Redistricting goes into overtime

Yesterday afternoon, the supermajority Democrats in the state Senate, followed shortly by their supermajority party colleagues in the Assembly rejected the congressional district maps prepared by the bipartisan New York State Independent Redistricting Commission. We don’t have to specify which Democrats, because almost to a person, Senate and Assembly, they voted no, even as every Republican voted yes.

At midnight, a few hours before this editorial was published online and it hit the streets and the front doors in the print edition of the Daily News, began the petition period for candidates running for public office this year, including senators and assembly members. Between now and April 4, under section §6-134(4) of state election law, they will collect signatures to put themselves on the ballot for the June primary and the November general election.

However, Democrats and Republicans running for New York’s 26 congressional districts are in limbo. Those districts, created by the IRC at the order of the state Court of Appeals, the highest judicial body under the state Constitution, needed to be adopted with twothirds votes in each legislative chamber and signed by Gov. Hochul.

Instead, the maps were killed by two-thirds margins and the Legislature has not yet offered their own maps. Any substitute they produce must be approved by the same required two-thirds margin.

The IRC maps were very close to the maps the Court of Appeals ordered drawn by a court-appointed special master in 2022, after the Senate and Assembly Democrats violated the state Constitution with a horrendously gerrymandered map that year.

The special master maps created extremely fair and competitive districts, and when the Dems ran lousy candidates with lousy campaigns and lousy messages, they got clobbered, handing control of the House of Representatives to the Republicans, who have done an atrocious job, even cannibalizing their own speaker, Kevin McCarthy.

Hakeem Jeffries would make a far better speaker and we hope the Brooklynite gets the top job (which would be a nice match for fellow Brooklynite Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer). But Jeffries needs to become speaker by winning a few more seats by running better candidates with better campaigns and better messages, like Tom Suozzi, who we were pleased to have strongly endorsed. The answer is not to cheat and bend the district lines to produce a favored outcome.

The IRC voted 9-1 (five on the GOP side and four on the Dems side in favor and one Dem dissenting) for a map which only differed very slightly from the special master map. Those few changes were acceptable to us and the minority Republicans in the Legislature, but the Democrats are being too greedy again. Their greed in 2022 is what caused the process to explode. Even Democrats who liked the IRC lines voted no yesterday out of party solidarity.

To our mind, as there are no approved districts, it defaults to the current special master map and House candidates should collect signatures based on those.

While our preference is to stick with the special master map, with the IRC map as a runner-up, should the Dems try to amend the IRC map, state law says they can only make a few more small changes, within 2%, called the Iowa Rule. Anything more must be called out by the courts.