Back to the drawing board

David Imamura, chairman of the state Independent Redistricting Commission said he was “extremely proud of the efforts of this commission” that deadlocked yesterday and was unable to produce a unified set of maps for 150 Assembly seats, 63 state Senate districts and 26 congressional members. Was he joking? He cited not the split verdict, but the 24 public hearings, 630 speakers and 2,100 written submissions from New Yorkers.

Clearly, the people did their part; they spoke up and wrote in and sat through the hearings in person and over the web. It was the commissioners who failed. Blame Imamura and his fellow Democrats Eugene Benger, John Flateau and Elaine Frazier along with Ivelisse Cuevas Molina, who is not enrolled in a party.

On the other side, Republicans Jack Martins, John Conway, Charles Nesbitt and Willis Stephens, along with Ross Brady, a member of the Conservative Party, also dropped the ball. Brady said it best that, “we should have finished this together. This is an abject failure. And I have to share in that failure because I’m on this commission, but I lay this at your feet, Chairman Imamura and the rest of Democratic caucus,” with a bit of a partisan dig. But he added, “we should have finished this. As a citizen of the state of New York, I’m incredibly disappointed. We could have done and should have done better.”

Instead of a single plan being sent to the Legislature for an up or down vote, as was intended when New Yorkers approved a state Constitution amendment in 2014, Democratic Plan A and Republican Plan B were submitted. There is plenty of speculation that the Democratic supermajority in both the Assembly and Senate will reject A and B and just draw their own maps, as they always did before.

Republican-led legislatures in several states trying to gerrymander Democrats out of existence for control of the U.S. House of Representatives makes it harder for even fair-minded Democrats to resist doing the same thing where they are in charge.