DL Open Thread: Monday, October 27, 2025
The Sussex County Democratic Party Chair, Jeff Balk, who was the subject of recent controversy over his decision to remain in leadership despite his past sex crimes against minors, resigned Sunday night.
He first announced the decision in a statement on the Sussex Democrats’ Facebook page.
“I am stepping down to ensure that I do not become a distraction to the candidates who are running in the 2026 cycle, a critical time for our county, state and country,” Balk wrote.
His resignation comes amid a growing call from state Democratic leaders for him to step down, two days after Spotlight Delaware first reported on Balk’s past. He spent seven years in a Missouri prison in the late 1980s for paying young boys for sex.
Delaware’s entire federal delegation – Sens. Chris Coons and Lisa Blunt Rochester, and Rep. Sarah McBride – issued a joint statement along with Lt. Gov. Kyle Evans Gay and Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings urging Balk to resign.
Taxpayer-Funded Gibraltar Project Soon To Be In Hands Of–Who, Exactly? This is some Delaware Way shit:
The board of Wilmington’s Land Bank wants to transfer a historic mansion rehabbed with the help of millions of taxpayer dollars to a newly created private company.
During a Thursday meeting of the Wilmington Neighborhood Conservancy Land Bank, board member Rick Gessner said the owner of the gardens that sit adjacent to the sprawling estate wants to reunite the two properties and place them under the ownership of a company called Gibraltar Estate & Gardens Inc.
The garden’s owner, a nonprofit called Preservation Delaware, previously owned the mansion but sold it in 2010.
Delaware business records show Gibraltar Estate & Gardens Inc. was created on Oct. 8.
While Gessner did not say who owns or controls the Gibraltar Estate & Gardens, the Land Bank Executive Director Bud Freel (!!) told Spotlight Delaware that Wilmington’s former mayor, Mike Purzycki (!!), is involved with the new company.
Oh. Please read this entire article. The secret machinations of Freel, Purzycki, and a bunch of people who they won’t name, absolutely reeks of Delaware Way sleaze. There are, at least, some public officials challenging this proposal:
Echoes of the past criticisms of the Land Bank also appeared during Thursday’s meeting.
In response to the announcement from the organization’s board, residents and city council members raised concerns about what they called a lack of transparency behind the proposal to transfer the property to a private entity.
Many, including some board members, noted they had just become aware of the proposal recently.
Listed on the agenda for the Thursday meeting was an item that only said “Gibraltar disposition.” Gessner emphasized that the agenda had been uploaded in a “timely manner.”
“It’s literally a foundation with no information available on Google that was explicitly created for this purpose. So that raises a lot of questions,” City Councilman Nathan Field said during the meeting.
Field’s comments added to criticisms from other Highland residents as well as from Councilwoman Shané Darby, who for the past year has spoken out about the Land Bank’s and Purzycki’s handling of the estate.
During the meeting, she said, in reference to Purzycki, that the Land Bank should not transfer a property to a company aligned with a former city official, after that same official previously directed the city to purchase it.
“There’s a clear conflict of interest, and not seeing that and being OK with that, really, it doesn’t sit right with me,” Darby said.
I don’t get the criticism. I’m sure that this sweetheart deal is something that the principals never envisioned until–stop, I can’t do it. It’s a dirty deal cooked up by the dirty inside dealers of the Delaware Way. No wonder Bud Freel was out campaigning against Shane Darby back in 2022. Ethical overseers must never be in a position to see what he and his cronies are up to.
Trump Flouts Law. Dems Are AWOL. I know, a ‘dog-bites-man’ headline if ever there was one. But we’re talking the brazen violations of international law here:
Since he returned to office nine months ago, President Trump has sought to expand executive power across numerous fronts. But his claim that he can lawfully order the military to summarily kill people accused of smuggling drugs on boats off the coast of South America stands apart.
A broad range of specialists in laws governing the use of lethal force have called Mr. Trump’s orders to the military patently illegal. They say the premeditated extrajudicial killings have been murders — regardless of whether the 43 people blown apart, burned alive or drowned in 10 strikes so far were indeed running drugs.
The administration insists that the killings are lawful, invoking legal terms like “self-defense” and “armed conflict.” But it has offered no legal argument explaining how to bridge the conceptual gap between drug trafficking and associated crimes, as serious as they are, and the kind of armed attack to which those terms can legitimately apply.
The irreversible gravity of killing, coupled with the lack of a substantive legal justification, is bringing into sharper view a structural weakness of law as a check on the American presidency.
It is becoming clearer than ever that the rule of law in the White House has depended chiefly on norms — on government lawyers willing to raise objections when merited and to resign in protest if ignored, and on presidents who want to appear law-abiding. This is especially true in an era when party loyalty has defanged the threat of impeachment by Congress, and after the Supreme Court granted presidents immunity from prosecution for crimes committed with official powers.
Every modern president has occasionally taken some aggressive policy step based on a stretched or disputed legal interpretation. But in the past, they and their aides made a point to develop substantive legal theories and to meet public and congressional expectations to explain why they thought their actions were lawful, even if not everyone agreed.
Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former top Justice Department lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, said Mr. Trump’s actions demonstrated an indifference to law that threatened to hollow it out.
“Nixon tried to keep his criminality secret, and the Bush administration tried to keep the torture secret, and that secrecy acknowledged the norm that these things were wrong,” Professor Goldsmith said. “Trump, as he often does when he is breaking law or norms, is acting publicly and without shame or unease. This is a very successful way to destroy the efficacy of law and norms.”
The silence about what legal theory can support Mr. Trump’s assertion that suspected drug smugglers are lawful military targets as “combatants” in an armed conflict dovetails with a growing pattern in his administration’s assertions of executive power.
The administration has found a two-part hack to the system in which executive branch lawyers are supposed to independently determine the legal boundaries within which policymakers may act.
The first is that Mr. Trump has told executive branch lawyers that they may not question any legal judgment that he — or Attorney General Pam Bondi, subject to his “supervision and control” — already decided. “The president and the attorney general’s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties,” Mr. Trump declared in a February executive order.
The second is that Mr. Trump has been declaring that as president, he has determined that the factual and legal scenarios exist that are necessary for him to exercise various extraordinary powers.
This is a lengthy, but essential, article. Highly-recommended.
What do you want to talk about?
If Mike Purzycki wants Gibraltar preserved so badly, why doesn’t HE buy it and donate it to this organization? It’s not like he can’t afford it.
What are Dems supposed to do? Other than making statements and expressing increasingly grave concerns? To date the only thing they have done is hold the line on the shutdown.
Nearly a year in on trump 2.0 and still no coordinated dem strategy. The current messaging seems to be “please peacefully resist the fascist takeover of your nation” which is deeply uninspiring and frankly emasculating.
There is a lot they could do, and they know it. They’ve played along with every step he’s made, from approving his awful appointments to not wreaking havoc over the bombing of innocent fishing boats in South American waters. Now they’re going to let millions and millions of Americans go hungry. They refuse to exert any power or influence they have because they serve the same damn master as the GOP: the billionaires who hoard all of the wealth and power so they can jail those who are poor so they can fill the for-profit prisons with more slave labor so they can stop paying those of us who aren’t locked up and make even more money. With the exception of a handful of folks, Dems don’t give a shit about us, period.
Well said, Peas. Especially, the point on the prison industrial complex. That shit is tangible.
I’m sending out an SOS.
The Spotlight Delaware article on Jeff Balk’s resignation details this:
‘Delaware’s entire federal delegation – Sens. Chris Coons and Lisa Blunt Rochester, and Rep. Sarah McBride – issued a joint statement along with Lt. Gov. Kyle Evans Gay and Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings urging Balk to resign.
I have been unable to find this joint statement anywhere. So, um, HELP!
If you have seen a copy, please send it along to us.
It looks like at least Coons dropped it on his political page, rather than his official Senate Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/chriscoons.
My guess is that because it involves a party issue, they didn’t want to use their “official” accounts.
Thanks!
That’s some statement. Translation: ‘We too’. Here it is, apparently in its entirety:
“Statement from Delaware Senators Chris Coons and Lisa Blunt Rochester, Representative Sarah McBride, Lt. Governor Kyle Evans Gay and Attorney General Kathy Jennings about Sussex County Chair Jeff Balk:
“We support Chair Evelyn Brady’s request that Jeff Balk resign from party leadership. We urge him to step down.”
Can YOU say ‘pro forma’ and/or ‘piling on’?
Have any of you seen ‘M’, featuring Peter Lorre? Lorre stars as a criminal who preys on children. He becomes the target of the entire criminal underground as he’s giving them a bad name and disrupting their business.
There’s at least an element of that here.
I actually took a different view of that statement. Rather than piling on with a lengthy, equivocating quote, they just threw their full support behind the party chair and her call for Balk to resign. Gives Brady unconditional support without grandstanding.
The temptation with these statements often is to babble and end up making it about them rather than the issue. I found it refreshing to just bluntly say he needed to step down. But I get that it also was minimalist as hell.
Also… did they ask the Governor to sign on or not? Are we to just expect his hand-selected State Chair to speak for him, or is he actually silent on this?
Yeah, we get it, you hate the guy. You’re actually criticizing him for having the good sense to stay out of it?
Wanna know why Democrats are feckless? Because their constituency is feckless.
“Largest Federal Employee Union Calls On Democrats To End Government Shutdown”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/government-shutdown-democrats-trump-afge_n_68ff7da8e4b0fb1b951554fa
In short, these union members don’t give a fuck about the people who’ll lose their health insurance. With constituents like these, why should Democratic electeds be any different?
Why should federal works “give a fuck about the people who’ll lose their health insurance?”
Are some offenses unforgivable? When someone serves time and makes pennance, is that not enough? Must we punish people who have contrition with lifelong guilt and suffering?
There is a certain kind of narcissism going on here, to believe that you can escape that kind of personal history in this modern age and then drag a whole contingent of innocent people down with you. Balk put his own personal interests ahead of the suxco dems and everyone is suffering as a result. To that point, it does not truly seem like Balk is a recovered man – that kind of self-centeredness is just expressing itself in different forms
If self-centeredness was a crime, a majority of Americans, and nearly all politicians, would do jail time.
I don’t blame Balk. He was trying to find ways to serve his community.
I blame the Sussex Dems who chose him to be chair with full knowledge of his past crimes.
” it does not truly seem like Balk is a recovered man – that kind of self-centeredness is just expressing itself in different forms”
Certainly does sound like you’re blaming him. I fail to see where that puts the onus on the Sussex Dems.
The posts are different Anons.
I should probably come up with a more unique pseudonym.
I think you can tell different Anons from the color of the icon on the post? But I could be wrong about that.
All they show is different IP addresses, I have no way of knowing who’s who. Lots of people who comment do so from two different locations, home and work, I presume.
I believe it is device-specific. But regardless:
“We are Anonymous; We are legion” as the terminally-online youth of the aughts would say.
Buddy Freel and Purzycki represent the worst of Delaware straight up!
I got an inside look at Gibralter 15-20 years ago. It was falling to pieces then, I can’t imagine what it looks like now. From what I recall it is subject to restrictions from being on the historic register or it would have been torn down years ago. There was a private effort at one point to renovate it into professional offices but it got shot down by the neighbors which I didn’t understand. I think right now it’s just an enormous money pit. The big question is who’s money is going to get thrown in it.
So far, it’s been the taxpayers.