Redistricting’s final chapter

We have used a lot of words on New York’s messy redistricting for the past two years and here are some more words. Why? Because what is at stake are three very important principles of self government. One is control of the House of Representatives, which is why the Democrats and Republicans have been fighting so furiously, in the Legislature and in the courts. While we prefer the Democrats (and Hakeem Jeffries being speaker), that should be decided by voters, not map makers.

The second is the right of New Yorkers to choose their own members of Congress, a power that derives from Article I of the U.S. Constitution, which came from the people, and which we care a great deal about.

The third, to us being the greatest and most important, is about the rule of law. Does the state Constitution, which also derives from the public, mean anything?

It started when Democratic supermajorities in the state Senate and Assembly, with ringleader Sen. Mike Gianaris as the co-chair of the Legislative Task Force on Demographic Research and Reapportionment (LATFOR), bypassed the fledgling bipartisan state Independent Redistricting Commission and drew grossly gerrymandered congressional districts.

Republicans sued and the highest court in New York, the Court of Appeals, threw out the map and appointed expert Jonathan Cervas of Carnegie Mellon as special master.

His unbiased, compact, contiguous and competitive maps were terrific and fair. We said so and they proved to be that, with many close contests.

But to Democrats, the Cervas maps were the spawn of Jim Crow and Bull Connor and they sued to have the process repeated.

What followed severely damaged the Court of Appeals itself, with the Senate embarrassing itself by refusing to vote on the nomination of Hector LaSalle to be chief judge, before they wrongly rejected him (two shameful firsts in state history).

Then a new associate judge, Caitlin Halligan, took a dive on the case by skipping out and the new chief judge, Rowan Wilson, unilaterally imposed a weird new practice to bring in a substitute jurist from a lower court to fill in.

Then the skewed court spun on its head to restart the IRC, which by a 9-1 vote ratified the map very close to the Cervas map.

But the Dems said the IRC map they so longed for was horrible and just as bad as the nasty Cervas map, so they killed it and produced their own as if by magic.

But their map was just about the same as Cervas and IRC, as it passed with even some Republicans in both houses voting yes.

So after all this, we end up where we started. As a memento of this nonsense, the Senate’s maps remain absolutely unconstitutional. Says the Court of Appeals, for the IRC didn’t produce a second Senate map. Someone should sue, but as neither political party sees a partisan advantage, they won’t. So will New York just live with an unconstitutional Senate?

The statute of limitations doesn’t matter, as the Court of Appeals dispelled with that because the unconstitutional Senate violation continues and that is an affront to the rule of law. Which is something that got lost by the pols in their pursuit of power.