(Photo by Hal Brown)

Radio talk show host Bill Spadea has had a lot to rant about recently.

On Friday morning, he needled NJ Transit over its disastrous service shutdowns and slapped Jersey Shore towns where free beach access has apparently led to too-crowded beaches. On Tuesday, he said he’d support state funds to pay for longer hours for lifeguards and he took a crack at Rutgers University.

Sort of typical for Spadea’s morning radio show on New Jersey 101.5. But now that he’s running for the GOP nod for governor next year, Spadea’s show is no longer just a chance for him to raise the blood pressure of his listeners by ranting about high taxes and those clowns in Trenton — it’s a daily, four-hour ad for Spadea’s campaign.

And it’s one that could go on for a while. Spadea’s bosses say they don’t intend to take him off the air until he becomes a “legally qualified” candidate. That could mean another nine months or so of New Jersey 101.5 giving Spadea free campaign ads, four hours a day, five days a week, unless someone steps in to stop them.

There are legal implications to all this — the Election Law Enforcement Commission will consider this week whether New Jersey 101.5 is providing an in-kind contribution to Spadea’s campaign by letting him stay on the air — but I’m less interested in what the station can and can’t do and more interested in what it should and shouldn’t do. Is it fair to let Spadea mouth off for hours every day while his opponents would have to pay New Jersey 101.5 to do the same? Shouldn’t a media company that has a healthy news component, one that is already covering next year’s race for governor, avoid giving free air time to one of the candidates?

I talked to some media watchers about this, like Joe Amditis. He’s associate director of operations for the Center for Cooperative Media, which is based at Montclair State University and hopes to grow and strengthen local news in the Garden State.

“I think it would come down to whether 101.5 considers itself a news organization,” he said. “There’s a lot of blurred lines for some orgs, especially for one like 101.5, which is not explicitly journalism.”

Kathryn Quigley, who teaches media ethics at Rowan University, where she chairs the school’s journalism department, wonders what New Jersey 101.5 would do if Spadea openly campaigned during his show.

“How will they react if he goes out of bounds?” Quigley asked. “Would they pull the plug on his show if warranted?”

The problem is it’s already warranted. Spadea previewed his campaign spiel in the video announcing his candidacy, and it’s nearly indistinguishable from his on-air musings: Taxes are too high, spending is out of control, liberals stink, so do RINOS, drag queens are bad, etc. He could change not one syllable of his show and it would still represent a free campaign ad.

Townsquare Media, which owns New Jersey 101.5, said in a statement when Spadea announced his bid for governor that it is aware of the issues involved here and has imposed some guidelines to ensure Spadea’s show adheres to “industry standards.” It’s unclear what those guidelines are, but one of the radio station’s fixes for this problem is a lengthy on-air disclaimer intended to distance itself from Spadea’s political career, but instead serves as a regular reminder that the station’s star personality is running for governor.

I asked some of Spadea’s opponents how they feel. Sen. Jon Bramnick, who is also seeking the GOP nomination for governor, said he doesn’t think this is complicated: New Jersey 101.5 is giving Spadea’s campaign something of value by keeping him on the air.

“If he’s talking policy, which he does every day, his opinion as to what should be done in the state of New Jersey, that means he’s campaigning and therefore there is value from the station that’s giving him that opportunity to speak,” he said.

Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop, who is vying for the Democratic nod for governor, has a different opinion: Spadea’s on-air takes on politics and policy may make him popular enough with Republican primary voters to win next June, but they will hurt him in November.

“I actually hope Spadea keeps his show because I’m excited to see him in the general election,” Fulop said.

The post New Jersey 101.5 is giving Bill Spadea an unfair advantage in 2025 gov race appeared first on New Jersey Monitor.

Governor Phil Murphy and Attorney General Gurbir Grewal announce a federal lawsuit to overturn IRS rule invalidating New Jersey’s efforts to restore property tax deductibility on July 17, 2019, in South Orange. Edwin J. Torres/Governor’s Office.

The corruption allegations facing Sen. Bob Menendez are so expansive, the senator’s trial was bound to reveal some unrelated unsavory allegations involving other New Jersey officials.

And sure enough, Thursday’s testimony by former Attorney General Gurbir Grewal included two juicy tidbits about former state Sen. Dick Codey and a Murphy administration official who went unnamed but who appears to be former chief of staff George Helmy.

Grewal was on the witness stand to relay that Menendez tried to talk to him multiple times about a pending criminal case Grewal’s office was prosecuting, with Grewal testifying that he believed the message from Menendez was to handle the case differently. Under cross-examination by Menendez attorney Avi Weitzman, Grewal conceded that Codey and the chief of staff both did the same.

Weitzman appeared to cite Codey and the chief of staff conversations as a “hey, it’s Jersey, everyone does it” defense, but Grewal made clear that public officials should know not to speak to the state’s chief law enforcement officer about cases his office is prosecuting.

“I think the prohibitions on elected officials and members of the governor’s staff reaching out about pending criminal matters, these are just norms that people should be aware of,” Grewal said.

People should be aware of them, yes. But as we’ve learned, sometimes our leaders don’t think the norms apply to them.

Helmy

Few details about the episode involving the chief of staff were discussed in court.

Weitzman mentioned it first, asking Grewal about the governor’s chief of staff reaching out “to discuss a particular case pending in your office.”

“I said I can’t speak to you about pending matters,” Grewal said. “And then I reached out to the governor’s counsel, Matt Platkin at the time, to remind folks in his office what the lines were and what they could and could not raise.”

The conversation so alarmed Grewal, he testified that it prompted him to issue a memo “informing the governor’s office about what they can and can’t raise with the AG’s office.” The memo is dated Oct. 8, 2020 — when Helmy, now a hospital executive, was Gov. Phil Murphy’s chief of staff.

A source familiar with the matter told me the case Helmy inquired about involved Walter Somick, a North Bergen recreation worker charged by the Attorney General’s Office under a Grewal predecessor with official misconduct, a serious charge that comes with a mandatory prison sentence upon conviction. Authorities alleged Somick falsified time sheets to collect pay for work he didn’t perform, your classic Hudson County no-show job. The source told me Helmy tried to speak about the case with Grewal multiple times.

Somick is not just anyone: His mother is married to North Bergen Mayor Nick Sacco, who in 2020 was a powerful state senator and someone Helmy needed to help guide Murphy’s agenda through the Legislature. And at about the time of Grewal’s memo, Sacco was trying to get the Legislature to pass a bill that would have ended the mandatory jail time minimum for official misconduct convictions. The bill ended up on Murphy’s desk and he came close to signing it (he issued a conditional veto instead).

Helmy did not respond to a request seeking comment. A Murphy spokeswoman declined to comment.

Somick’s case finally ended for him in October 2022, with him pleading guilty to fourth-degree records tampering and winning an 18-month term of probation and a yearlong suspended jail term, according to the Jersey Journal.

Codey

The episode with Codey, Grewal said, happened early in Grewal’s tenure as attorney general (he assumed that role in January 2018).

It was at the tail end of a meeting when Codey said this, per Grewal: “I’m concerned about how the prior administration weaponized this office politically, and I’m particularly concerned about a pending matter.”

“I said to him, I’m not having a conversation with you about a pending matter,” Grewal testified Thursday.

Weitzman said the matter involved Kevin Bannon, a former Mercer County parks official and onetime loyalist of Democrat Brian Hughes, the former Mercer County executive. Grewal’s predecessor charged Bannon with diverting thousands of dollars of public money to a nonprofit he controlled.

Why would Codey — an Essex County Democrat and former acting governor — be so interested in this case that he’d try to lean on the attorney general over it? Codey, like Helmy, did not return my call. So I asked Bannon’s lawyer, Jack Furlong, who told me he believes Codey — who he said called him once to get background on the case — is friendly with the Bannon family.

“Governor Codey, as he likes to be called, is a hail fellow well met, and I think he’s one of those fellows that if he thinks he can be helpful he will be,” Furlong said. “Non-lawyers or people outside of the criminal justice system don’t seem to understand — we are not lobbyists. We don’t pick up the phone and call somebody and say, hey can you dismiss this indictment? That’s just not how this thing works.”

I’ve written before about Menendez’s own defense of these claims. His lawyers say it’s no big whoop that he had conversations with prosecutors about cases involving his friends and allies, that he just wanted to make sure the prosecutors were doing the right thing.

Absolute nonsense. When you’re in a position of power and you pull someone aside to say, “My friend’s in a jam and you can help him,” you’re sending a message that they need to listen to you or else. This is bad behavior even if you haven’t been accused of accepting gold bars in exchange for it. Whether you’re a U.S. senator, a state senator, or a Murphy administration official, it is — to quote Grewal’s colleague on their conversation with Menendez — gross.

Furlong is correct that asking prosecutors to help out your buddies is not how the criminal justice system is supposed to work. Alas, in New Jersey, too many of our leaders think it is.

The post Former A.G.’s testimony in Menendez trial reveals more New Jersey grossness appeared first on New Jersey Monitor.

The Open Public Records Act, a New Jersey law that allowed journalists, good-government groups, and everyday citizens alike to uncover government corruption at the state and local level, died this week after a series of fatal blows at the hands of the Legislature and Gov. Phil Murphy. It was 22.

The law, commonly known as OPRA, was hailed at the time of its passage as a “major reform” that helped citizens access documents that had previously been denied to them. It was responsible for the public knowing about glaring missteps at state-run veterans homes during the early months of the pandemic, the level at which police officers use force against citizens, the high rate of deaths in custody in New Jersey jails, and more.

But government officials soured on the law in recent years. County and municipal clerks said their offices were inundated with requests for government records, sometimes as many as one a day. Meanwhile, town leaders chafed at the legal costs associated with records disputes they lost in court, and at commercial entities that used the law to access records that, as taxpayers, they paid to create and maintain.

Fueled by this discontent, lawmakers earlier this year axed a few critical portions of the law and rewrote others, making it virtually unrecognizable. Murphy signed those revisions into law Wednesday.

Supporters of the Open Public Records Act expressed sorrow at its demise.

“Sad day for the people of New Jersey; a sad day for the party that I still believe in; and a sad day for our governor,” said former state Sen. Loretta Weinberg, a Bergen County Democrat and longtime OPRA champion.

Elouise McDaniel, an Irvington senior citizen who often used the law to obtain information about her town’s finances, expressed disappointment with Murphy. Irvington sued McDaniel in 2022, alleging she used the Open Public Records Act so much it verged on harassment (the town later dropped the suit).

The law Murphy signed Wednesday creates an incentive for towns to lodge these kinds of lawsuits against their citizens. It gives judges the power to ban some people from filing records requests entirely if a public entity accuses them of using the requests to “substantially interrupt” how the entity functions.

“It appears that rights are being given to municipalities to use public funds as they see fit with no restrictions,” McDaniel said.

The Open Public Records Act was born in Trenton on Jan. 8, 2002, when the state’s acting governor, Donald DiFrancesco, signed it on his final day in office. At the time, DiFrancesco, a Republican who was then wrapping up a 26-year career in the Legislature and nearly a year as the state’s chief executive, called the bill “truly unprecedented and historic.”

“It throws open the doors of government like we’ve never done before by affirming the public’s right to access virtually all government records,” he said.

The prior version of the law granted disclosure only of records specifically required to be filed or maintained, but OPRA allowed citizens to view and copy a host of other government documents, including electronic records, unless the law specifically barred disclosure.

A key enforcement mechanism imposed heavy fines on officeholders who purposely denied access. The law also required public entities to reimburse plaintiffs who were forced to go to court to obtain documents.

It was not without its critics from the start. A key last-minute change exempted certain legislative records, something press advocates at the time said they believed the Legislature would correct. It never did.

But over two decades, the law was key in uncovering political scandals major and minor. It helped reveal that millions in taxpayer dollars flowed to private schools and their highly-paid administrators, that Monmouth County commissioners secretly awarded themselves pay raises, and that a Jersey City councilman used a taxpayer-funded car to take joyrides while he was getting paid for a low-show public job.

But the law couldn’t survive lawmakers’ complaints that it allowed citizens to obtain too much information about their government.

The Open Public Records Act’s end was mourned on both sides of the aisle. Assemblyman Brian Bergen (R-Morris) called its replacement “the epitome of terrible government.”

“A bad bill, passed with bad intention, by people who either directly benefit from it or have been bought off to vote a certain way. I’ve never been part of anything more disgusting in my life,” Bergen said.

The post The Open Public Records Act, once touted as a ‘major reform,’ dies at 22 appeared first on New Jersey Monitor.

WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 06: A pro-Trump mob breaks into the U.S. Capitol on January 06, 2021 in Washington, DC. Congress held a joint session today to ratify President-elect Joe Biden's 306-232 Electoral College win over President Donald Trump. A group of Republican senators said they would reject the Electoral College votes of several states unless Congress appointed a commission to audit the election results. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

With 156 days left until polls close in the 2024 presidential race, I’m wondering whether the chaos that ensued after the last election will matter to voters in the fall.

Polls indicate that it should:

• A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll from January said most Americans (55%) believe the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol was an attack on democracy that should never be forgotten.
• A CBS News/YouGov survey from the same month found 78% disapprove of the actions of those who forced their way into the Capitol.
• ABC News/Ipsos in August found 52% of Americans think Donald Trump should have been charged with a crime for his connection to the riot.

But in national and battleground state polls, Trump has the edge over President Joe Biden.

So what gives here? Are there voters who think the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol was deplorable but don’t think it’s an especially important issue compared to the economy or immigration? Or are there Americans horrified by the riot but uninterested in voting?

This is on my mind because I was in Madison Wednesday to watch U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill, D-N.J., talk with Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, in what was billed as a “fireside chat on defending American democracy.”

Anyone who followed the House committee hearings on Jan. 6 probably recognizes Raskin, who sat on the panel and is not shy about his feelings on the rioters and Trump’s involvement in the episode. He was also lead manager for Trump’s second impeachment, a role that won him warm applause from the crowd who gathered to watch him talk to Sherrill.

Sherrill, who is reportedly eyeing a run for governor next year, expressed fear that Congress has little control over the kind of behavior Trump exhibited after he lost the last election — e.g., using his powers as president to try to remain in office, voters be damned.

“I felt like a lot of it really rested on tradition and a belief in our system of government, and it felt like there were very few levers we could use to force that transfer peacefully or ensure that it went forward,” she said.

Wednesday’s conversation — which occurred before another will-this-matter moment, Trump’s conviction on 34 counts in his hush-money trial — naturally veered to the U.S. Supreme Court and Justice Sam Alito’s flag-flying proclivities. Alito, a Jersey boy, has been the center of controversy lately because he flew flags favored by Trump loyalists and Jan. 6 rioters outside his homes. Raskin said the flags call Alito’s objectivity into question.

“I basically take Chief Justice Roberts at his word. He says that a judge is just an umpire,” he said. “Well, would Major League Baseball allow an umpire to officiate at the World Series if he was flying the pennant, the flag of one of the teams in his yard? Or flying one of the flags of the other teams upside down? Or if his wife was protesting to the league that the last game’s score should be nullified and reversed?”

He added: “If a judge is going to be an umpire, then act like an umpire.”

Raskin’s plea that Supreme Court justices should have term limits and should come from different places around the nation earned a slight rebuke from Sherrill.

“New Jersey hasn’t really done very well with their Supreme Court justice, Alito, so we may need to be careful,” she said.

The crowd in Madison Wednesday ate up Sherrill’s and Raskin’s thoughts on Jan. 6, but back to my initial question: Do head-to-head polls between Trump and Biden indicate voters don’t think the Jan. 6 riot matters? Raskin told me he thinks the polls showing Biden behind will not reflect what happens on Election Day.

He noted that Democrats have outperformed polls in recent special elections, like the one for a Republican seat in Long Island that Democrat Rep. Tom Suozzi won by eight points in February.

“We’ve been winning elections all over the country,” Raskin told me. “Some of the poll figures reflect people who are concerned about different issues, including what’s going on in the Middle East, but when people go out and vote, they’re voting for the Democrats at this point, and we fully expect that to be what’s going to happen.”

I posed the same question to Craig Sicknick, whose brother Brian was a U.S. Capitol police officer and died in the hospital a day after defending the Capitol during the riot. Brian Sicknick has become somewhat of a hero to Trump critics who condemn what happened on Jan. 6 as an insurrection, and his family was in Madison Wednesday to watch Sherrill and Raskin speak.

“I feel personally that I wouldn’t be here today without his protection,” Sherrill said to applause from the crowd.

Craig Sicknick told me he fears “all the time” that voters have moved on from this issue. I asked him what his message for these voters is.

“If you want to have a country that you want to live in, you’d better pay attention,” Sicknik said.

The post As voters consider their White House choice, is Jan. 6 a factor? appeared first on New Jersey Monitor.

(Edwin J. Torres/NJ Governor’s Office)

When Sen. Bob Menendez’s lawyers finally began arguing his case to a jury last week, they did their best to make his conduct sound innocuous.

Their problem is New Jersey politicians have so normalized their often-egregious behavior, they don’t appear to recognize when they’re describing corrupt acts. The Overton Window on unethical conduct in the Garden State hasn’t been shifted; it’s been smashed into pieces.

Take the events surrounding Menendez’s search for a U.S. attorney for New Jersey. When Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential race, the search was on for a new person to become the state’s chief federal law enforcement officer, and Menendez was tasked with finding one.

(Yes, one person — if they belong to the same party as the person occupying the White House — essentially gets to hand-pick our U.S. attorney. That’s how the system operates, and it’s barely questioned, so we’re starting at a base level of sorta corrupt.)

Menendez reached out to attorney Philip Sellinger about the gig and asked him about an active U.S. Attorney’s Office case involving Fred Daibes, a real estate developer and Menendez pal who was charged with bank fraud.

Prosecutors told jurors that Menendez used this interaction to tell Sellinger “he hoped the candidate would look into Daibes’ case if the candidate became the U.S. attorney.” The message from Menendez to Sellinger, prosecutors say, was clear: You’ll get the job if you agree to make my friend’s charges disappear.

Sounds bad! Menendez’s own version of events, via his lawyer Avi Weitzman, is that Menendez merely mentioned to Sellinger that he thought Sellinger was biased against Daibes because of an unrelated legal matter between Sellinger’s firm and Daibes.

“You’ll see clear evidence that the senator just wants to make sure that the U.S. Attorney’s Office gave Fred Daibes due process, the exact same thing that prosecutors all over the land are required to give their defendants. Does that sound like someone putting a thumb on the scale of justice?” attorney Avi Weitzman told the jury Wednesday.

Yeah, actually, it does! Menendez has nearly total power over getting Sellinger named to a prestigious job, and during the job interview, Menendez — by his own admission — said, soooooo whaddya think of this case that involves a close personal friend of mine? That very much sounds like him trying to put his thumb on the scales of justice. Add in that Sellinger was at Menendez’s wedding, and you have to wonder why Menendez was even talking to him about the U.S. attorney job in the first place.

I talked to Kedric Payne, senior director of ethics at Campaign Legal Center, who noted that in recent years, politicians have engaged in behavior that not so long ago would have forced them to resign. He cited George Santos, the former New York congressman who was the subject of a 23-count federal indictment and a House ethics report that found “substantial evidence” he had broken federal law — but still had to be expelled from the House in December when he didn’t heed calls to resign.

“Elected officials seem to no longer be ashamed of appearing corrupt, which then goes to not being ashamed of actually being corrupt,” Payne said.

Now, the question for the Menendez jurors is whether all this is illegal. I have some doubts about whether prosecutors can prove it, not just to the 12 jurors who will decide Menendez’s fate, but also to the U.S. Supreme Court, which loves overturning public corruption convictions. In Justice Elena Kagan’s decision reversing the Bridgegate convictions, Kagan famously wrote that “not every corrupt act by state or local officials is a federal crime.”

Maybe so. But every corrupt act is, in fact, corrupt.

The post Actually, Sen. Menendez, what you did does indeed sound pretty corrupt appeared first on New Jersey Monitor.

Gov. Phil Murphy addressing the Legislature during his annual State of the State address on Jan. 9, 2024. (Hal Brown for New Jersey Monitor)

As the Legislature considers a newly revised bill that would revamp our state’s public records law, the choice for Gov. Phil Murphy and the Democrats who rule Trenton is clear: They can emulate Democrats in Michigan, or Republicans in Louisiana.

In Michigan, Democrats are moving toward expanding their public records law by finally extending it to the Legislature and governor’s office, a move the state’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, is expected to support.

Down in Louisiana, Republicans are heading in the opposite direction with a bill that would shield most government records from public view. Republican Gov. Jeff Landry is supportive, saying public records have been “weaponized.” 

This may be news to New Jersey voters who continue to give our state’s Democratic leaders control of the Statehouse, but our overlords in Trenton sound more like the conservative Republicans who control Louisiana than the progressive Dems who have pledged to take Michigan in a better direction.

I’ve written numerous times about this attempt to water down the state Open Public Records Act because it may be the most important bill in Trenton right now. Not just because the bill would impair journalists from doing their jobs — though that’s true — but because it would all but eliminate one of the most useful tools our citizens have to learn what their government leaders are doing when they think no one is watching.

The bill has been amended a few times in ways its supporters believe make it a good compromise. It is not. If enacted, it would give towns more opportunities to shield records from the public, punish people who regularly request documents to learn more about their government, and give people with money the chance to get their records faster. And those are just three of the most odious provisions.

Here’s one more: The bill says if a judge finds that a requestor has tried to “substantially interrupt” a public entity’s performance — whatever that means — the judge can bar that person from filing more records requests. I call this the Elouise McDaniel provision, after the senior citizen Irvington hauled to court because she had the temerity to file many records requests.

It’s no secret why legislative leaders — the bill’s sponsors include Sen. Paul Sarlo and Assemblyman Joe Danielsen — want to feed the current version of the Open Public Records Act into a shredder. The law has been used to uncover all sorts of malfeasance by them and their pals.

In Danielsen’s case, the IT company he owns has been at the handful of records disputes, including one from a decade ago when the Government Records Council fined Franklin Township’s fire commissioner and his fire district $17,500 total for “willfully and knowingly” violating the law when it refused to fork over spending documents related to the district’s work with Danielsen’s company.

The Government Records Council’s website indicates a requestor in one of those fights had a bunch of disputes go before the agency over the years (he was on the winning side of a lot of them). I’ve no doubt Danielsen and his friends in Somerset County would have loved to have a judge put the guy on a no-more-OPRAs watchlist if they could.

A Senate committee passed the bill Thursday and an Assembly hearing is scheduled to hear it Friday, which makes critics fear the law’s goose is cooked as far as it comes to the Legislature, which could pass it as early as Monday. That leaves transparency advocates with Murphy’s veto pen as potentially their only hope.

Alas, when Nancy Solomon asked Murphy about the bill Wednesday, he echoed the sponsors’ misleading claims that they seek to modernize the Open Public Records Act, the kind of flimflammery I now expect from a group that last year passed a bill that let them skate on hundreds of thousands of dollars in alleged campaign finance violations and called it the Elections Transparency Act.

Still, Murphy has some time to figure out which path he wants New Jersey to follow: The one led by Michigan Democrats who seek to expand their citizens’ access to government records, or the one led by Louisiana Republicans, who want to cloak their actions in secrecy.

The post Gov. Murphy’s choice on public records bill: Mimic Michigan Dems, or the Louisiana GOP appeared first on New Jersey Monitor.

Yael Bromberg, Brett Pugach, and Flavio Komuves posing in their offices with, on the left, an office block-style ballot that will be used in many primaries in June and, on the right, a county-line ballot that federal judges say may be unconstitutional. (Photo by New Jersey Monitor)

When both sides in the legal fight over New Jersey’s county-line ballots met in a federal courtroom in Newark for a hearing in March, it was clear which side had the most firepower.

On the defense side were the attorneys for the county clerks and Camden County’s Democratic Party — so many lawyers that, at one point, the judge seated some of them in the jury box. The clerks had representatives in the audience, too, and there were other attorneys off-site, filing briefs in the case as the hearing progressed.

Representing the plaintiffs were Yael Bromberg, Flavio Komuves, and Brett Pugach.

“You have 100 attorneys on the other side,” Bromberg told me. “And you have the three of us.”

Turns out, the clerks were outmatched. Not only did Bromberg, Komuves, and Pugach score a big victory at the district court level by getting New Jersey’s county-line ballots thrown out for June’s Democratic primaries, they won again 20 days later when a panel of federal appeals court judges sided with them, too.

And it wasn’t just the clerks and their high-powered lawyers fighting Bromberg, Komuves, and Pugach. The state’s political bosses were working behind the scenes to keep the county line alive, too.

So this isn’t just a David versus Goliath story. To paraphrase Albert Finney in “Erin Brockovich,” this is a story about David versus Goliath’s “whole f***ing family.”

“This team is just incredible,” Komuves said.

I visited the trio of lawyers recently in their Somerset office, where they spent many, many hours crafting the legal arguments that have left the county line on life support, to chat about how they came to be bona fide heroes in New Jersey’s progressive community.

Jersey roots

The three got their legal educations here in the Garden State. Komuves went to Seton Hall Law, and Bromberg and Pugach were classmates at Rutgers Law.

Komuves worked for the government in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was deputy public advocate under Gov. Jon Corzine, and has been senior counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey.

Bromberg worked at Common Cause and taught and supervised litigation in Georgetown University Law Center’s Civil Rights Clinic and Voting Rights Institute. She was part of the legal team that sued conservative group Project Veritas on behalf of Democratic consulting firm Democracy Partners over claims the group had violated wiretapping laws and used fraud to misrepresent itself to produce a heavily edited video trashing the consulting firm during the 2016 presidential campaign. A jury awarded Democracy Partners $120,000.

Pugach has represented various progressive candidates and served as general counsel for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in New Jersey in 2016. He also authored a 2020 paper for the Rutgers University Law Review called “The County Line: The Law and Politics of Ballot Positioning in New Jersey” that offered a preview of their fight with New Jersey’s party bosses, who, as Pugach wrote, “exercise unchecked power to endorse candidates up and down the primary ballot in New Jersey.”

Before 2020, Pugach told me, “you weren’t allowed to talk about this.”

“Anyone that had any aspirations for a political future, it was taboo. You literally couldn’t mention anything about this issue,” he said. “We created a space where, hey, it’s OK to talk about this issue and there’s going to be a grassroots movement behind people who are willing to challenge the system as it exists.”

As Komuves put it: “Nobody likes bossism, right? But there was this sort of, eh, what are you going to do about it?”

‘The exact right people at the right time’

Bromberg said Pugach’s paper provided much of the framework for their two legal challenges to the county line.

The first came when the three represented then-congressional candidate Christine Conforti in a 2020 lawsuit targeting the line that was still winding its slow way through the federal courts when they filed a similar suit in February 2024, this time with Rep. Andy Kim as one of the plaintiffs. Both were heard by U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi, who in late March issued the preliminary injunction that prevents clerks from using the county line in Democratic primaries. Quraishi found the plaintiffs would likely succeed in establishing that the county line improperly influences election outcomes.

How’d they do it? Well, they had experts on their side — like Josh Pasek, a political science professor at the University of Michigan who studied the effects of the county line and determined it alters election results and renders otherwise unviable candidates viable — that the clerks’ attorneys had a hard time rebutting. And once a federal appeals court refused to block Quraishi’s order pending an appeal, the clerks gave up and produced ballots without the county line, robbing them of what was one of their chief complaints, that Kim’s lawsuit came too late for them to change how they design ballots.

“Lo and behold, they all figured out how to do it,” Pugach said.

They also had Kim, who helped offer them a current, high-profile example of a candidate harmed by the county line. Kim in a statement said Bromberg, Komuves, and Pugach were “the exact right people at the right time to take on this challenge.”

“Each of their individual strengths, intellect, and experience brought something meaningful to the table. While their collective passion for protecting and strengthening our democracy has helped empower New Jersey voters and make us stronger and fairer,” he said.

The lawsuit isn’t dead. But Bromberg said she’s confident the county line will be kaput once the case is resolved because the public and the courts are now aware of its manifest unfairness.

“Now that they’re so knowledgeable about the issue, how can they meaningfully have public confidence in our elections unless we have fair and equal and uncorrupted office-block ballot designs?” Bromberg said.

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Rep. Mikie Sherrill, right, at Cooperman Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston on April 24, 2024. (Photo courtesy of Sherrill's office)

Rep. Mikie Sherrill was in Livingston Wednesday to — again — defend abortion rights as — again — the U.S. Supreme Court is mulling whether to restrict access to the procedure.

Sherrill (D-11) chose to make her remarks outside the emergency room of the former Saint Barnabas hospital to highlight the particular dangers of the most recent case.

“It’s simple: Politicians, legislators should not be deciding whether pregnant women live or die,” she said.

Idaho’s near-total ban on abortion is at the center of the case, which the high court’s justices heard Wednesday.

The state law allows abortions if “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.” The Biden administration argues that a 1986 federal law called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act trumps the state’s law. The federal law says that hospitals participating in Medicare must offer necessary treatment to stabilize care for someone with an emergency medical condition. For the Biden administration, that means the hospital must perform an abortion if necessary to prevent severe health risks to the mother, and not just their death. Idaho argues that is too expansive a reading of the federal law.

Sherrill sounded the alarm about what will happen if the Supreme Court sides with Idaho: Women living in states with draconian abortion laws may not get the medical care they need in an emergency.

“What these Idaho lawmakers fail to understand is that when a woman comes into an emergency room with complications regarding her pregnancy, whether it’s a miscarriage, an ectopic pregnancy, or anything else, often the life-saving medical treatment they need at that moment is an abortion,” she said.

Sherrill’s appearance in Livingston Wednesday came as Democrats, sweating about the prospect of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, see abortion as a, if not the, issue that could save their party. It may also, they hope, give their party a boost statewide next year, when the governor’s race will be at the top of the ticket. Sherrill is expected to jump into that race after November’s election.

Republicans here have argued that other states’ abortion restrictions are irrelevent. We’re run by Democrats who support abortion rights and were quick to codify them when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, they note. State Sen. Holly Schepisi (R-Bergen) has argued New Jersey Democrats who focus on abortion are scaring voters to win elections. Assemblyman John DiMaio (R-Warren), his chamber’s minority leader, wrote an op-ed last year saying abortion rights “aren’t at risk” in New Jersey.

Their message: New Jerseyans shouldn’t care about this issue.

That’s not entirely true, and Sherrill explained to me why. She said the restriction of abortion rights in other states means women’s rights are on shaky ground there and here. What if a New Jersey woman who is pregnant needs to take a business trip to a part of the country where reproductive health care is under attack, she said. Should she go? What about a college graduate thinking of where to start a family, she asked — would she want to pick a part of the country where a future pregnancy could be a death sentence?

“So I don’t think we in New Jersey feel like our protections are built on very safe ground, and as women, we really feel that curtailment of freedoms across our country,” she said.

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A makeshift campsite for people experiencing homelessness in Oregon, a state at the center of a U.S. Supreme Court that could expand how towns target people without homes. (Ben Botkin/Oregon Capital Chronicle)

A comment from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has been rattling around my brain since I heard it Monday morning.

The nation’s high court was hearing a case centered around an Oregon city’s ordinance restricting when people can sleep outdoors, an attempt to shoo away the city’s unhoused population. Sotomayor asked the city’s attorney what would happen if towns nationwide pass laws barring people with no homes from sleeping in public places.

“Where do we put them if every city, every village, every town lacks compassion and passes a law identical to this? Where are they supposed to sleep? Are they supposed to kill themselves not sleeping?” Sotomayor asked.

A blunt but effective way to get at the heart of this issue. The nation has a lot of people who have no homes. What are they supposed to do if every town’s policy solution for this problem is to make it impossible for them to exist?

Monday’s hearing centered around an ordinance from the city of Grants Pass, nearly 3,000 miles away from New Jersey, but a ruling in the city’s favor would have broad implications nationwide. It would, I fear, give leaders here a license to try to make the issue of homelessness invisible rather than try to solve it.

It’s not like they haven’t tried.

Middle Township last year approved a ban on sleeping in tents. Newark said in 2021 that anyone who gives food to the homeless must get the city’s OK first. And Paterson recently unveiled a plan to restrict anyone from distributing “resources” in public — food, clothes, tents, basically anything.

No doubt there are places in New Jersey, like Grants Pass, Oregon, that see a lot of homelessness. Newark and Paterson had the most unhoused people by far in their respective counties last year, per an annual count. But does anyone running these cities think passing laws that bar them from living in tents or limit how much people can give them will do anything to make a homeless person not homeless? It won’t. And that’s what Sotomayor was getting at Monday.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, on the other end of the political spectrum, hit at this issue, too. Sotomayor had previously noted that the Gospel Rescue Mission shelter in Grants Pass has fewer than 100 beds, while the Grants Pass homeless count is around 600.

“If there’s a mismatch between the number of beds available in shelters, even including Gospel Rescue, and the number of homeless people, there are going to be a certain number of people who — there’s nowhere to go,” Kavanaugh said.

Theane Evangelis, the attorney representing Grants Pass, responded, “That — that is a difficult policy question.”

“How does this law deal, help with that policy question?” Kavanaugh asked her.

“So it encourages people to accept alternatives when they come up so that fewer people end up camping,” Evangelis said.

Yes, encourages them by fining them and threatening them with jail time. But don’t worry, Evangelis noted, the fines are “low level” and the jail times are “very short.”

The American Civil Liberties Union submitted a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of the unhoused people whose lawsuit against Grants Pass led to Monday’s hearing. I spoke to Jim Sullivan, deputy policy director at the group’s New Jersey chapter, about efforts here to target homelessness.

Sullivan told me he is “pretty horrified” by the Paterson plan, an ordinance that would have restricted when organizations can distribute resources — “perishable or nonperishable goods, items, clothes, tents, chattel and/or other tangible materials” — without city approval.

“It would further criminalize poverty, which serves no community members,” Sullivan said.

Paterson’s council wisely postponed a vote on the ordinance after seeing the angry reaction it elicited from mutual aid groups and others in Paterson and elsewhere. Paterson Mayor Andre Sayegh has said the move was an attempt to deal with the problem of trash left behind when groups hand out food and more to people in need. Critics like Justis Reins, a Paterson woman I spoke to recently outside Paterson City Hall, scoff at the mayor’s justification.

“They’re not worried about trash on the streets. Look at all the trash on the streets here!” she said.

Assemblywoman Shavonda Sumter, a Democrat who lives in and represents Paterson, is less critical of the Paterson ordinance. It merely requires organizations giving out food to get a permit in advance so there’s some order to the process, Sumter told me.

“It puts the group on notice to, one, clean up after themselves when they’re gathering and be respectful of the neighborhoods. It’s actually well written,” she said.

A nice thought, but count me in Sullivan’s camp that the Paterson ordinance, if resurrected, would place unnecessary hurdles in front of groups attempting to give aid to those least fortunate. Like Newark’s restriction on giving food to people without homes, or Middle Township’s ban on living in tents, it’s not a policy solution to homelessness — it’s a push to send people without homes elsewhere, to be some other town’s problem.

Lily Morgan, the Republican council president in Grants Pass in 2013, gave the game away at a public meeting that March about the city’s homelessness problem.

 “The point is to make it uncomfortable enough for them in our city so they will want to move on down the road,” she said.

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Rotunda in New Jersey Statehouse in Trenton (Dana DiFilippo | New Jersey Monitor)

Lawmakers eyeing changes to our state’s public records law have done a remarkable thing in this era of political division: They have managed to get an overwhelming majority of New Jersey’s registered voters to agree on something.

The problem for Trenton is lawmakers are on the wrong side.

A new poll from Fairleigh Dickinson University on voter opinion of a bill that would revamp the Open Public Records Act says 81% of respondents do not want the law revised, versus just 14% who back the proposed changes.

The details are even more remarkable. Support for not touching the Open Public Records Act stands at 79% among Democrats and 85% among Republicans; 79% among respondents without a college degree and 83% among those with a degree; 76% among those 30 and under and 81% among those 65 and older; and 71% or higher for white, Black, Asian, and Latino respondents.

“Nobody thinks this is a good idea,” said poll director Dan Cassino, a professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson.

That may not matter. By all accounts, our legislative leaders are laser-focused on taking an ax to OPRA. Among their complaints: too many people file too many requests; commercial entities use the law to further their business interests; and public entities are forking over legal fees because of public records disputes.

I’ve already dispensed with these arguments a few times (but just as a reminder: citizens being interested in their government is a good thing!; the people who run businesses pay taxes, too, and have as much right to public records as anyone else does; and public entities would pay less in legal fees if they stopped withholding so many public records). But the poll results add a new reason for lawmakers to end this misbegotten enterprise: the public wants them to.

Supporters of the bill may take issue with the way the poll was worded. Pollsters said the measure “would make it harder for citizens to access to public records, and limit what records they can request,” and that’s not how Sen. Paul Sarlo, Assemblyman Joe Danielsen, and the other bill’s other sponsors would describe it. But their own descriptions of the bill are flagrant lies exposed by even a cursory reading of the legislation. Sarlo told a television reporter last month that the bill would “modernize” OPRA, and Danielsen told us that most of the bill’s provisions would increase access to documents. Both claims are absolute nonsense.

If anything, the poll wording didn’t go far enough. I would have suggested asking, “Do you support a bill that would make it easier for towns to ban residents from filing requests for public records?” Or maybe, “Do you support a bill that would make it harder for residents to see emails their town’s leaders exchange about public business?” Perhaps, “Do you support a bill that would allow a town to charge someone whatever it wants in exchange for handing over a public record?”

Sarlo and others have chafed at public opposition to the bill, whining that news stories about it are biased. This new poll should make them consider that the negative reaction to the bill seen at the Statehouse is reflective of larger public opinion that the bill is nothing more than a transparent attempt to keep New Jerseyans in the dark about their own government.

“Supporters of the OPRA overhaul say that if the public knew what was really in the bill, they’d feel differently about it,” said Cassino. “These numbers show that if that’s true, they’re going to have to do a lot of explaining in order to get the public on their side.”

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