King readies to abdicate House seat

Rep. Pete King was in a reflective mood on a recent visit to his office. He won’t be running for reelection come November, so he’s starting to clean out his desk.

He’d been in this Massapequa Park location since taking office in 1993, so there was plenty.

There were remnants from nearly three decades of Long Island polling. Memos of presidential conversations and documents related to King’s role in the historic Irish peace process — some of it destined for archiving at Notre Dame, where King studied law. There were pictures of President Donald Trump gesticulating in his face during a 2018 St. Patrick’s Day lunch.

King noted that this was the moment he and Trump “got into it over Gateway,” the crucial regional infrastructure project involving replacement of crumbling Hudson River train tunnels that Trump has periodically threatened.

Irish officials were nearby, perhaps hoping to talk Brexit or tariffs with the leader of the free world, King remembers. Instead: “We were talking about a bridge and a tunnel here.”

There are plenty of moments to remember over King’s three-decade-long congressional career. This is a man who last week put out a 1,300-word Presidents Day statement on the commanders-in-chief he has known — so maybe it’s no surprise he reaches for the past to explain the present.

He does this when we’re talking about what he describes as one of the formative recent issues in his district, the arrival to Long Island over the last decade of an unprecedented number of unaccompanied minors from Central America.

It was as if you were bringing a kid from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Garden City in the 1960s, says the 75-year-old, who grew up the son of a police officer in Queens.

Or another analogy from life: The disruptive experience, with kids going from a “rougher existence” to a less rough one, was like that of kids who moved from Belfast to Dublin during Ireland’s Troubles.

King notes that he wanted more funding to alleviate some issues presented by the struggling newcomers.

But there was also a political reaction to the minors’ arrival, and the spate of MS-13 gang violence that struck the region not long after. This was underscored by Trump, who rallied his party against immigration and came to Bethpage in 2018 to highlight the gang violence and call MS-13 members “animals.”

King has agreed with that characterization and shared much of the president’s language on MS-13 and illegal immigration.

It was an issue that proved crucial in King’s 2018 reelection, which now that it’s in the past he can call his hardest in decades. In the last moments of his race against Democrat Liuba Grechen Shirley in a blue-wave year, King says he pumped in a million dollars “to fortify,” including TV ads on MS-13.

King won’t be running in November, which means that it’s a reflective moment of change for the district, too. The two party-sanctioned candidates, Democrat Jackie Gordon and Republican Assemb. Andrew Garbarino, are from the Suffolk side of the 2nd Congressional District instead of King’s Nassau side. The candidates are decades younger than King — Garbarino is 35. And Gordon, 55, a Jamaican immigrant and retired Army Reserves veteran who like King grew up in Queens, represents an updated slice of the suburbs compared with King, who served in the National Guard and came out from the city, too.

But old history may not exactly be past in 2020. Trump is on the ballot again. The president is signaling that this election, like the last one, will have plenty about immigration and the cultural changes roiling the country. Surely that discourse will filter down to Long Island as it did in 2018, even as King packs up his papers and leaves the district behind.

Mark Chiusano is a member of Newsday's editorial board.

By Mark Chiusano

mark.chiusano@newsday.commjchiusano

Mark Chiusano is a member of the Newsday editorial board.