One of the worst experiences I’ve had since getting involved in legislative politics several years ago was witnessing the committee hearings for House Bills 205 and 206. For years after the George Floyd uprisings in 2020, victims of police violence had been fighting for real reforms to the state’s Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights (LEOBOR). For a while there was some progress. In 2021, Sen. Elizabeth Lockman introduced Senate Bill 149, which sought to completely remove secrecy protections on police misconduct records, and was holding a series of public meetings to work through more potential changes.

Throughout 2021 and 2022, the process largely stalled due to law enforcement pressure as the bill was slowly amended to place more restrictions on which misconduct records could be accessed. Then in 2023, without any public input, the bill was scrapped entirely and replaced with HB 205 and 206. These bills scrapped the framework of SB 149 entirely and instead created a new convoluted process that had the full backing of the police.

Many community groups came out and opposed the bill, but both pieces of legislation passed committee with little official pushback. When the testimony was done, Rep. Frank Cooke, a retired police officer who chaired the committee, used his privilege to launch an attack on those who had spoken against the bill. This group included the ACLU, the NAACP, and many community members who had personally experienced police violence or had family members killed by police officers. He railed against them for criticizing the process that he was so proud of, even though it was a process that the community had largely been excluded from.

HB 205 and 206 were promised as a first step, but not a single piece of meaningful police reform legislation has been introduced in the two years since. Instead, many of the community review boards the legislation promised are being dismantled and police largely continue to operate with complete impunity.

The whole situation spoke to the inertia of Delaware’s brand of tight-knit politics, where consensus is required for those in power and optional for those out of power. It’s the type of politics that led a frustrated state to vote in a new generation of leadership in 2024: throwing out both Lt. Governor Bethany Hall-Long and Speaker of the House Valerie Longhurst in heavily contested primaries. For a moment, it seemed like politics in Delaware might be changing. Then things got a lot worse.

Democrats Against Democracy

As Political Director for the Delaware Working Families Party, I spend my days working with elected officials, committed activists, and everyday people who are just getting involved with politics for the first time. Although this line of work provides me with insight that may not be available to everyone, it is somewhat limited because I don’t get to sit in all those backroom meetings. Nevertheless, I have the blessing to be able to look at political situations from multiple angles.

From this vantage point, I was not expecting salvation, even with new leadership in the legislature, but I was expecting a mild step up from the secretive and petty politics of the last several years. Instead, I witnessed a massive increase in anti-democratic and outright inappropriate behavior. For a while, I have tried to mostly limit my criticisms to private, interpersonal conversations and the occasional broadly-messaged public statement, but I think it is important to lay it all out to get the full effect.

Here are some specific examples that I have witnessed that have troubled me greatly:

• In 2024, after regular protests in front of Sen. Chris Coons’s house, Wilmington City Council attempted to restrict protests in residential areas.
• During the fight over Senate Bill 21, which overhauled Delaware’s corporate code and drastically reduced the power of shareholders to seek litigation, State House leadership took several actions to shut out the voices of opponents of the legislation. They refused to take meetings with plaintiff attorneys and consumer advocates, and when an opponent spoke on the floor he was shouted down and dismissed by the Speaker of the House.
• When the SB 21 fight drew an immense amount of federal attention and briefly crashed the state’s email servers, the legislature seems to have blocked ActionNetwork forms entirely, preventing constituents from using form emails to reach out to their legislators. Many constituents have also had issues even making calls into the legislature.
• One personal experience: when we were hosting a public, non-partisan campaign training at the Route 9 library, Rep. Frank Cooke, Councilman Jea Street, and the husband of Speaker Minor-Brown came in and warned that we were not allowed to hold a training there because it might be used to find candidates against Rep. Cooke.
• After Milton Rep. Parker Selby’s tragic medical emergency in December, her condition was deliberately kept secret from the public, as her constituents went largely unrepresented for six months. When her condition was made public, the Speaker chose to attack the media coverage of the situation rather than encouraging Selby to resign.
• Just this week, the Wilmington City Council responded to the recent rent stabilization vote by introducing legislation that would remove supporters of rent stabilization from their committees and limit existing forms of public comment and petitioning.

There are many other situations I could point to that I have no public videos or articles of so I’ll leave them off the list. However, there are a variety of other practices I feel comfortable calling out as I have witnessed them more than once:

• Legislators have refused to schedule meetings with constituents because they did not like them personally, or because they suspected they were supporting something they disagreed with.
• Legislators have joined votes and committee meetings off-camera, clearly not paying attention or not joining at all because they’ve already made up their minds well before any public comment or even official arguments. This is on top of the common practice of “taking a walk” to avoid controversial votes.
• Legislators have refused to provide information to community members about the status or next steps of bills that the community members themselves brought the legislator.
• Legislators have pulled bills from being voted on because they did not want their colleagues to have to make unpopular votes. Similarly, legislators have refused to introduce or sign on to legislation because they are worried about their colleagues facing pressure.
• When constituents have liked or responded to social media posts critical of legislators, those same legislators have personally called and yelled at them over the phone.
• Legislators have reached out to people who submitted FOIA requests about them to personally demand to know why the request was made, rather than providing the information in the FOIA request.
• Legislators have threatened candidates, other elected officials, or even activists at their place of employment to try to get them fired.
• Internally, legislators have been punished for working with the wrong people or speaking to press outside of a pre-approved narrative.

This is not a universal problem, but it is widespread and seems to only be growing. All of these actions speak to a culture of governance in Delaware where our elected officials see themselves and their colleagues as a more important constituency than any member of the public. It’s not democracy, or even meritocracy, when government business is conducted through silence and intimidation. And it affects more than individual egos or bureaucratic procedure. When they close the halls of power to those outside, elected officials destroy the potential for positive, transformative change. As a result, we have seen a massive shortage of meaningful legislation this year despite the huge problems the state faces.

It is hard not to think that this has to do with elected officials feeling some pressure. In the last three months alone, I have had two different people approach me to share that they had been ostracized from a political space because they were accused of being “WFP,” referring to the Working Families Party. I did not know either of these people beforehand, and they had never been involved with (or even heard of) WFP. But because they chose to advocate more vocally or challenge existing power structures, they were kicked out of these spaces, with local elected officials leading the way.

Those particular examples point to a broader trend that is all but public knowledge within political circles: The presence of the WFP and other community-based organizations that are calling for more electoral and legislative accountability is being used by hardliners to justify much of this inappropriate behavior. Frankly, I can no longer sit by and watch the organization which I help run be used as a boogeyman to justify blatantly anti-democratic actions.

Perhaps certain elected officials think that by cracking down on activism and organizing, they will be able to protect their positions. If they push hard enough, then maybe the entire community will join in on their cone of silence. Surely the rabble rousers and trouble makers can not represent their “real” constituents. To that, I will point out that David McBride, John Viola, Earl Jaques, Ray Seigfried, Larry Mitchell, Vincent White, Bregetta Fields, and Valerie Longhurst all made similar calculations. It did not work out for them.

There’s no conspiracy against you. The people are just watching, and they don’t like what they’re seeing.

What Does Democracy Look Like?

I truly do not believe that these actions being taken by our elected officials are popular among the voters, the rank-and-file of the Democratic Party, or even those who chose to get involved in the machinery of the party.

The recent election of Evelyn Brady to the chair of the Delaware Democratic Party hopefully demonstrates this. Throughout the last several months, I heard from multiple people that Brady was accused of being WFP. I can personally attest that she has never been a WFP member, never attended a WFP meeting, and as far as I’m aware never even supported a WFP candidate in a primary. But because she encouraged cooperation between all wings of the Democratic Party, and was not rabidly anti-WFP like her opponent, she was smeared all the same. Luckily, that did not seem to hurt her as she handily won the election.

For better or for worse, elections will likely be the biggest way to resolve the problems outlined in this piece. Many elected officials have decided that perceived threats against them justify their anti-democratic behavior, but ultimately that decision will be made by the voters. Through the Working Families Party, we will do our best to at least give those voters a choice through the primaries. 

However, elections alone are not enough to change a rotten culture. Many of the discussions I’ve had with people on my side (and even some I disagree with) center on how we can construct a truly democratic public culture. We need a culture that encourages everyday people to speak up and organize around the problems that they’re facing, and gives them access to the machinery of representative democracy to achieve real, deep solutions.

It needs to be a culture that prioritizes the needs of workers over corporations that leech millions of dollars in state money and won’t even hire locally. It needs to be a culture that recognizes that a tenant losing their residence is more important than a landlord losing an investment opportunity. It needs to be a culture that sees fenceline communities as a more important constituency than those who fill their neighborhoods with pollution. It needs to be a culture that welcomes conflict, not one that squashes it at any given opportunity. Democracy requires a sense of proportionality. 

For my part, I hope that our work in the Working Families Party can help build towards this. Besides trying to give voters a choice in primaries, we have also been working to build an internal culture that is more inclusive, democratic, and self-critical. We are reaching out to more people, bringing them into our decision-making structure, and building strong norms that are designed to open the process to everyone. We are far from perfect on this front, but with the challenges we’re facing as a state and a nation, I believe it’s more important than ever to move in that direction. I just hope others who have more power than myself will come around to the same belief.

There are many other examples of horrible behavior that I don’t have time or permission to share in this article, but I encourage others to share their experiences. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and it’s going to take more than one person or one organization to change this culture. Democracy is the responsibility of all of us.