After a few years of chaos, everything seemed to be getting back to normal for Advisory Neighborhood Commission 2A.
A homeless shelter that has been the subject of seemingly endless arguments at the body’s meetings finally opened this month, surviving a slew of legal challenges over the the past year and a half. Mayor Muriel Bowser even hosted a showy ribbon-cutting ceremony Monday to mark the victory. And one of the ANC’s most controversial members, Joel Causey, opted not to run again in the November election, ensuring that the commission will no longer have to deal with scrutiny of his past as a registered sex offender or his profanity-laden, caustic methods of critiquing the plans for the aforementioned shelter. With all that fading in the rearview, commissioners surely hoped things would settle down on their volunteer panel.
Unfortunately, it’s an “out of the frying pan and into the fire” sort of situation for the Foggy Bottom-West End ANC. Shortly after the election wrapped up, commissioners were mortified to discover that two perpetual long-shot candidates with eccentric beliefs (to put it mildly) have almost certainly won seats on the ANC: Bruce Majors and Dennis Sobin. The former has made a few bids for office as a libertarian over the years and has recently come to embrace some Trumpy conspiracy theories; the latter was once famously dubbed the “smut king” of D.C. and has perhaps the most colorful past of any character in local politics other than Mayor-for-Life Marion Barry.
The pair was able to win the seats via some odd quirks of D.C. election law. No candidate secured a spot on the ballot for these races (hardly an unusual occurrence in low-interest ANC contests) so Majors and Sobin ran as write-ins. Elections officials won’t release the results of races decided by write-in votes until early December, but these two are shoo-ins: They both registered with the Board of Elections as write-in candidates, a requirement for anyone hoping to actually be sworn into office. Even if each one only voted for himself, they’d still beat out any other write-ins because they’re the only ones registered. (As absurd as all this might sound, a BOE spokesperson confirmed to Loose Lips that it’s accurate.)
Perhaps understandably, this has some on the ANC feeling like these fringe candidates—both of whom have run for mayor on the Libertarian Party ticket at different points over the years—view these runs as a more of a chance to get some attention than to actually do the thankless work of negotiating small-bore community issues. To make matters worse, both Sobin and Majors only registered as write-in candidates a full week after the election was over. The move is allowed under D.C. law, but it means virtually no one in the community knew either were running until it was too late.
“I don’t know what it is about individuals like these who want to treat the ANC commissions as a joke,” says Trupti Patel, the chair of ANC2A. “Every time I run for office, I have to file my paperwork and gather signatures and basically prove to the District that I have a vested interest and a stake in running for this office … and it just feels like they don’t care about the work that the ANC conducts.”
Patel says she won’t work with either Majors or Sobin if they actually take their seats on the commission. The same goes for former chair Jim Malec, who plans to ask both men to refuse to serve on the ANC should they be certified as winners. He has particular concerns about Sobin, who spent more than a decade in prison after being convicted on child pornography charges in Florida in the 1990s. (Ironically enough, outgoing ANC Causey was also convicted of sex crimes involving a minor in the Sunshine State a few years after Sobin.)
“You should not be able to just write your name down and win elected office,” says Malec, who had to resign his old seat earlier this year after moving out of the single member district; he will rejoin the commission after winning a different ANC post on Nov. 5. “Perhaps especially in the Trump era, we need to ask ourselves what kind of people we want representing us and what kind of people we want to empower.”
Both Majors and Sobin tell LL that their motives here are pure, and they simply want to serve their communities. Though they’ve run in the same libertarian circles over the years, the two controversial candidates say they did not coordinate their campaigns in any way. (In fact, each one said they had no idea the other was running until LL called to inquire about their intentions.) Neither man was willing to consider Malec’s request to step aside.
“I’m not afraid to take ‘no’ for an answer and to keep pushing forward anyway,” Sobin says, noting that he has never been terribly popular in his various runs for political office. “In fact, they would only, as they’re doing in this case, give publicity to some of my ideas with their opposition.”
Dennis Sobin in 2010 Credit: Darrow Montgomery
Those ideas are the same ones Sobin has been pushing for the entirety of his long, strange career in local politics: the full legalization of drugs and sex work. He says he learned about the vacancy on the commission because he’s friendly with former ANC 2A09 Evelyn Hudson, so he chose to run in her place when she decided to retire, viewing this as a platform for the causes he cares about. Sobin’s past runs for office certainly got more attention—he was famous for hiring sex workers to staff his campaigns—but he says this will be the first race he’s ever actually won.
“I’m sort of like the mayor in reverse,” Sobin says of Bowser, his rival in the 2022 campaign. “She started as an ANC and worked up to mayor. I went backwards.”
The 81-year-old’s platform, however, is not the main thing that Sobin’s future ANC colleagues find so objectionable. He’s served his time in prison, of course, but it’s hard to look past the content of what he was convicted of doing all those years ago. He was spotted filming nude videos of his stepchildren, then a 6-year-old girl and 8-year-old boy. A past City Paper cover story also detailed his rather ugly relationship with his son, Darrin, a D.C. government employee who fought repeatedly in court for a restraining order against him. Overall, Patel says she finds Sobin “revolting.”
“This is someone who clearly should not be serving in any form of elected office,” Malec says. “It should be a red line that we all agree on, that if you have been credibly accused, let alone convicted, of any sexual offense against minors, you are not fit to serve in public office ever.”
Majors represents a very different case. He started his career in D.C. politics when libertarianism was having a bit of a moment in the mid-2010s. He first ran against Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton in 2012 (picking up enough votes to win the party ballot access in the process) and then challenged Bowser in 2014, quoting free marketers like Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek along the way. Majors ran against Norton again in 2022 on the libertarian line, but his social media posts have begun to sound less like John Galt and more like Alex Jones as time has gone by.
For instance, he’s written that Democrats “rig elections and fake votes,” including (of course) the 2020 presidential race. He seems to believe that the “deep state” planned the assassination attempt on President-elect Donald Trump and suggested that it could also “recruit a ‘white nationalist’ to assassinate President Joe Biden if he does not retire.” He dubbed Vice President Kamala Harris “Kneepads McCackle” in one Substack post and railed against “DEI hires” in several others. And if you’re wondering what his stance is on the COVID-19 vaccines, well, you probably won’t be surprised.
Bruce Majors (left) Credit: Darrow Montgomery
This is perhaps par for the course for a guy who first earned attention in 2010 for warning attendees of a Tea Party rally which D.C. neighborhoods to avoid, but it is nonetheless alarming for the people who might have to work with him soon.
“If you’re going to deny the results of free and fair elections, if you’re going to try to undermine our democratic process for your own political gain, you don’t get to be a part of this,” Malec says. Would that the same standard applied to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Majors didn’t deny the controversial content of these posts when LL mentioned them. But he did say that he doubts “any of those things are particularly ANC issues that I would be steering into talk about” on the commission. He lives in the same West End condo building as Causey, and when he decided not to run again, Majors says he chose to mount a last-minute write-in bid to address what he sees as the “deterioration of the neighborhood.”
“[Malec and Patel] should spend more time doing something for the neighborhood and less time worrying about people’s political philosophy, their jokes, their social media, tweets, whatever,” Majors says.
Malec argues that these views would absolutely be relevant to neighbors in deep-blue D.C., yet he feels the community didn’t get a true chance to evaluate Majors because so few people knew he was running. Majors says he posted a few flyers advertising his run over the past few weeks, but his late registration with the elections board means that there wasn’t much publicity at all about his bid. “Red flags would’ve gone up, there would have been a robust conversation about that,” says Malec, who plans to urge the Council to change the law to prevent this sort of outcome in the future.
And Patel worries that the stridency of Majors’ remarks suggests he will be “a distraction and, frankly, a disruptor” as the commission tries to do its work. In particular, she is concerned about what it will mean for the Aston, the new homeless shelter that just opened in the West End neighborhood.
The shelter has consumed the ANC’s business ever since the city bought the old George Washington University dorm on New Hampshire Avenue NW last summer. An anonymous group of neighbors and property owners has waged a persistent, classist fight to block the shelter’s opening, but plenty of others have also shown up at ANC meetings to rail against what it would mean for the wealthy community. Some ANCs, Causey foremost among them, have frequently sided with the project’s critics and sparked additional conflict; Patel and Malec have fought vocally in its favor. The city has so far succeeded in all of the various legal battles against the shelter, ensuring that 50 people should be able to move in by Thanksgiving, but it seems a decent bet that there will be plenty of other issues around it to tackle in the coming months.
“It’s been my experience, with all of the things that we’ve done to transform the homeless services system, that there’s always a lively debate,” Bowser said, euphemistically, at the ribbon-cutting event Monday. “Sometimes lawsuits, sometimes fights at the Council, there’s always a lively debate. And I can say, in almost every case, the projects get better because of that debate.”
Mayor Muriel Bowser cuts the ribbon on the new Aston homeless shelter in the West End neighborhood. Credit: Darrow Montgomery Credit: Darrow Montgomery
LL is not sure he shares Herroner’s rosy assessment of these fights—consider that the Aston could’ve gotten people off the streets months ago but for these fruitless legal challenges—but she is certainly correct that no shelter opens or operates in the city without some sort of drama. (And, credit where credit is due: She has generally stuck to her guns in the face of community opposition, both at the Aston and elsewhere.) Will Majors and Sobin be ready to help cool tensions or reopen old wounds?
Neither soon-to-be ANC said they had any familiarity with the Aston saga when LL inquired, but Sobin (at least) has some firsthand experience to bring to the table: He says he lived in a homeless shelter for a year and a half after he was released from prison.
Majors, however, is more apt to repeat the sort of complaints about homeless people that his shelter-skeptical neighbors have used over the past few months, if his comments to LL are any indication. He cited the recent prevalence of homeless people in the West End Library among his reasons for believing the neighborhood has gone downhill in recent years.
“Libraries should be more libraries, and not also homeless shelters or mental health services or whatever, daycare,” Majors says. “That should be done somewhere else.”
This ignores, of course, that libraries have long been places where government workers can find people who don’t have homes and connect them to said services. But it is perhaps emblematic of the “out of sight, out of mind” attitude toward homelessness that has defined the debate over shelters like the Aston.
“If you’re going to be coming to every meeting saying how you hate the Aston and you hate the residents, that’s not productive,” Patel says. “It’s not conducive to getting work done.”
But that is a problem for another day. If Sobin and Majors really are going to take these jobs, Patel has to hope that they at least do the basics of showing up to meetings and answering constituent requests—hardly a guarantee for candidates with minimal ANC experience mounting such haphazard bids for office. Otherwise, Patel’s job gets a whole lot harder.
“It’s important that my colleagues who are elected actually execute their duties of office and not leave their constituents high and dry,” Patel says. “I have no intention of seeing lame-duck commissioners take these seats.”