way — and in so doing, convince others to have the same kind of contempt for efforts to work within the system they seem to have.
This is just the latest example of this behavior over the past couple of months.
In Montana, a trans legislator openly encouraged a protest in the gallery of the state Legislature by repeatedly holding up a microphone to amplify the shouting and accused her colleagues of having “blood on your hands” because they voted against providing transgender-favorable medical treatment to minors.
She was removed from the chamber and then expelled.
In Tennessee, three progressive state legislators who were unhappy that their views on gun control weren’t going to be debated when they wanted shouted through bullhorns and deliberately disrupted the proceedings.
Two of them were expelled from the House as well.
These expulsions are extreme responses but neither unprecedented nor unwarranted based on the longstanding rules of those bodies.
And it’s clear that the expelled legislators believe their tactics are just and right and would simply continue to use them — when the whole point of being elected to a Legislature is to work within it for the good of the people who elected you.
The ideologically righteous always give themselves a pass on behaving goonishly on the grounds that their moral superiority transcends conventional strictures — that conventional strictures actually exist to deny them their rights.
But no one has a right to secure political changes if those changes cannot be achieved without a consensus of the governed, as expressed through their representatives.
That’s what representative government means.
Increasingly we are being represented by people who do not actually believe in representative government.
The consequences over the course of the next generation are going to be dire.
As citizens of a democratic republic, we vote in elections to authorize fellow citizens to represent our interests — and to enact or oppose legislation that literally has the force of law.
We willingly give these fellow citizens power over us to gather in legislatures for the purpose of managing or blocking change.
This is how politics works — or is supposed to work.
