A Council Divided

This essay is part of a series in which writers reflect on Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration as the mayor of New York City. 

Ever since the late 1980s, when a Supreme Court ruling and resulting revised city charter essentially remade New York City’s government in the hope of resolving its sheer unconstitutionality and pervasive corruption, the overwhelmingly Democratic fifty-one-person City Council has acted as a foil to two Republicans (Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg), two Democrats (Bill de Blasio and, for his last year in office, David Dinkins), and a secret third thing (Eric Adams). Usually constrained by a more conservative executive, the council has often tried to outflank the mayor from the left, whether by pursuing criminal justice reforms or by advocating for far larger municipal budgets than the mayor would like.

The outcome of this arrangement has been less than ideal. New York City has countless progressive laws on the books that conservative mayors just simply refuse to administrate. (Bill de Blasio, especially during his first term, was the exception, and you’ll find the new administration absolutely crawling with de Blasio alums who know exactly which laws Adams ignored.) During his sole term, for instance, Adams disregarded legislation that promised to expand eligibility for people who need housing vouchers—leading to a lawsuit that the state supreme court resolved in the administration’s favor—and a sweeping plan to ensure safety-minded redesigns of city streets.

Because of the city’s “strong mayor” system, mayors are more or less allowed to do this. Forcing the executive to enforce a given law would mean suing them—and risking the possibility that a court could find the law illegal altogether—or dragging commissioners in front of the council to explain themselves. The result is that, the moment he took office, Zohran Mamdani already had a number of progressive laws just sitting there. The challenge will be securing the money and political will required to deploy them.

Of those laws, perhaps the most critical to New Yorkers’ physical and spiritual wellbeing—although Mamdani rarely remarked upon it during his campaign—is the one that imposes a looming 2027 deadline to close Rikers Island. Following the suicide of Kalief Browder, a teenager who was held in Rikers for over three years, including seven hundred days in solitary confinement, the moral stain became too much for the City Council, which in 2019 relented to a well-organized pressure campaign and passed a law requiring the jail to be closed within eight years. But that mandate came with a compromise that ultimately broke apart the anti-Rikers coalition: four new neighborhood jails would take its place. Without outside pressure to build the new facilities (even the de-carceralists who backed the compromise weren’t going to become project managers for new jails), Adams did practically nothing to get the city ready for the deadline, all but requiring his successor to push the date back. To do so, Mamdani will have to work with a council almost a decade removed from the one that finally committed to closing New York’s island hellhole.

The council that Mamdani will inherit is a tricky one to navigate. It has an energetic left faction, made up of five prominent socialists and a coordinated progressive bloc, and over the past four years it bucked Adams repeatedly (led by its senior members, holdovers from the de Blasio era). Champing at the bit to assert its independence after years of Adams’s vetoes, this progressive flank will surely welcome the chance to work with a mayor less opposed to its priorities. But other councilmembers who entered office alongside Adams, having already served the first of their two terms, are already eyeing their exits (and whatever higher offices they aspire to). They may have less reason to work with Mamdani than with whoever could help them get where they want to go next—and having been elected during the primary Adams won, some of them skew more centrist.

These tensions came to a head in November, when the council’s left-aligned members failed to install their nominee, Brooklyn’s Crystal Hudson, as the next speaker. Instead a coalition of labor groups, political machines, and business interests got behind Julie Menin, a Manhattan councilmember who spent seven years chairing a community board and lost a run for Manhattan borough president before finally being tapped for several positions in the de Blasio administration. On the council, Menin has focused on the interests of small businesses, public-private partnerships, and transparency in health care pricing; she also helped pressure City Hall to cancel a concert by the pro-Palestinian performer Kehlani in Central Park. Many of the forces that coalesced around her, like the Hotel & Gaming Trades Council and 32BJ SEIU unions, first endorsed Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary (before ultimately backing Mamdani in the general). Also on the list of her backers is the far-right, bigoted councilmember Vickie Paladino, who recently called for the expulsion of Muslims from the United States. (Menin called the social media post in question “abhorrent” and asked Paladino to take it down but stopped short of joining the call for her censure.)

The speaker is an influential role: Menin now has pretty much total power over what legislation comes to a vote. Presumably she won’t put up much of a challenge to Mamdani on some items, particularly regarding his affordability agenda. But some of Menin’s allies and supporters have expressed deep concerns about Mamdani’s agenda on criminal justice. The council’s nine-person, reactionary “common sense” caucus, which gave Menin a good part of her advantage over Hudson, for instance, has long resisted any incursion on the NYPD’s sovereignty. There is some cause for concern, then, that Menin’s council might be less obliging when it comes to working with Mamdani to close Rikers or implement another major plank of his agenda: forming a Department of Community Safety that would move the NYPD away from interacting with people experiencing homelessness or mental health crises (the significant majority of people being held on the island).

During an interview in December, Menin recounted reaching out directly to Tisch about creating Mamdani’s proposed department. “There’s a lot of agreement in terms of mental health issues,” she said. “We’re asking NYPD officers to do too much.” But although a bill establishing the department has already been introduced in the council by Brooklyn councilmember Lincoln Restler, Menin also wondered aloud whether legislation would even be needed to achieve those goals. “There are many things the mayor can do via executive order,” she said, somewhat undercutting her own legislative body’s power. It was hard not to see that comment as a veiled suggestion that Menin’s bloc of the council might not rush to set Mamdani’s criminal-justice priorities down in law. The thing about executive orders is that they’re easy for the next mayor to rescind.