Hochul’s first big mistake

New York’s Independent Advisory Redistricting Commission is having its 24th and final public hearing Sunday, where ordinarily New Yorkers can weigh in on how state and federal legislative district lines should be drawn for the next decade. Speak up, people, these are your communities and your neighborhoods being sliced and diced (or in redistricting lingo, “packed” and “cracked”) to form your government.

This new panel was created following a constitutional amendment approved by voters in 2014. We have exceedingly low expectations from the commission, which is equally divided between Democrats and Republicans.

But we still have much more confidence in this bipartisan outfit than in giving the self-interested Legislature authority to draw the lines for their own districts and for the state’s congressional seats. That’s a guaranteed one-sided partisan massacre. With Democrats holding a supermajority in the Assembly and state Senate and a Democratic governor, many likely Republican seats would be on the verge of extinction.

Thus Gov. Hochul was terribly wrong to sign a bill last week that would hand the map-making process to the Legislature if the commission deadlocks or otherwise fails to settle on a single set of new districts by January. All the Democrats on the panel need to do now is sit on their hands, as the whole thing would then be given to their buds in the Legislature to take out their carving knives and do in the GOP.

What is even more galling is that this exact provision was explicitly rejected by the voters last month when they correctly turned down a proposed constitutional amendment pushed by the Legislature’s Democratic supermajority. Hochul’s aides say that several watchdog groups back the bill. That’s meaningless, as those groups all backed the failed constitutional amendment that voters quashed.

In her formal approval memorandum (strangely not in the computerized Legislative Retrieval System), Hochul says the bill “serves to clarify an oversight in the process.” Wrong. If there’s a dispute about what the constitution means, it should be settled by the courts, not the Legislature.