When I was growing up, I was taught that a legislative body made up entirely, or almost entirely, of members of one ruling party, whose leaders are chosen by a few unelected party "leaders," was the kind of bad thing they did in the Soviet Union.
Welcome to the New York City Council!
With today's expected resignation of Dennis Gallagher, the special election that will be held in May may reduce the Republicans to two seats out of 51. Granted, in New York City, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 5.5 to 1, it stands to reason that a truly representative legislature will be overwhelmingly Democratic. But when all but two or three of the 51 seats are one-party, there is no chance for an opposing viewpoint to be heard.
But wait, there's more!
Add to this the fact that the Speaker is chosen not by elected representatives of the people (except for the kind of rubber-stamp vote the Soviet system was famous for), but by two or three Democratic county leaders in a back-room deal. Once chosen, the Speaker has extraordinary power to determine who gets to chair which committees, which bills get voted on and which ones die, and what the budget looks like. What we have is not a truly American system.
A better way would be a borough-by-borough proportional representation system. Under this system, each party would put up a "slate" for each borough, and voters could vote for the slate. Each party would then get members elected based on the percentage of votes their slate received. Under this system, it stands to reason that there would be eight or nine Republicans in the Council -- not enough to get their own bills passed, perhaps, but enough to have a voice, and certainly enough to be truly representative of the City's people.
The down side is that party insurgents would have a more difficult time getting elected. In Queens, out of the 13 Democrats in the Council, about half can be classified as "insurgents," as they did not get the County endorsement. The solution is to determine the "order of preference" of the members of the slate based on vote totals during the primary. In other words, Manhattan has 10 City Council members, so each party could put up a slate of 10. Those 10 would be chosen in a borough-wide primary, with the top vote-getter being the first in line for a seat should the party win a seat in the general election, the next highest vote-getter getting the second seat, etc.
Combine this system with a "Clean Money, Clean Elections" campaign finance system so that candidates could not truly campaign borough-wide (except perhaps on Staten Island), and an insurgent with a large base of disaffected voters could actually have an easier time getting elected than under the current system.
In addition, a third-party candidate would also have an easier time getting elected. Currently, there is one third-party member in the Council (Letitia James, listed officially as "Working Families Party"), but that is due to a fluke in timing. She was chosen in a special election held on the day of the general election in 2003 after James Davis was killed, running as a WFP candidate, as the Democrats put up Davis's brother. She is the first third-party candidate elected to the Council in 30 years, and it took very unusual circumstances.
A few years ago, the Brennan Center for Justice released a report detailing the dysfunction of our state government. Perhaps it's time for a similar report on the City Council.
