Conservatives in the chamber: NYC's Common Sense Caucus tries to counter the left

Members of the Common Sense Caucus after declaring a complete turnaround at the Rikers Island jail complex.

A small group of conservative-leaning politicians said it's hitting its stride less than two years after gaining official recognition as a caucus from the New York City Council. But in the liberal bastion of city government, its cause remains an uphill climb.

Members of the “Common Sense Caucus” said they’re mobilizing around the migrant crisis and the city’s crime rates to increase their numbers – and influence – on public policy and legislation.

“In the same way that the Progressive Caucus is trying to push politics to the left, we are trying to push politics to the right," Councilmember Joe Borelli, a Republican who co-founded the caucus, told Gothamist.

The conservative-leaning voting bloc is one of seven caucuses within the Council, and aims to operate as a counterweight to the progressive caucus. But it is still something of a scrappy underdog; while the progressives count 20 of the Council’s 51 members among their ranks, the Common Sensers are a mere band of eight.

The caucus hasn’t been around for very long, either: Borelli and Robert Holden, a Democrat, officially formed the group in late 2021 – although it operated unofficially several years beforehand. Although being a Republican isn’t a prerequisite for being part of the caucus, the bulk of its members are, including Councilmembers Vickie Paladino, Joanna Ariola, Ari Kagan, David Carr and Inna Vernikov. The caucus also counts Democratic Councilmember Kalman Yeger among its ranks.

What unifies the caucus, according to its website, is the desire for a "safe and secure city," as well as prioritizing "fiscal responsibility" and "rational approaches to governing."

And the caucus is already working as a unit. Recently, it submitted a letter urging the judge presiding over the “right to shelter” court case to suspend the decadeslong measure guaranteeing shelter to anyone in New York City because of the ongoing migrant crisis. On Staten Island, the group had a short-lived victory in winning a temporary restraining order against using an abandoned school as a migrant shelter.

All but one of the caucus's members appeared at Rikers Island earlier this month, and the entire group later jointly wrote a letter discouraging the city’s largest jail from falling under federal receivership — an opinion at odds with most advocates as well as the federal monitor overseeing the complex.

The caucus met with the mayor to advocate the end of public health mandates and filed a lawsuit against a measure that would let noncitizens vote in local elections, which is currently being appealed.

The eight-member group communicates “really every day” over texts, in emails or when encountering one another in City Hall, said Carr, a Republican who joined the caucus in 2021. They occasionally meet over Zoom before the full Council votes on a bill.

And while there’s never been a nail-biting showdown with their more liberal colleagues, the caucus's members say they’re ready to scrap, should that day come.

Ariola, a Republican caucus member, recalls one instance in which all of the members were urged to leave a room – where they were meeting separately from their colleagues – and enter the chamber so the Council could have a quorum to take a vote.

“Right then and there, we knew that we were of value and we could make an impact,” she said. “Because if the eight of us had decided not to go into the chamber that day – which was never the case, mind you – we would not have had that stated meeting.”

“I think that we’re already a voting bloc to be reckoned with,” Carr said. “I know that the majority conference is frequently doing whip counts because they know that – when there’s a bill on which we’re not in agreement – they're already eight votes down.”

The caucus is also expecting to expand in the near future. Carr said there are “potential Republican pickups” in several local races in November, including for Council seats in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn. He said there are instances in which even a Democratic winner will want to join the caucus, and pointed to the newly formed 43rd Council District, an Asian-majority area where public safety and violence remain major concerns. Borelli said that Democratic Councilmember Justin Brannan also faces a tough race in the 47th District.

Ariola said more current councilmembers would join the Common Sense Caucus's cause “if they weren’t fearful of retribution from the far left.”

But Carolyn Abbott, an assistant political science professor at CUNY’s Baruch College, voiced skepticism that the conservative-leaning group is gaining as much momentum as it thinks.

“New York City has always gone through these cycles of the Democratic political machine being really, really strong and the machine getting a little bit too arrogant, too cocky, too much corruption, too much not paying attention to what their constituents need and ignoring their voters, and then you have these defectors, these challengers,” she said.

The Common Sense caucus, she said, isn’t going to present a long-term challenge to the city's overwhelming liberal majority.

“They like to pretend as if they have some control over anything in city politics, but they don’t — they still don’t,” she said.

The caucus’s performance in the past year-and-a-half is shaky. When asked about legislative accomplishments it has been able to achieve thus far, Borelli could only point to the property tax rebate in last year’s budget and rescinding some employees’ vaccine mandates. But both of those were already mayoral priorities.

The shelter restraining order on Staten Island was overturned on appeal hours after it was issued.

Borelli also said he’s aware that he – and the other conservative-leaning officials – won’t be in office forever. But he added that the Council’s recent redistricting ensured that the conservative areas in the city would remain so. He said that will guarantee that moderate Democrats or Republicans will continue to fare well in districts where they already have the support.

“Politics is a pendulum,” Borelli said. “It sounds like a cliché, but it always holds true that things swing back and forth.”

Others are more doubtful.

“My favorite Common Sense Caucus story was when Ari [Kagan] was a progressive Democrat a few months ago, they asked him to join, but he declined because he said the caucus had ‘too many Republicans,’” Brannan told Gothamist.

The prospect of a conservative-leaning caucus – with enough members to sway votes – is a far cry from what the Council looked like for Sal Albanese, a conservative Staten Island Democrat who served on the Council from 1983 to 1998. Albanese said the caucus could send waves through the chamber if it adds a few more members to its ranks.

“They were really parochial,” Albanese recalled. “They never really focused on macro issues. They basically settled for crumbs.”

Correction: A previous version of this article misidentified Councilmember Kalman Yeger, who is a Democrat, as a Republican.