NEW YORK — In a serious escalation of a long-running political feud, Manhattan Democratic Party Chair Keith Wright scheduled a vote on whether to expel Rep. Adriano Espaillat and three allies from their roles as district leaders.

The move toward an expulsion vote comes after an ethics report found the member of Congress tried to cheat in an election for a party position in 2023.

Now Espaillat has filed a lawsuit to block the Thursday vote, saying the report was politically motivated and invalid since the Manhattan Democrats’ ethics committee chair actually lives in Westchester County.

“The Ethics Committee has operated as an arm of a factional political agenda,” Espaillat’s attorney Ali Najmi wrote in the suit filed Monday. “County Leader Keith Wright has demonstrated a long-standing hostility towards Congressman Adriano Espaillat.”

The situation is inflaming longstanding tensions between Espaillat and Wright — and threatens to weaken Espaillat’s hold on his local base of power.

Wright’s side is downplaying the controversy, saying the party is just following a process and Espaillat is overplaying his hand.

“It’s just another ridiculous thing in a long history of Adriano not paying attention to the bigger things in life,” Manhattan Dems Executive Director Kyle Ishmael said in an interview. “He’s paying attention to whatever small fight he can pick with Keith [Wright] or some proxy battle. It’s ridiculous and unnecessary.”

Espaillat and Wright have been locked in a heated rivalry for more than a decade. In 2012, and again in 2014, then-Assemblymember Wright stood with former Rep. Charlie Rangel when Espaillat challenged the veteran congressmember’s reelection. When Rangel retired and picked Wright as his successor, Espaillat ran against Wright and won. The battle turned ugly, with accusations of racist voter suppression, and became a referendum on the Upper Manhattan district’s African-American population in Harlem, represented by Wright, versus the growing Dominican population centered in Washington Heights, represented by Espaillat. The tensions have continued, with Espaillat and Wright regularly finding themselves backing candidates on the opposite sides of elections big and small.

It was a small election that kicked off the saga resulting in the lawsuit. Espaillat and three aligned district leaders backed Assemblymember Harvey Epstein for county chair over Wright’s pick, Nico Minerva in October 2023. County chair is the number two position in the party, behind the leader. But Manhattan is a reform party organization, where the leadership holds relatively little power over the party.

Minerva ended up narrowly winning the vote, but accusations flew that Espaillat and his fellow district leaders — Assemblymember Manny De Los Santos, Maria Morillo and Mariel De La Cruz — had tried to cheat by reporting that Minerva didn’t get a single vote from their district’s county committee members when he had actually received 23 votes. Espaillat and others denied wrongdoing, blaming the mixup on procedural issues caused by Wright’s party leaders.

The county party’s ethics committee opened an investigation last year and released a report Feb. 10, 2025 finding that Espaillat and his allies “intentionally misreported votes” which “constituted a deliberate attempt to suppress votes for Minerva.” The report also found Espaillat and allies violated other party rules at the meeting and “engaged in obstruction and intimidation.” The ethics committee offered three options for the party’s district leaders: permanently expelling Espaillat, De Los Santos, Morillo and De La Cruz as district leaders; suspending them for ten years; or adding two additional district leader seats in Espaillat’s home Assembly district that could not be held by members of his political club.

The roughly 70 district leaders are volunteers with limited formal powers, but expulsion could limit Espaillat’s influence in the party — and would keep him from ever becoming county leader, a job that some suspect he would like to take away from Wright.

After Wright announced the report would be discussed at the party meeting Thursday, Espaillat filed the suit, asking a judge to block the party from taking action on the report.

The suit notes that two of the five members of the ethics committee have publicly dissented with the report, and that a third, Chair Denny Salas, actually lives in Westchester County, which would make him ineligible for a party position in Manhattan.

“It is inherently problematic — and unethical — for someone who no longer is legally qualified to be registered as a voter in New York County to deceive members of the (county party) and then attempt to oversee ethical standards and compliance within the Manhattan Democratic Party,” Najmi, the attorney, wrote in the suit.

Najmi provided video of Salas, who works as a lobbyist with Gotham Government Relations, answering the door at his home in the village of Ossining and saying he had not lived at his previous address in Manhattan for two years.

Salas declined to immediately comment on the suit and his residency. Wright’s spokesperson denied the party leader was using the report to hurt Espaillat.

“It’s not a Keith Wright report, it’s not a Keith Wright ethics committee. Because the whole party had to vote on the ethics committee,” Ishmael said. “We’re going to continue following the process, which includes at least discussing the report on Thursday.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Sunday rebuffed a recent critique from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi about his decision to support the Republican-backed stopgap spending bill, saying he had no choice but to avert a government shutdown.

“What we got, at the end of the day, is avoiding the horror of a shutdown,” Schumer said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to host Kristen Welker. There was no leverage point that we could’ve — we could’ve asked for things, they just would’ve said no.”

Pelosi — a longtime ally of Schumer — had taken aim at the minority leader’s move last week, accusing him of giving ground to Republicans without demanding anything in return. “I myself don’t give away anything for nothing,” she said.

Schumer and a small group of other Democrats’ decision to vote in favor of the continuing resolution has sparked backlash from members of their party who argue Democrats capitulated on key priorities. Schumer, however, has held firm, repeatedly asserting that a shutdown would have handed President Donald Trump and his allies an opening to continue gutting the federal bureaucracy.

Schumer’s decision to support the GOP bill drew praise from Trump, who said Schumer had “guts” and “did the right thing.”

Despite the clash, Pelosi said she continues to support Schumer — a stance that contrasts with growing murmurs within the Democratic Party about whether Schumer should step down from his leadership role.

Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet recently declined to explicitly call for Schumer to step aside as Senate minority leader, but highlighted echoes of the party’s internal struggle last summer over former President Joe Biden’s candidacy. But Schumer pushed back on the comparison when asked if he thought he could be making a similar mistake.

“No, absolutely not,” he said. “I did this out of conviction.”

He doubled down on his decision to support Republicans’ spending bill, saying, “Look, I’m not stepping down.”

ALBANY, New York — Gov. Kathy Hochul’s lifelong obsession with Harriet Tubman is propelling an effort to place a statue of the 19th century abolitionist in the U.S. Capitol.

The push to put Tubman’s marble likeness in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall is also being backed by both the state Senate and Assembly, which support the governor’s plan to swap out a statue of founding father Robert Livingston.

There are 100 statues in Statuary Hall — two for each state. The planned switch to Tubman would be the first change in one of New York’s spots since the likenesses of Livingston and George Clinton were shipped to Washington in the 1870s.

Hochul has been as big a booster of Tubman as anybody. Last year, she told a group of elementary school students about her childhood fascination with the Union Army spy.

“When I was in third grade, I had this one favorite book. It was called ‘The Story of Harriet Tubman,’” Hochul said. “It was a book I used to check out of the library all the time. I didn’t own it. I checked it out so much, the librarian one day said, ‘Why don’t you just keep it?’ And what I’d do is, late at night, my parents said, ‘Turn the lights out,’ it was dark in my room, I crept out of bed and I’d go grab that book. And I read it over and over and over because I could not get over how courageous she was.”

Seventeen statutes have been removed from Statuary Hall since 2003, most of whom were Confederates or their sympathizers. Democrats in the House have twice passed a bill in recent years to ban such statues. And while this has yet to win approval from the Senate, other efforts to remove sculptures that have faced criticism have been successful — including North Carolina’s Republican-backed push to replace segregationist Charles Brantley Aycock with Billy Graham last year.

Hochul has made at least four official visits to Tubman’s historic home in Auburn since she became lieutenant governor a decade ago. She renamed one of the boats the state uses on the Erie Canal after Tubman in 2022. And she announced in 2023 that the state would spend $400,000 to add a Tubman statute to Binghamton — which is set to be unveiled this Friday.

Livingston spent 24 years as New York’s first chancellor — a post that made him the top judge in the state, but which also had some powers currently held by the governor. His tenure overlapped with a stint as the first American to hold the job that evolved into secretary of state. He later served as Thomas Jefferson’s ambassador to France and negotiated the Louisiana Purchase.

But his historical standing has been marred by the fact that he owned more than a dozen slaves.

Livingston was never a consensus choice for a statue. As the Legislature began debating the honorees in 1872, steamboat inventor Robert Fulton seemed like the early frontrunner to join Clinton.

Hochul’s proposal, which was buried in her budget and has since been included in both chamber’s one-house budget bills, would create a five-member commission tasked with selecting a Tubman statute. The governor would then be tasked with working with the Architect of the Capitol to finalize plans.

“One of the architects of the Underground Railroad, one of the folks who has redefined who we are as a human,” said Sen. Jamaal Bailey — who’s sponsoring a bill to make Harriet Tubman Day a state holiday — about why the abolitionist is deserving of the historical honor.

“From a human perspective, not just a Black perspective — and I think it’s great, as a Black person in New York state, for her to have this recognition — I think it’s very important for us to do,” Bailey said.

While Livingston might be removed from Washington, his likeness will live on. Two exact replicas were made when his statue was finalized in 1875. One of them still stands prominently at the western end of the state Senate’s lobby in New York’s Capitol building.

Michael Bennet stopped short of calling for Chuck Schumer to step aside as Senate Democrats’ leader — though he pointedly compared the situation to the party’s internal strife over then-President Joe Biden serving as the party’s nominee last summer.

“On the leadership question, it’s always better to examine whether folks are in the right place, and we’re certainly going to have that conversation,” the Coloradoan said in a town hall in Golden, Colorado, Wednesday evening.

Bennet sidestepped a question about whether he would call for Schumer to step down, referencing the end of Biden’s disastrous 2024 election bid where the president ultimately stepped aside after growing agitation from other elected Democrats.

“In dodging your question, let me just say: It’s important for people to know when it’s time to go, and I think in the case of Joe Biden, and we’re going to have conversations I’m sure in the foreseeable future, about all the Democratic leadership,” he said.

Bennet’s statement comes almost a week after Schumer backed a GOP funding bill that most of his caucus voted against.

Bennet — a one-time 2020 presidential candidate — was one of the earliest Senate Democrats to publicly grapple with Biden’s position at the top of the ticket in 2024. He has publicly expressed interest in a potential run for Colorado governor next year.

Schumer has since faced intense scrutiny from his party — and particularly members of the House — but has repeatedly contended the move was necessary to stave off a government shutdown that he believes would have allowed President Donald Trump and Elon Musk to accelerate their crusade to hollow out federal agencies.

That, he has said, could also shunt critical public services like food benefits or mass transit funding.

“I’m a smart politician, I can read what people want,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Tuesday night. But Republicans, he continued, put forward a “terrible, terrible, bill,” and a shutdown would have been “so much worse.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said at a town hall earlier this week that Schumer “was wrong,” WBUR reported, but otherwise did not address if he should remain leader.

Much of this resentment is concentrated among House Democrats, who were largely united in voting against the GOP bill. Senate Democrats have largely held their tongues.

Earlier this week, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — a longtime partner of Schumer’s — added to the fire, saying, “I myself don’t give away anything for nothing. … I think that’s what happened the other day.”

James Blair: White House ‘not bashful’ about pushing Trump agenda

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