Last week, as activists debated symbolic resolutions about ceasefires abroad and supermarket closures at home, the Chronicle quietly reported on an explosive story: Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin had ousted Supervisor Matt Dorsey from the powerful Rules Committee, a barely disguised act of political warfare and professional betrayal. In Dorsey’s stead, Peskin appointed Supervisor Hillary Ronen to head up the three-member committee, which is responsible for vetting appointments to boards and commissions, deciding when proposed legislation will go before the full Board and — crucially, in an election year — reviewing and revising ballot measures and proposed charter amendments. 

The brazenness of Peskin’s maneuver shocked even Dorsey’s ideological rivals on the board. Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, who several months ago introduced a “poison pill” amendment which made funding for Dorsey’s minimum police staffing plan reliant on new taxes, told the Chronicle he had “never seen anyone removed from the chair before their two-year term is over” in his seven years in office. Supervisor Ronen, who is termed out this year and apparently has a “countdown on her phone of her days left in office,” didn’t even attempt to justify her appointment. “I am happy to play whatever leadership role President Peskin thinks I can be helpful with,” she told reporters with (one imagines) a dopey and distracted smile. 

On one level, the ousting is election year politics as usual. Peskin is sidelining Dorsey, a political moderate who favors items at odds with the “progressive” (read: pro-dysfunction) agenda — a strong police department, coercive treatment for fentanyl addicts, and homeless encampment sweeps. But close observers of city politics will see the darker dimension of the move. Last year, in an eleventh-hour bid for the board presidency, Peskin brokered a deal to appoint Dorsey to chair the Rules Committee in exchange for his vote. Dorsey, a (presumably naïve) newcomer to the Board, accepted. Now, emboldened by his power, Peskin has broken his side of the deal. As Lee Edwards put it on X, this is how the ratfucking gets done in SF.