I believe in a big tent Democratic Party, and I’ve often supported and contributed to Democrats far to my right, in the belief that Democrats champion a free and open society, but Queens (NY) Assembly members Stacey Pfeffer Amato and Sam Berger, who claim to be Democrats, deserve our contempt. This is not personal. I don’t live in their districts, and had never heard of either of them before I heard of their attempts to destroy free speech and protest in New York.
Pfeffer Amato and Sam Berger want to make non-violent protest a felony, as it is in authoritarian states. They have introduced Assembly bill
A0895, which. would create a new Class D Felony termed "Domestic Terrorism,” defined as “blocking a road or transportation facility.”
Pfeffer Amato and Berger hope to end peaceful protest in New York, by terrorizing peaceful protesters with the threat of seven years in prison. The bill was a reaction to recent protests calling for a ceasefire in the conflict between Israel and Hamas, which blocked traffic going into Kennedy Airport, which is in the district. Yes, it was inconvenient—I almost missed a plane because of the protests, but to me that’s a small price to pay for living in a country where people are free to protest.
Historically, the area that comprises Pfeffer Amato’s district was mostly famous for John Gotti, and also for the 1986 Howard Beach Incident, when a gang of white men beat Michael Griffith and Cedric Sandiford with baseball bats because they dared stop for a slice of pizza in the neighborhood while being Black. Griffith was chased onto the busy high-speed Cross Bay Boulevard, where he was killed by a passing car. At the time, Mayor Ed Koch deplored the Howard Beach killing as “the sort of thing that you expect to happen in the Deep South.”
A0895 is also the sort of thing that you expect to happen in the Deep South. Democrats on this site and in this state should go on the record against the bill, and hold Pfeffer Amato and Berger up for shame and ridicule for trying to criminalize protest as if this were Mississippi or Moscow. If Alabama had such a law in 1965, MLK and the protesters probably would have been put away in Alabama prisons for years. It’s possible that the Civil Rights Movement would have been suppressed.
Trying to out-Trump Trump with racist dogwhistles is unprincipled and it’s bad politics. If I was Pfeffer Amato’s Republican opponent, I’d be calling Democrats in her district to tell them what Pfeffer Amato and Berger have done. Most Democrats won’t countenance political repression.
Pfeffer Amato and Berger are in close races, in what are relatively red areas for New York City, but the numbers suggest that they could win easily if they actually did some competent organizing of the liberal voters in their district instead of tailing after Trump.
Machine Democrats in New York these days tend to be lazy about organizing. That’s why there are been so much progressive criticism of Gov. Hochul for retaining the conservative state party chair
Jay Jacobs.
In 2022, Amato, whose district is conservative, beat her Republican-Conservative Party opponent by only fifteen votes, 16,185-16,170. In 2020, she had carried the district with 61.5% of the vote, garnering 29,065 votes. In 2022, she only turned out 55% of the 2020 Democratic downballot voters in the district, while Republicans and Conservatives turned out 89% of their 2020 voters. So her race was close because she took the district’s Democrats for granted, and ran an ineffective campaign. Is her effort to make New York more like Russia likely to turn out more Democratic voters? I doubt it.
