Elements of a stump speech were peppered throughout Suffolk County Legislator Bridget Fleming’s remarks to a gathering of Democratic voters in Springs on Friday.
Ms. Fleming, who last year declared her candidacy to challenge Mr. Zeldin in the Nov. 3 election, told members of the East Hampton Town Democratic Committee and the activist groups Resist & Replace and Progressive East End Reformers that Representative Lee Zeldin is vulnerable, and that she is the candidate who can defeat the three-term congressman, who has drawn a national spotlight as one of President Trump’s most ardent defenders.
The congressman takes “the extremist, most alarmist view of the very basic questions in our democracy” and an “extremely partisan approach” to representing New York’s First Congressional District, she said. He is “increasingly committed to defense of the president,” whose impeachment trial in the United States Senate began on Tuesday. Mr. Zeldin was named to Mr. Trump’s impeachment defense team on Monday.
“What’s happening in our country is perilous and getting worse,” Ms. Fleming, who was re-elected to a third two-year term in November, said. “I believe that the vulnerability — that is being increasingly exposed — of the current occupant of the congressional seat is an opportunity for us to take this seat back.” Speaking of Tim Bishop, a Democrat who held the seat for six terms before his 2014 defeat by Mr. Zeldin, Ms. Fleming said, “We can do that again, and this is our moment to do that. We’ve looked at the hard numbers, and we believe it’s true.”
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Ms. Fleming criticized Mr. Zeldin on a host of issues likely to be prominent in the campaign, including the congressman’s recent signature on a “friend of the court” brief asking the Supreme Court to consider overturning landmark rulings establishing a woman’s right to an abortion. “Long Island does not deserve a congressional representative who seeks to overturn one of the bulwarks of national jurisprudence that protects women’s right to determine what happens with our own bodies,” she said. “How long and hard did we fight to get Roe v. Wade and all the protections that flow from it? . . . It is a very extreme position to ask that that be overturned, and it’s not the position that someone who represents Long Island should be taking.”
Like the other declared candidates for the Democratic Party’s nomination, Perry Gershon and Nancy Goroff, Ms. Fleming hammered Mr. Zeldin on what is likely another element of the eventual Democratic nominee’s campaign: the congressman’s “no” vote last month on a bill that would have temporarily eliminated the $10,000 cap on state and local taxes, known as SALT, that individuals and businesses can deduct on federal income tax returns. The cap had been imposed by the Republican-led tax overhaul of 2017.
“He voted no on a bipartisan bill that was supported by Congressman [Peter] King as well as our great [Representatives] Kathleen Rice and Tom Suozzi to alleviate the burden on Long Island households that’s been created” by the cap, she said. Mr. Zeldin had criticized the bill, noting on the House floor that it would permanently return the top individual tax rate from 37 percent to 39.6 percent, the rate before the 2017 overhaul, while only temporarily eliminating the SALT cap.
But, Ms. Fleming said, “Mr. Zeldin is not willing to do it because it means that you would have to reinstate a 39-percent tax rate for people who earn — wait for it — $518,000 or more.” Mr. Zeldin, she said, “is willing to protect the folks who are earning more than half a million dollars a year by visiting that burden on households that are now paying taxes between $10,000 and $20,000.”
She also gave support to maintaining the Affordable Care Act in spite of what she acknowledged are flaws, rather than doing away with it in favor of a single-payer health care system. “I would much rather see us move incrementally to fix prescription health care costs, to fix high premiums without losing pre-existing condition protections, and protections for young people in their family households. . . . And it’s absolutely unconscionable that Lee Zeldin continues to push to repeal A.C.A. without providing for the 60,000 people in this district who would lose their health care if he had his way.”
Elected to represent the Second Legislative District in 2015, Ms. Fleming is a former Southampton Town councilwoman. Before that she was a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. She serves as chairwoman of the Legislature’s Ways and Means Committee and co-chairwoman of the Health Committee, and is a member of the Public Works and E.P.A. Committees. She was recently appointed vice chairwoman of the Public Safety Committee, which oversees the county’s district attorney, Police Department, Sheriff’s Department, and emergency services, among other entities.
“I’m in a good position to understand the needs and concerns of our local constituencies,” she said on Friday, “and bring those needs and concerns in an effective way to a broken Washington, D.C.”
Ms. Fleming claimed a fund-raising effort that is outpacing those of her competitors for the Democratic Party’s nomination. Yesterday, she announced that she would report having raised $239,095 since declaring her candidacy on Nov. 26, in a filing on Friday, Jan. 31. “We feel very strongly that, if we have the resources to introduce me to every voter in Brookhaven, we will win,” she said. She also touted her law enforcement background, work on renewable energy issues, relationships built throughout the county, and a growing list of endorsements (reported on elsewhere in this issue).
She professed “nothing but admiration and respect” for Mr. Gershon, an East Hampton resident who lost to Mr. Zeldin by four percentage points in 2018, and Ms. Goroff, a Stony Brook resident who is on leave from positions as professor and chairwoman of Stony Brook University’s chemistry department. “Believe me, it’s really hard to do this,” she said of seeking elected office, but “I do not believe that the profile that either of them presents is what we need to take this seat back.” The stakes are too high and the opportunity too great, she said. “That’s why I’m in this.” A Democratic congressional primary election is to be held on June 23.