Koch gets last map laugh
If you believe in the survival of the soul after the death of the body and in the righteousness of independent redistricting as sound public policy, you know that wherever Ed Koch is right now he is laughing his skinny rear end off. Or maybe he’s crying — the afterlife is hard to fathom these days.
But for now, I’m going with the notion that he’s laughing: howling out towering gales of Bronx-inflected yuks as the former mayor of New York City watches New York’s Republican Party hoist on what Koch might describe as its own petard after the Legislature’s overwhelming Democratic majorities voted last week to approve redistricting maps that will likely make life even more miserable for the GOP for the next decade.
They can’t say Koch didn’t warn them. In 2010, two years after Republicans briefly lost their last bastion of power to a bare majority of state Senate Democrats, dozens of GOP lawmakers and candidates signed a pledge crafted by Koch’s reform group New York Uprising that committed them to create a truly independent redistricting process. When the GOP were returned to the majority the following year, they joined Assembly Democrats and passed a redistricting bill that fell well short of that definition, at least according to Koch and virtually every good government group in the state.
“It’s the most devious Legislature in America,” Koch said after the deal was struck. “We tried our best, and the ghouls won.”
The new system handed the task of redistricting the state to a commission that had the word “independent” in its name ... but in its first field test deadlocked along party lines, thus handing the job over to the Legislature. For the first time in modern memory, that meant the task was solely in the hands of Democrats.
A decade after sowing the wind, Republicans are reaping the whirlwind in the form of Congressional lines that are going to make life rather difficult for House GOP incumbents Nicole Malliotakis and Claudia Tenney, and legislative lines that will not draw huzzahs from friends and family of Sen. Daphne Jordan, among others. Halfmoon’s Jordan was so incensed that she threw the Greek word for “Shame!” at Democratic Sen. Mike Gianaris, who is of Hellenic descent, during the floor debate. (I hope Jordan keeps this up for opposing lawmakers of every ethnic background, because this state is a beautiful quilt.)
Other Republicans have responded as if the Democratic plan was the thing that possessed young Regan MacNeil in “The Exorcist,” and was now barfing all over New York’s voters. State Sen. Jim Tedisco called the plan “treachery and the essence of evil . ... What the Dem
ocrats couldn’t do fair and square through the ballot box they’re scheming to do now through gerrymandering to build a bigger power base in New York City.”
In fact, what the Democrats are doing now is arguably what they were empowered to do under the rickety plan approved by Senate Republicans, Assembly Democrats and ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo a decade ago, according to the majority powers that Democrats won at the ballot box in 2018, and then saw enhanced in 2020. I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s definitely something Republicans could have stopped or at least tried to stop a decade ago, but chose not to.
A group of Republican voters, represented by a team of lawyers that includes former Republican Sen. George Winner, has challenged the new lines in a lawsuit that cites a relatively new antigerrymandering provision of the state constitution that requires congressional districts to be drawn to preserve the cores of previous ones and be designed to be competitive, among other criteria. It will be an interesting court case for redistricting nerds like yours truly, but it’s on a clock: Petitioning deadlines and more ahead of June’s primary are fast approaching.
Along with the lawsuit, we can all look forward to the state Republicans’ call for federal redistricting reform, which is of course the only way to put a stake through the problem of gerrymandering. It will be edifying to hear Tedisco and state GOP chair Nick Langworthy bemoaning egregious partisan gerrymandering in Florida and Texas.
It might be equally edifying to remember more history beyond the betrayal of Ed Koch. According to the state Board of Elections, in 2000 there were 5.2 million enrolled Democrats in New York and 3.1 million Republicans, but the GOP controlled the state Senate after that year’s elections with a 36-25 advantage. While party enrollment is not destiny, you have to wonder how they pulled it off, and what role the district lines set in 1992 played.
In 2010 — two years after Senate Republicans were narrowly cast out by Barack Obama’s blue wave — GOP enrollment had dropped by 400,000 but the party, running on the lines its members had drawn in 2002, still managed to depose the bare Democratic majority, thus enabling Republicans to once again take over the next redistricting round. In 2020, Democratic enrollment had swelled to 6.2 million while Republican enrollment has dropped to 2.7 million. This roughly 2-to-1 ratio is that same as the party makeup of the current state Senate and Assembly, and the Congressional delegation.
Whether the new maps will stand or fall, or upend that makeup, remains to be seen. From the Great Beyond, perhaps Ed Koch knows the answer.