Will Amy DeGise Resign?

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. On the Jersey side of the river, you may have already heard the news that Jersey City Councilmember Amy DeGise was charged last month in a hit-and-run accident. Surveillance caught her black SUV driving away after hitting a bicyclist who apparently ran a red light. According to a recent article in Gothamist describing the video, DeGise never stops. Her vehicle drives out of view without appearing to slow down.

She's a city councilwoman at-large. No, not at-large like running from the law as that video might suggest, at-large as in she represents the entire city along with two other at-large members, not a particular neighborhood. The rest of the six members represent each ward that Jersey City has.

So far DeGise has refused calls from some members of the public and some of her colleagues to resign over this accident. Notably, the Mayor of Jersey City, Steve Fulop, and Governor Murphy have stopped short of asking her to step down. But why, and what options are there to remove her from office if that's the right thing to do if she won't resign, or can she be asked to step down in a meaningful way, again if that's the right outcome?

Our next guest, our own Nancy Solomon, says New Jersey laws make it harder to remove or recall a politician wrapped up in a scandal like Amy DeGise now is than in many other states. Nancy is host of the Ask Governor Murphy monthly call-in show, as many of you know, and of the podcast Dead End: A New Jersey Political Murder Mystery, which is about all that other stuff that Nancy has become famous for reporting on. Hi, Nancy. Welcome back to the show.

Nancy: Hi, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: For people who have not seen the video or heard the story, who is Councilmember DeGise, and what's her significance in New Jersey politics before this?

Nancy: She's fairly significant because she is the daughter of Tom DeGise. Tom DeGise is the Essex County executive, so that's the position that controls the county. It's the top administrative job, basically the director of the county. Counties in New Jersey have very sizable budgets, and they become fiefdoms really in and of themselves. There are also close ties across the state, not just in Hudson County, between county executives and what's called the machine in the majority party, in this case the Democrats. The Hudson County Democratic Committee, which is colloquially referred to as "the machine."

What you have is her father is this longtime boss in Hudson County. Hudson County is different from a few other counties in that it's got a few bosses and they have their own little mini fiefdoms within Hudson County, so there's that complication. Then there was a big public fight in 2018 about who was going to become the chair of that committee and run the machine. It was unusual that the decision actually came to a vote of committee members, the rank and file, as opposed to a backdoor decision. Out of that fight, Amy DeGise herself became the head of the Democratic Party in Hudson County for a few years.

She was recently kind of kicked to the curb, not having anything to do with the hit-and-run but because of more political infighting and a deal that was reached in Hudson County by some of the other bosses. She unceremoniously had that position taken away.

She's also a teacher at a county high school, so that represents another part of the tentacles of the machine because what you have is the question of patronage jobs. I'm not saying anything about whether she's qualified or not to be a teacher. One person stood up at the council meeting and talked about what a great teacher she is, but when you see the daughter of the county executive working at a county high school-- you see that a lot across many counties in New Jersey, and so it's a red flag for a patronage job.

Then - sorry, but this is a long list - just this past year she was elected on the slate of Steve Fulop, the Mayor of Jersey City, on to the City Council. Steve Fulop is of course one of the best-known politicians in New Jersey. He was considered to be a shoo-in for the governor's position before Phil Murphy came in and swiped it right out from under him. He's considered to still be running. He has a huge war chest of money that he's been amassing. He's a very popular politician so he has his power base, and so she's part of that as well.

Brian Lehrer: There was this video that caught Amy DeGise in her car, her SUV, striking a bicyclist and then apparently not stopping. Has she been charged with a crime?

Nancy: Yes. She has been charged with not reporting an accident and what is essentially a hit-and-run. It's called-- it has some funny name. It escapes me at the moment, but it's basically a hit-and-run charge. There were two charges and they've now just recently been moved. They've moved the case to Essex County out of Jersey City Municipal Court.

Brian Lehrer: What's her defense? Is she saying she didn't realize that she hit the cyclist, who reportedly ran a red light, and does that mitigate whatever charge might be against her?

Nancy: She has not articulated anything in terms of a defense. At last Wednesday's City Council meeting she said she felt terrible about what happened. She said that she's been advised by her lawyers that she cannot speak about the case until it's resolved in court. She may have a defense but I couldn't tell you what that is. The video is-- it's astounding. It really is something to watch. It's hard to imagine somebody not stopping given that this was a very large man on a bicycle who she hit square on, and his bike went flying in one direction. He went flying and tumbled over; like somersaulted in the air.

Luckily for him and for Amy DeGise, he landed to the side of the SUV. I think if he had landed in front of the SUV he could have been killed, and he certainly would have been injured quite severely. Because he flipped to the side, I think that really saved him. He had bruises, he limped-- In the video, the car drives off, and it's a large SUV, and then he gets up and walks off the street to the sidewalk. He's limping but he gets up and he walks away. The whole thing is an incredible video to watch.

Brian Lehrer: At least he's more or less okay, it sounds like. We looked up that term that you were trying to remember for a hit-and-run in Jersey City. They could just call it hit-and-run, but they call it action in case of an accident.

Nancy: Exactly. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: There it is, for the record. So far only two out of the nine City Council members in Jersey City have called for DeGise to resign over this. Here's a clip of one of those councilmembers, James Solomon, who you interviewed last week.

James Solomon: "It's not just no resignation. It's no apology either to the biker or the constituents, no accounting for why it took six hours to go to the police station to report the crash. And I've called on the councilperson to resign because I don't think she can continue to serve the public and earn the public's trust given the video we all saw."

Brian Lehrer: Only two of the nine councilmembers are taking that position, you report. Is your analysis of this cynical enough, if I could use that word, that the other seven are staying quiet because of all this political power that you laid out at the beginning that Amy DeGise is connected to?

Nancy: Yes. It's six really because Amy DeGise-

Brian Lehrer: Oh, she's the other one.

Nancy: -is one of the nine. It's six--

Brian Lehrer: [chuckles] She's not calling for her own resignation.

Nancy: Right. Six councilmembers have remained silent. Steven Fulop, the mayor, has made one comment to NJ Spotlight saying that it was wrong to leave the scene of a crime, but that's as far as he would go. Governor Phil Murphy has been asked and has not called for her resignation either. I don't even know if I would call it cynical, Brian. I think that New Jersey politics is dominated by the machine system. It's not just one county, it's the whole state. There are so many examples of it that I don't think you can ignore the power of the machine in this instance.

Brian Lehrer: Right. I didn't mean to say that you were cynical, but rather that the situation would lead to a cynical view.

Nancy: That is true.

Brian Lehrer: You recently spoke with Hector Oseguera, who ran in 2020 to represent Hudson, New Jersey. Can you tell us a bit about him before we play this one clip?

Nancy: Yes. For New York listeners he's a bit of an AOC character. Young, charismatic progressive Democrat who wants to change the party from within. He's a lawyer who works at a bank on enforcing-- like stopping money laundering, and researching and keeping the bank in compliance. He's an anti-money launderer by day, as he describes it, and an anti-machine activist by night. He ran against Albio Sires, who's the Hudson County Democrat who represents the congressional district there.

We've talked about this before, Brian, but there's this thing called the county line. The machine endorses its candidates for the primary and they all run in a line together. You have the best-known Democrats in the state at the top or to the left if it's going across, and then you read that line and it's like, "Oh, these are my people." If you're a Democrat voting in the primary you see, "Oh, it's got the governor. It's got Cory Booker," whoever it is who happens to be running that cycle, and then congressional representatives run every two years, so there they are.

It's very, very hard to win an election in New Jersey if you're not on that line. It confers a huge advantage. Oseguera made a good fight at it but he lost. Now - I think we have a piece of tape of him - he's talking about the fact that you can't just move this case out of Jersey City. The machine system is really a statewide system when you have senators and the governor also seeking the endorsement of each county machine.

Brian Lehrer: Here he is.

Hector Oseguera: "Because it spans countywide, it in some ways spans statewide. Because the people who need statewide influence rely on the county influence, which boils down to the municipal influence, which is all the same system to begin with. I think it's really impossible to expect that there even exists an independent body that could review these sorts of cases without political influence fomenting in one way or another."

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. This isn't the first time DeGise is involved in a traffic altercation. I see in November, I think, the same month she was elected into City Council, she was caught on police camera pleading with the officer to not tow her car. She even boasted about her endorsement from the Jersey City Police Department - you tell me if that's the department or the union to get her out of the situation - so people are accusing her of abuse of power in both these situations.

I guess the last question as we run out of time, Nancy, is there's no recall election process in New Jersey. Some people are drawing attention to that, but of course, recall, we saw it in the district attorney situation in San Francisco with the progressive DA and some other places. Recall is usually used as a tool of the populist right, so I don't know if the people of New Jersey want recall, but where does that come into this? We have 30 seconds.

Nancy: There is a recall process, but what makes New Jersey different is that the threshold is so much higher that you need a percentage of registered voters instead of voters who cast a ballot in the last election.

Brian Lehrer: Oh wow.

Nancy: The petition in Jersey City, of which there is one, would need basically the same number of signatures as the total number of people who voted in the gubernatorial election in Jersey City last time. It's a very high bar. It's the reason why we don't see a lot of recall petitions and actions in New Jersey. As you said, you can debate whether that's a good or bad thing, but I think at the moment it's frustrating Jersey City residents who came out in huge numbers last Wednesday night to call for her resignation. If she's not voluntarily going to step down, there aren't a whole lot of tools to get her out of office.

Brian Lehrer: WNYC's Nancy Solomon reporting on the Amy DeGise hit-and-run and the fallout from that. Nancy, thanks as always.

Nancy: Thanks, Brian.

 

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