Decision day on the rotten maps

There is a double chance for right to triumph today as two appellate courts take up the “obviously invalid” (in the words of a Manhattan federal judge) maps for state Assembly districts. Dumping the Assembly maps into the same trash can as the Senate and congressional lines is the duty of the judiciary, following the earlier action of the highest court in New York, the Court of Appeals, decreeing that in drawing them, the Legislature violated the state Constitution.

At 10 a.m., Albany Presiding Justice Elizabeth Garry and her colleagues Christine Clark, Stan Pritzker, Molly Reynolds Fitzgerald and Andrew Ceresia hear the case of the League of Women Voters vs. the state Board of Elections. The League, America’s oldest non-partisan good government group and one of its most trusted, cares a lot more about the integrity of voting than the politicians and their incompetent party hacks at the board.

Then at 2 p.m, Manhattan Justices Barbara Kapnick, David Friedman, Peter Moulton, Martin Shulman and Bahaati Pitt have the matter of Nichols et al vs. Hochul, with three citizens also demanding that the unconstitutional Assembly maps be replaced and the primary rescheduled. There is no harm in pushing the primary into August or September, but there is a far greater harm in using invalid Assembly lines to form our government.

As the League correctly points out, the Constitution commands that “The redistricting plans for the Assembly and the Senate shall be contained in and voted upon by the Legislature in a single bill.” That “single bill” for the Senate was thrown out by the Court of Appeals, so the Assembly portion of this dead letter cannot remain.

These 10 justices, who’ve all read the extensive record, must deliver their verdicts with great speed, as their appellate peers in Rochester did, as well as their judicial superiors, both ruling within a day. The state’s lame claim was that there wasn’t enough time to remedy the congressional and Senate maps. But there was, just as there is sufficient time to remedy the Assembly maps. Get to it.