Raucous Brooklyn Party Meeting Rubber Stamps Rule Changes That Judge Found to Be Illegal

Chaos and conflict marked a much-delayed, eight-hour meeting of the biannual Brooklyn Democratic County on Wednesday. The result: the party rubber-stamped rules that a lower court judge had recently found were illegal. The contentious meeting was the latest front in the war between the establishment Brooklyn Democratic Party, led by Democratic Assemblymember Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, who didn’t show up to Wednesday’s meeting, and a reform coalition seeking to overthrow her, led by the New Kings Democrats. In last June’s primary, the reform coalition won enough votes to oust Bichotte Hermelyn as party chief and gave their unanimous support to Julio Peña III, a longtime district leader from Sunset Park. But Bichotte Hermelyn called a meeting of the outgoing district leaders in August who voted to add dozens of new voting members to the executive committee, making the reformers block irrelevant. / On Wednesday, about 200 Democratic county committee members crowded int