By Celia Bernhardt | cbernhardt@queensledger.com
Credit: Celia Bernhardt
High-ranking House Representative and Queens County Democratic Party Chair Gregory Meeks answered questions about upcoming judicial elections at a wide-ranging media roundtable on Monday, praising his selected candidates and pushing back on arguments that the party perpetuates a culture of political patronage in the courts.
Meeks’s candidate for Surrogate’s Court, Cassandra Johnson, faced a relatively close primary against Wendy Li in June. Li framed herself as a political outsider, arguing that she would bring a fresh perspective to the system as someone without a stake in the inner workings of the party machine. She emphasized a future of “fair” and “merit-based” attorney appointments, trying to draw a contrast to the court’s history of doling out lucrative cases and positions to party power brokers.
Johnson ultimately beat out Li with 55% of the vote. Now, Republican candidate Stephen Weiner — who, by virtue of his party, is looking at a long shot campaign — is taking up Li’s mantle, arguing that Johnson would perpetuate the favoritism entrenched in Surrogate’s Court while he would shake up business as usual.
“I don’t want to replace a clubhouse and put in a clubhouse. That’s not my legacy. That’s not something I had any interest in,” Weiner told the Queens Ledger in a July interview.
“It does de facto help the Democratic party,” Weiner later said of the party’s presence in judicial roles. “That’s sort of how it is. But what else is going on in the court?… I want to give it a fresh look from top to bottom.”
Asked for his perspective on those critiques, Meeks denied that political patronage rules court appointments under his party’s reign.
“It has not happened with me as the county leader,” Meeks said. “I think the key is being fair, and I think that Judge Johnson will be fair in making sure she’s working with all the attorneys.”
“In fact,” Meeks continued, “what was extremely important to me and to the district leaders when deciding who to support was, by large part, talking to attorneys that practice — and a wide range—to see if, in fact, based upon their working with Judge Johnson…whether they thought she would be fair and impartial to everyone. And I think that overwhelmingly, that’s what they said.”
Johnson, for her part, has expressed openness but not commitment to changing certain longstanding court appointments, arguing that she would need to assess the inner workings of Surrogate’s Court firsthand to determine her course of action.
Also in the legal world, Meeks recently selected three Democratic candidates — Amish Doshi, Peter F. Lane, and Melissa B. DeBerry — to run for newly-added seats on the borough’s Civil Court bench. The new judicial positions were established with a rapidly-passed piece of state legislation, long after primary season (which would have allowed for an open election) had already come and gone. Doshi ran as one of two party-backed candidates for an open seat in the Civil Court this past primary season, but came in last. When asked why he selected Doshi to run for the new seat in the general election, Meeks praised the candidate, and cited his position as the fourth and final name listed on the primary ballot as the reason he lost his first race.
“Doshi ran around Queens County when running for Civil Court. It’s amazing the amount of people that just fell in love with him,” Meeks said. “Look at his history and who he is and how he has grown up in this system.”
“He didn’t lose because of who he is or the content of his character and what he represented. He lost because of ballot positioning,” Meeks added. “So to be fair, that should be rotating — in some places you’re number four, in other places you’re number one or number two. So that then people have to focus more on exactly who they are.”
