Normally, the annual three-day meeting of the Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic, and Asian legislative caucus in Albany, known as Caucus Weekend, is where a big chunk of the state’s political Establishment celebrates the difficult, decades-long road that political outsiders traveled to reach the heights of political power in New York.
Not this year.
As usual, the three-day whirlwind includes policy workshops, a fundraising gala, a reception at the governor’s mansion and countless private huddles and boozy receptions where lobbyists, journalists, government staffers, and campaign strategists mingle with the legislators who control both houses of the state legislature. But this year, there is one subject on everyone’s mind and one word whispered in nearly every conversation: embarrassment.
Nobody has enjoyed watching Eric Adams, New York’s second Black mayor — a former state senator and ex-member of the Caucus — go from pompous boasting (“when does the hard part start?” he used to say) and pronouncing himself “the symbol of Black manhood in this city” and “the future of the Democratic Party” to now operating as the political hostage of President Donald Trump, subject to the public humiliation that Trump inevitably inflicts on his subordinates, allies, and adversaries.
It was painful to watch Adams appear on Fox News alongside Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, who crudely threatened the mayor on national television while Adams grinned and giggled. If Adams fails to be sufficiently cooperative in helping the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement detain and deport undocumented New Yorkers, said Homan, he will return to New York, come into Adam’s office, and be “up his butt saying ‘where the hell is the agreement we came to?’”
“Damn … and Mayor Adams just sits there showing all his teeth as Homan emasculates him,” former RNC chairman Michael Steele said on social media. “When Homan said Governor Hochul needs to go. Eric didn’t say a mumbling word in defense of his ‘partner,’” New York Post editorial board member Michael Benjamin posted online. Journalist Rob George also said the quiet part out loud. “This is the most humiliating thing I’ve ever seen happen to a New York City mayor,” he tweeted. “And I’ve seen de Blasio eat pizza with a knife and fork, Bloomberg speak Spanish and Rudy wear a dress.”
It seems clear that Adams cut a questionable deal to trade active support (or meek silence) for Trump’s mass-deportation campaign in exchange for the dismissal of bribery and other criminal charges against the mayor, operating at the end of a short leash held by the White House. Adams’s lawyer calls talk of a deal a “total lie,” but no fewer than seven federal prosecutors, including the top career attorneys running the Justice Department’s public integrity division, all resigned rather than sign papers dismissing the charges. The mass resignations made U.S. v. Eric Adams a national story, including an explosive contention by ex-U.S. attorney Danielle Sassoon that prosecutors were blocked from moving forward with “a superseding indictment that would add an obstruction conspiracy count based on evidence that Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the FBI.”
The request for dismissal, which was finally signed by top officials in Washington, is now in the hands of federal judge Dale Ho, who is likely to grant the request and kill the case. That leaves Adams in a weakened but viable position to compete in the all-important Democratic primary for mayor, which is just 18 weeks away.
Black political leaders, meanwhile, are planning for life beyond Adams. Entreaties have been made to City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, urging her to consider entering the race at the last minute as a well-liked, moderate legislator who has quietly contained the worst ultraprogressive excesses of the Council and shepherded through the historic, pro-development City of Yes rezoning. Keep an eye on Adams’s powerful patron, Queens Democratic chairman representative Gregory Meeks, to see if there’s sufficient support for an Adams versus Adams race.
The other electrifying development is the out-of-the-blue endorsement of Andrew Cuomo for mayor in a public letter issued by none other than H. Carl McCall, a former state comptroller who once represented Harlem in the state Senate and tangled with Cuomo a generation ago in a bitter fight for the 2002 Democratic nomination for governor.
“The mayor must have the ability to defend our city and demonstrate a powerful counterbalance to President Trump. The people of New York cannot be represented by someone whose loyalty to the city is compromised,” McCall wrote in an unsubtle dig at Adams. “At this critical time, the next mayor must be able to win and keep the confidence of a wary public.”
Cuomo, in turn, released a public note of his own, thanking McCall, calling his voice “one of moral clarity, experience, and guided by what is right for the people above all else.” It’s the surest sign yet that Cuomo is thinking about running for mayor even if Adams stays in the race, relying on McCall’s bona fides as a Harlem leader to offset the fierce anti-Cuomo campaign that will surely be waged by Democrats loyal to Cuomo’s main adversary, Attorney General Letitia James.
Those who wish Adams would simply go away are likely to be disappointed. “As long as Trump wields this leverage over Adams, the city is endangered. We cannot be governed under coercion,” said Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “If Adams won’t resign, he must be removed.”
That’s much easier said than done, according to Jim McGuire, a retired Appellate Division judge who formerly served as counsel to Governor George Pataki. While New York governors have the legal power to remove mayors, he says, the law is vague about what constitutes valid grounds for such a drastic step, and there are no clear procedures about exactly how to give Adams a legally required “opportunity to be heard.” “Hochul has to be mindful of the appearance of violating due process,” McGuire told me. “She also has to be mindful of the gravity of the exercise of the power. You’d be removing an elected official.”
As the saying goes: Nobody is coming to save us. New York voters chose Adams in 2021, and it will be up to voters to decide whether to keep him, baggage and all, or spare the city further embarrassment by making a change.
This post has been updated. An earlier version misidentified the federal judge overseeing the Adams case.
More on the City politic
- Judge Orders Adams, DOJ to Explain Themselves: Updates
- The Justice Department’s Existential Crisis Is Self-Inflicted
- The Adams Quid Pro Quo Is Unlike Anything Since Watergate
