Who is Mike Lavery, the new and old NJGOP Chairman?
/By Rubashov
Identity dysphoria is the distress a person feels due to a mismatch between what they identify as and the reality of what they are. There’s a lot of it going around within New Jersey’s political class – especially amongst those “insiders” who jostle for position in “this 100 that” or “that top 50 this”.
Governor Phil Murphy – a Goldman Sachs robber baron – identifies as the champion of the destitute (even of those he has made destitute). Murphy’s prep school heiress wife thinks a Marxist revolution just happened and that she’s a Bolshevik.
I think it so… and so it is! That’s their working principle.
“I’m not a politician, at all”. GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Steinhardt puts out a video with these words coming out of his mouth. Steinhardt goes on to make the claim – himself, on video – that he’s “different” from “the same Trenton insider politicians who run for governor”.
Why is the guy who was head of one of the state’s two major political parties for three years saying these words? Who wrote such nonsense?
Maybe he believes it – like Murphy does. If so, just mark it down to another case of identity dysphoria. It’s become a national phenomenon that takes many forms. Conservative Ben Shapiro’s blog recently covered an extreme manifestation of identity dysphoria…
Over the weekend, the NJGOP sent out an email blast that provided a photograph of new Chairman Mike Lavery and these words: “Give a warm welcome to the new NJGOP Chairman, Michael Lavery” That was it.
We have come to expect the NJGOP to be light on the details of specific solutions and Republican legislation to address the problems faced by the state’s citizens, but now it appears that tendency has banished such things as biographical details of those who lead or are employed by the State Committee. So, as a service, we will take a crack at filling in those details. And there is much.
It seems that in passing over Bob Hugin and selecting Mike Lavery, the members of State Committee rejected someone who has given millions to Republican causes of all ideological stripes, to embrace someone who has harnessed politics to make money for himself and his law firm. Even Hugin’s public promise to raise a million dollars for the NJGOP didn’t cause most of the voting members to take their eyes from Lavery, so what’s with the attraction?
To start with, Mike Lavery held the job of NJGOP Chairman before – in 2017 – after gubernatorial candidate Kim Guadagno objected to “non-politician” Doug Steinhardt becoming NJGOP Chairman, on the grounds that his wife had recently accepted a six-figure political appointment from then-Governor Chris Christie. Guadagno claimed she didn’t like “the optics”.
When he served in 2017, Lavery was said to be a “placeholder” for Steinhardt, the media reporting that Lavery is “very close to Steinhardt” and calling him “one of his (Steinhardt’s) best friends”. Indeed, Steinhardt made Lavery the NJGOP’s General Counsel.
Writing of his appointment in 2017, InsiderNJ noted that “puzzled reactions around the state” turned to “cynical head shakes of disbelief” when people learned that Lavery was the nephew of the (now former) Ocean County GOP Chairman, George Gilmore. Gilmore, a powerful party boss, ran a politically connected law firm before being convicted on federal charges. He recently lost an appeal in federal court.
Optics?
There’s a whole lot more to the Mike Lavery story, much more than we can accommodate in so short a column, but as the NJGOP’s email blast was so lacking in information, let’s at least provide you with a sketch of the new Chairman…
Like Doug Steinhardt, Mike Lavery is a member of what has been jokingly called the “Warren County mafia” – a political (and legal business) machine with great success in monetizing that which falls under their control. A former legislative aide to then-Senator Leonard Lance, from 2005 to 2011 Lavery was the Mayor of Hackettstown.
In 2015, Mike Lavery got a political appointment as a Commissioner for the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission. A year later, he was made Chairman of the Commission. The Bridge Commission is a $160 million operation that controls bridges serving four New Jersey counties – Sussex, Warren, Hunterdon, and Mercer. Besides Lavery, the two other Republican Commissioners are Warren County residents. Both reside in Doug Steinhardt’s hometown of Lopatcong.
According to his biography on the website of the law firm he founded (Lavery, Selvaggi, Abromitis and Cohen) Mike Lavery is “the director of the firm's Municipal Government Practice” and is considered “one of the state's foremost attorneys in the area of municipal government law.” His biography states:
“He presently represents numerous governmental entities and serves as Special Counsel to the County of Warren for Open Space & Farmland Preservation.
Mr. Lavery has been appointed to be the Township Attorney for Hardwick, Lopatcong, Mansfield, Oxford, Greenwich and Washington (Warren County) Townships, as well as Attorney for the Frelinghuysen Township Land Use Board, the Chester Township Zoning Board of Adjustment, the Warren County Soil Conservation District and Special Counsel to the County of Sussex.
Michael is also a seasoned land use attorney. He has represented many developers, corporations and individuals in a variety of applications. He is recognized by land use boards throughout northern New Jersey…”
That’s a brief outline of who the new NJGOP Chairman is. He does serve on the boards of various organizations – such as the Centenary College Board of Trustees (yes, that Centenary College, the one that once banned conservative Steve Lonegan from speaking on campus) – but we couldn’t find any involvement in movement conservatism. Not that we expected to.
Mike Lavery’s law firm has an extensive record of involvement in all sorts of things that some, or indeed many, would find “controversial”. The firm is currently involved in an effort that has effectively blocked citizen activists from getting to the bottom of the solar scam that ripped-off property taxpayers in Sussex, Morris, and Somerset Counties. This is important, because Phil Murphy is pushing the same sort of solar scam – as part of his new energy plan.
Taxpayers need to know what happened the last time, to prepare and ensure that it doesn’t happen again. Taxpayers need closure on the scam they’re still paying off and that their children and grandchildren will be paying off.
Studying the interconnections of New Jersey’s political, lawyer-lobbyist firms is instructive and should be required as part of every social studies course. Move over LGBTQ curriculum… forget the silly black and white of the two-party charade… this is how power really works. None of these firms – the really powerful ones – care a fig for party loyalty or platforms or issues. They are all a mix of Democrats and Republicans engaged in the time-honored practice of enriching themselves.
Lavery’s own firm includes the Democrat Mayor of Hoboken, Ravinder Bhalla, “a seasoned litigator and trial attorney in the areas of complex civil litigation, local government law, employment and civil rights law, and criminal defense law.” Before joining Lavery’s firm, Wikipedia reports that “Bhalla was a civil rights attorney at the law firm of Florio, Perrucci, Steinhardt & Fader who have represented NJ Transit.” Initially a strong supporter of COVID restrictions, Bhalla apparently dismissed them to join rallies organized by the Black Lives Matter movement to defund the police.
In 2017, newly elected Mayor Bhalla bragged, “I’m Everything Trump Hates.”
Bhalla’s presence at the Lavery firm does question the new NJGOP Chairman’s commitment to the “Fair School Funding” concept championed by Senator Mike Doherty and others. Hoboken is one of 31 Abbott districts statewide, now referred to as “SDA Districts” based on the requirement for the state to cover all costs for school building and renovation projects. These 31 districts suck up 60% of all the education aid – the state’s income tax revenue.
More than a decade ago, it was clearly established that half the state’s financially at-risk children resided outside these 31 districts. For nearly two decades, there have been calls to kick wealthy districts like Hoboken out of the Abbott/ SDA system. And yet… there appears to be no appetite by the Republican Party establishment to do so. 31 mainly Democrat machine-controlled districts get 60% and the remaining more than 500 districts (many of which are Republican) get the leftovers and the NJGOP appears fine with that.
When folks from outside New Jersey ask why the NJGOP has never pushed a winning “haves and have nots” strategy based on the inequity of a school funding system that forces poor families in rural and suburban New Jersey to subsidize the property tax bills of wealthy people in towns like Hoboken… well, you need to explain the interconnectedness of those lawyer-lobbyist firms to them. Next to your family, nothing is so intimate as who you share a business with.
Which is why it is so important to make the NJGOP and the Republican gubernatorial candidates take positions on actual solutions and legislation. No more getting by with words like “conservative” or “pro-life” or “pro-Second Amendment”. If you are conservative, make “Fair School Funding” a priority and talk about it. If pro-life, take a public position on S-3030/ A-4848. If pro-Second Amendment, sign-on to activists’ legal challenges and provide counsel and raise money. Words should mean something…
Unless you are suffering from identity dysphoria?
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
George Orwell
