Mamdani revs up his socialist property grabs — thanks to gutless Julie Menin

As early as Wednesday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani plans to sign a bill banning Central Park’s beloved horse carriages — and he’ll probably be smiling as he makes it law.

That’s not just because Mamdani is always smiling. 

He’s got reason to be happy: He’ll be doing his latest lap of running circles around this City Council and its leader, Speaker Julie Menin.  

Mamdani is mayor in part because he’s really good at politics, something many opponents still don’t grasp; they see him as a lucky rookie who’s going to screw up soon.  

No: He’s more politically ruthless than Andrew Cuomo, and more strategically populist than Donald Trump.  

The horse idiocy is the latest example.  

As a candidate, Mamdani theoretically favored banning the horses, per his reply to a questionnaire prepared by anti-carriage advocates.  

But he never ran on it — for a canny political reason: Only a small but intensely rabid and well-funded advocacy group cares about it.

That group, NYCLASS, had only one employee and 200 volunteers as of 2024. 

But its power is leverage in low-turnout races.  

Local pols don’t forget the vicious campaign NYCLASS ran in 2013 against mayoral frontrunner Christine Quinn, then the City Council speaker.  

Quinn, to her credit, stuck up for the carriage trade’s 200 jobs in her district — because she could see, as any normal person can, that the horses are treated well. 

Sticking to her principles contributed to her loss against ardent ban supporter Bill de Blasio. 

Ever since, New York’s hapless business-as-usual pols have played a game: Every mayor and council tries to ban the carriages, but nobody actually does it.  

Menin seems not to have gotten the memo that you’re not supposed to take this seriously. 

So, after a once-in-less-than-a-century freak fatality this June, Menin backed the ban —before listening to testimony.

Her support built a veto-proof majority allowing the bill to sail through the council last month.  

The lopsided 40-to-7 vote took all pressure off Mamdani; what he does won’t matter.  

So he can sign the bill, genially keeping the anti-horse people off his back for nearly two years, until the law takes effect.  

Even then, he can keep his options open, pleasing whichever side he deems more politically useful.

If the “workforce transition” plan for the industry doesn’t work, he can just delay enforcement — after all, Gotham is a city that doesn’t enforce much of anything.  

And as a citywide official who can attract high turnout to his own re-election race, he’s not as beholden to these fanatics as council members are. 

What Mamdani does do in signing the bill is make clear that it’s the council, not he, that’s sacrificed its principles. 

Menin and other moderate Democrats are supposed to champion small businesses and middle-class jobs — not this mayor.

If they don’t care, why should he? 

Not coincidentally, Mamdani will sign another bill soon — this one weakening the property rights of landlords, by giving nonprofit groups the right to bid first or bid best when some struggling buildings go up for sale.  

Unlike the horse carriages, this issue is important to Mamdani’s base, and the council delivered.  

As it’s done for this mayor time and again.

Pick an issue, almost any issue: Before this June’s budget, the mayor and the council had a deal to add 580 police officers to the streets.

At the last minute, Mamdani reneged — but Menin went through with the budget anyway. 

E-bikes: When Mamdani announced in March that he’d stop criminal enforcement of the rules of the road for e-cyclists, Menin could have put pressure on him to control these menaces under existing laws.  

Instead she caved, merely holding a day-long hearing at which most council members couldn’t be bothered to listen to the victims of e-bike crashes.  

Again, if public safety and quality of life aren’t important to the City Council’s moderates, why should Mamdani care?  

Any City Council speaker faces a built-in disadvantage against any mayor. 

NYC has room for only one attention-consuming local official (quick, what’s the city comptroller done lately?), and Mamdani will inevitably be the pol who gets the ink, the streaming views and the clicks.  

Menin can’t command broad attention — but to the extent she does, she’s just reminding people why they’re fed up with business-as-usual pols like her.

Out of all this city’s problems, your only headline first-year accomplishment is . . . banishing horses?

All she’s really doing is making Mamdani look like the adult in the room — quite a feat. 

If you’re starting to worry that you face seven more years of Zohran rather than just three, don’t blame him.

Blame the people in office who are supposed to, er, steady the reins.  

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and a 2026 fellow at the CCNY Moynihan Center.