It was 2020, more than a year before New York began its ten-year realignment process, when Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie foresaw a problem.
New York voters had authorized a bipartisan commission to oversee the task of drafting new legislative maps for the House and local state districts. But Mr. Heastie feared the constitutional language behind the new process would prompt Republicans to undermine the committee, according to two Democrats familiar with the discussions.
If the committee failed to complete its work, Republicans could try to take the map-making process directly to the courts, rather than the Democrat-dominated legislature.
With a handful of crucial seats in the state’s House and Senate at stake, that outcome could have been disastrous for Democrats. They drafted a constitutional amendment to confront Republicans, but voters rejected it last November. Lawmakers then tried another solution, passing a bill that authorized the legislature to act if the commission failed to complete its work.
Heastie’s fears came true in January, when Republican commissioners refused to pass a final recommendation to the legislature.
But instead of turning to the courts, Democratic leaders decided to make a bet: They ignored the commission’s work, unilaterally approving maps positioning their party to pick up key seats in the House, and hoped that their legal change would be looked at critically.
The Democrats’ maneuver imploded on Wednesday.
In a strongly worded decision, the New York State Court of Appeals said the legislature’s actions violated the state constitution and accused Democratic leaders of placing partisan interests above the will of the voters who created the commission in 2014 and have outlawed partisan gerrymandering.
A majority of the panel of seven judges — all nominated by Democrats — explicitly found flaws in Mr. Heastie’s attempted procedural resolution, ruled that Congressional cards had been “drawn for an impermissibly partisan purpose,” and authorized a court-appointed special master to redraw the congressional and state senate lines.
The ruling threw New York politics into chaos and this fall clouded the national battle for control of the House of Representatives.
What you need to know about reclassification
†Any Democrat in New York you get on the phone today and tell you anything other than that this was an unmitigated disaster is just not telling you the truth,” said Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who helps lead the government. national reclassification of the Republicans. attempt.
Democrats had counted on the new cards in New York to provide as many as three new seats in the House, offsetting expected Republican gains by redistribution in other states.
The final outcome of the 2022 battlefield may still depend on Florida courts taking down the Republicans’ new map there like a gerrymander. But for now, Republicans seem poised to beat Democrats nationally for the second straight cycle of realignment, making it increasingly difficult for Democrats to maintain their slim majority in the House.
The situation in New York was even more dire. Not only will court-appointed special masters weeks be needed to draw new lines — pretty confusing contests that have been going on for months — but election lawyers said Thursday they weren’t sure how the state could even comply with the injunction and others. election-related requirements.
For example, it initially appeared that primaries for government positions such as governor and lieutenant governor were not affected by the ruling, but those contests can still be called into question. To qualify for the vote, the State Election Board requires candidates for statewide office to collect petitions from voters in multiple congressional districts. No one could immediately say whether those petitions filed weeks ago are now invalid.
“Boy, that could really disrupt the election a lot more than I initially thought,” said Jerry H. Goldfeder, a Democratic election attorney who wrote an industry-leading textbook on New York’s electoral law as he reviewed the ruling Thursday morning.
Goldfeder and other Democrats strongly disagreed with the Court of Appeals decision, the first time in half a century that the judges have knocked down a map approved by lawmakers. They called it court overrun and blamed the Republicans, who they say deliberately sabotaged the committee’s work in hopes of reaching the outcome they ultimately won in court.
“It would have been impossible for us to actually meet the threshold set by the Court of Appeals because Republicans refused to come to a meeting to vote,” he said. David Imamura, the Democratic appointee who chaired the reclassification committee.
He called the current system “unworkable” and warned that the decision of the Court of Appeals, while trying to justify the will of voters, would in fact ensure that one party or the other always has a political incentive to deprive the legislator of the possibility to sign. lines.
Jack Martins, Mr Imamura’s Republican counterpart, did not return requests for comment.
In reality, both sides entered this year’s reclassification cycle knowing that the commission had not been legally tested and had serious flaws that set it apart from the commissions that have worked in other states.
Born from a compromise between former Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the Republicans controlling the Senate at the time, the panel was made up of an even number of Democratic and Republican appointees. It lacked clear incentives to compromise, and his work could always be overruled by the legislature if lawmakers rejected two successive proposals from the body.
But voters, sick of years of political map-making in New York, enthusiastically enshrined it in the state constitution, alongside language that forbade partisan gerrymandering.
For a while, the committee seemed to be working. That changed late last year, when members began drafting final maps for the Congress, Senate and Assembly. Rather than send the legislature a set of cards to consider in January, the committee sent competing party cards.
When those cards were rejected, the committee simply collapsed without submitting a second proposal required by the state constitution, ultimately laying the groundwork for Republicans to sue.
Democratic lawmakers insist that after the commission failed, they acted in good faith, acting on what New York courts have long recognized as the representative arm of the government to sign maps.
How US reclassification works
What is reclassification? It is redrawing the boundaries of the congressional and state legislative districts. It happens every 10 years, after the census, to reflect changes in the population.
“They haven’t done their job, and it’s not like we had to wait past the deadlines if they don’t do their job and say, ‘Well, maybe someone else will come up with something,'” said the state senator. Liz Krueger, a high-ranking Democrat from Manhattan.
“So we have taken the initiative that the language of the constitution has given us,” she added. “And we’ve drawn maps.”
In any case, lawmakers and their attorneys believed that if a court found problems with the cards, they would give the legislature a chance to fix them, as is common in states across the country. The Court of Appeals did not, and in its majority decision, the panel said lawmakers could have asked a court to force the committee to act, replace uncooperative members or otherwise exert political pressure.
A senior New York Democrat, who requested anonymity to discuss the pending case, complained that the court’s ruling would now deprive state representatives, led by two black leaders, of the opportunity to draw the line in favor of a single special master overseen by a conservative judge in rural Steuben County.
Yet Democrats have never completely removed the veil of partisanship from the process. When Governor Kathy Hochul was asked by DailyExpertNews reporters last August whether she would use the realignment process to help her party expand the House majority, she replied “Yes.”
In February, the legislature drew cards without Republican aid or a single public hearing. Independent redistricting analysts wasted little time labeling the Congressional card as a gerrymander, noting that it would likely give Democrats 22 of the 26 seats in the House, up from 19 today.
Rank-and-file Democrats went along. But multiple Senate Democrats privately questioned Thursday whether they’d gone too far in shifting congressional lines in favor of their party.
Others blamed Mr. Cuomo for agreeing to a flawed committee structure with Republicans and for appointing Supreme Court justices they felt were too conservative. Chief Judge Janet DiFiore, who wrote the majority opinion, was once a Republican; Joining her, Michael J. Garcia represented Senate Republicans while in private practice.
Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Mr Cuomo, called the charges “absurd” and defended the 2014 reforms as a “national model.” He added: “If they want to blame anyone for violating the process and pulling unconstitutional districts, there are plenty of mirrors in this city,” he said.
Republicans blamed the current Democratic leaders in Albany most of the time for flying too close to the sun.
“Despite clear directive from New York voters, Albany’s ruling class has decided to put their political survival above the will of the people,” said Republican Senate leader Rob Ortt.
Luis Ferre-Sadurnic reporting contributed.