D'Esposito's reelection a top Nassau GOP concern

Daily Point

‘Tossup’ D’Esposito seeks edge amid MTG follies

Maybe it’s just a sample of today’s performative politics. First-term Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, whose reelection is a top priority for the Nassau County GOP, ended up winning far more national media notice — and bipartisan agreement — on Wednesday from what he opposed and denounced than what he promoted and defended.

D’Esposito co-sponsored a Republican majority bill, H.R. 7109, that would require an authoritative count of citizens and noncitizens in each state in the 2030 census. More controversially, the resulting reapportionment, which determines the number of House seats per state, would exclude noncitizens for the first time.

The bill cleared the House on the expected party-line vote, 206 to 202 — but only after much delay and confusion over whether a tally would even take place. The intervening chaos was prompted by the latest exhibition from Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who moved to vacate the speakership of Rep. Mike Johnson. That futile procedure lasted a while, generating a cascade of boos and hisses, largely from other Republicans still reeling from the disruptive prior ouster of ex-speaker Kevin McCarthy.

In the end, Rep. Steve Scalise called for a motion to table Greene’s petulant maneuver, which carried the House with 395 votes, or 82%, aided by Democrats. For D’Esposito, who voted to table, it became a credible if easy moment on CNN from the steps outside where Rep. Nick LaLota visibly stood in the frame over his right shoulder.

“We wish we had a larger majority in the House, we wish we had the Senate, and we wish we had the presidency,” D’Esposito said, “and the best way to get there is by being a unified Republican conference. And stunts like this [do] not unify our conference. We should be growing the majority, taking the Senate and electing Donald Trump president in November.”

“These tantrums,” he said, “taking the country down this course like we saw months ago, it’s not what we’re going to do …” It echoed what he’s said repeatedly for months about the internal GOP chaos.

Keeping D’Esposito out front and winning news exposure may be strategically important for him as he runs to defeat Democrat Laura Gillen in a 4th Congressional District rematch from two years ago. Neither candidate faces a challenge on primary day, June 25.

The Cook Political Report’s ratings of LI candidates’ likely success reflect what’s at stake in CD4.

Rep. Andrew Garbarino’s district, CD2, is rated by Cook as “solid Republican,” LaLota’s CD1 is “likely Republican,” and Rep. Tom Suozzi’s CD3 is “likely Democrat.”

But D’Esposito’s CD4 is rated as a “tossup” — the website-based report’s only such designation on Long Island. That’s incentive for him to stay in the limelight.

The census bill, denounced by Democrats, is likely doomed in the Senate. Critics call it blatantly unconstitutional and designed to drain congressional seats from blue states like New York that have many immigrants, both legal and undocumented. And if D’Esposito’ s bill were to become law, loss of House seats in New York would likely force a considerable part of his district into heavily Democratic Queens.

— Dan Janison dan.janison@newsday.com

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Reference Point

Performative politics are now center stage

A short piece was tucked at the bottom of a string of three editorials that appeared in Newsday on May 9, 1967. It was titled “The Vigilante,” and it took to task a man who had been elected but not yet sworn in to the Farmingdale Library board of trustees. Carl E. Gorton had removed from the library a magazine that included a short story he considered obscene. Newsday’s editorial board said he was wrong, writing that “he should (a) disband his one-man vigilante committee, (b) return the magazine and (c) pay the late charges.”

That single paragraph, though, was only a hint to the controversy created by Gorton, who preceded by decades the performative politics and conspiracy theories that are now mainstream.

In March 1967, Gorton was severely injured in the crash of a small-engine airplane he was piloting, according to published reports, which said the crash made him rethink his priorities in life and become a vessel of sorts for God’s will. A member of the ultraconservative John Birch Society, Gorton went to war with the Farmingdale Library.

Gorton, an engineer by trade, faced petit larceny charges for “confiscating,” as he put it, that copy of the Paris Review. After being sworn in to his library post, he was arraigned in August on a charge of third-degree assault for allegedly twisting the arm of assistant children’s librarian Hortensia R. Stoyan, who said Gorton also “pushed her against a table when she tried to switch off a tape recorder that the trustee wanted to use to record a conversation with a children’s reading consultant,” according to The New York Times.

In 1968, he sought a public hearing in his campaign to fire Stoyan “on the grounds that she is Puerto Rican and a Jehovah’s Witness,” Newsday reported at the time. He was found guilty of discrimination by the State Division of Human Rights after he declined to present his charges at a closed hearing.

In July of that year, death threats were mailed to five people, three of whom were current or former library officials, all five of whom had been at odds regularly with Gorton. A grenade was found in the car of Nassau County Executive Eugene Nickerson but police successfully removed it after receiving a tip.

In 1969, Gorton tried to expand the library’s offerings. As Newsday’s editorial board put it on Sept. 13, “If he can’t get what he calls trash off the shelves, we gather, Mr. Gorton is determined that it shall at least have competition for reader interest” — by adding that the board called “the gamiest propaganda available.” The titles he wanted to add included the antisemitic tract “International Jewry” and the most widely distributed piece of antisemitic literature, “The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion.”

Along the way, the John Birch Society expelled Gorton.

In July 1970, Gorton quit the board during a five-hour board meeting that Newsday called “extraordinary even by Farmingdale standards.” It started when Gorton paid on the spot a $250 fine for contempt of court to sheriff’s deputies who had come to arrest him in connection with Stoyan’s discrimination complaint. He told Newsday the fine was “the ounce of blood I had to pay to gain entrance to this board meeting.”

And after jockeying with fellow trustees over board appointments and positions, Gorton made a 45-minute speech in which he announced his resignation but not before launching some unhinged broadsides. In particular, he warned of a conspiracy to establish “a military dictatorship to maintain law and order” and make people “socialistic enslaved robots,” and said President Richard Nixon, Vice President Spiro Agnew and conservative thought leader William F. Buckley were part of the conspiracy.

With that, Gorton left the library, sold his house, and moved to Florida.

In response, Newsday’s editorial board wrote on July 9, 1970, what might be the shortest editorial in Newsday history. It was titled “Carl Gorton” and it read, simply: “Good riddance.”

— Michael Dobie michael.dobie@newsday.com, Amanda Fiscina-Wells amanda.fiscina-wells@newsday.com

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