Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the second-highest black legislator in Congress, has made an aggressive effort to discredit a proposed congressional card that would divide historically black neighborhoods in New York, comparing its configurations to Jim Crow tactics. .
Jeffries is spending tens of thousands of dollars on digital advertising as part of a scorched earth campaign to try and stop New York courts from finalizing the new map with no changes later this week.
As explained, the map would split Bedford-Stuyvesant in downtown Brooklyn into two districts and Co-Op City in the Bronx into three, while placing black incumbents in the same districts — changes that Mr. Jeffries said would conflict with the state constitution.
“We are in a moment of all hands on deck,” said Mr. Jeffries, a Democrat in Brooklyn, in an interview on Thursday. In the most recent ad, he says the changes “brought a sledgehammer to black districts. It’s enough to make Jim Crow blush.”
Mr. Jeffries may be laying the groundwork for an eventual legal challenge, but his more immediate aim was to pressure Jonathan R. Cervas, the court-appointed New York special master, to play the cards of Congress and the Senate of New York. change the state he first proposed on Monday. will present the final plans Friday to a state court judge for approval.
The stakes could hardly be higher. After New York’s highest court last month ruled Democrat-friendly cards signed by the state legislature unconstitutional, the judges gave Mr. Cervas, a postdoctoral researcher from Carnegie Mellon, near-full power to enact rules that would govern elections. a decade will come.
The original proposal from Mr. Cervas unfolded a map gerrymanded by the Democrat-led state legislature, opening new pick-up opportunities for Republicans. But it also significantly changed the shapes of New York City’s districts — carefully drawn ten years earlier by another court — that reflected a patchwork of racial, geographic, and economic divides.
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mr. Jeffries was far from the only one to appeal as a last resort. The court was inundated with hundreds of comments suggesting revisions from Democrats and Republicans alike — from party advocates pushing for more politically favorable lines to an analysis of the differences between Jewish families on the east and west sides of Manhattan.
A broad coalition of advocacy and minority advocacy groups told Cervas this week that his changes would risk weakening the power of historically marginalized communities. They include Common Cause New York and the United Map Coalition, an influential group of Latino, Black, and Asian-American legal groups.
The proposed map would divide Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights and Brownsville — culturally significant black communities in Brooklyn — between the 8th and 9th congressional districts. Each neighborhood is currently falling into one or the other.
The Northeast Bronx, another predominantly black area that includes Co-Op City and falls within Representative Jamaal Bowman’s district, would be divided into three distinct districts.
The groups have expressed similar concerns about Mr. Cervas’s proposal to separate Manhattan’s Chinatown and Sunset Park, home to large Asian-American populations, into two districts for the first time in decades. Other Jewish groups have made similar appeals for their Brooklyn communities.
Most of the changes are likely to have little impact on the partisan makeup of the districts, which are safely democratic. But Lurie Daniel Favors, the executive director of the Center for Law and Social Justice at Medgar Evers College, said breaking through existing communities would further weaken the political power of historically marginalized groups.
“Now, when Bedford-Stuyvesant wants to organize and petition at the congressional level, they have to split their efforts and go to two separate representatives,” she said.
The cards would also push four of the state’s seven black representatives into two districts, forcing them to compete with each other or run in a district they don’t live in. Under the special master plan, Mr. Jeffries and Representative Yvette Clark would live in the same central Brooklyn district, and Mr. Bowman and Mondaire Jones would live in the same Westchester County seat.
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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.
“It’s another slap in the face for black people,” said Mr Bowman, whose district would see its voting black population drop from about 30 percent to 21 percent under the new maps.
Mr. Cervas did not explain why he drew the lines the way he did. He declined to comment on the cards Thursday, but said his team was reviewing “every comment submitted to the court”.
Language amended in the New York Constitution in 2014 provides mapmakers with a set of competing guidelines. It says districts cannot be drawn to discourage competition or favor a particular candidate or party. It also instructs line charging to “consider the maintenance of cores of existing districts” and “key communities”.
Democrats like Mr. Jeffries pointed to those guidelines on Thursday, arguing that Mr. Cervas, in an effort to increase seat competitiveness across the state, had chopped up the cores of some existing districts or communities of interest. Public interest and civil rights groups explored the possibility of legally challenging the maps if the final versions don’t allay their concerns.
“We are willing to do whatever is required by law to right the wrongs done to communities of color,” said Mr Jeffries.
But legal experts said it could be difficult to convince a judge given the Constitution’s conflicting requirements.
“What they’re arguing for is a reasonable outcome, but I don’t know if where the special master is is not a reasonable choice either,” said Michael Li, senior advisor for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
“I’m not sure if anyone has so far cited clear legal grounds” to prove otherwise, he added.
Republicans who challenged the Democratic Congressional cards largely opposed the changes in Brooklyn and the Bronx in their own letter to the court late Thursday. They have complained that Mr. Cervas did not go far enough in winding down the Democrats’ attempted gerrymander, arguing that he produced a congressional map that still leans too far to the left.
Meanwhile, new lawsuits continue to emerge from New York’s redistricting saga.
The League of Women Voters of New York State filed a lawsuit late Wednesday in federal court in Manhattan to postpone the June 28 primaries for governors and other offices statewide and to reopen the petition process based on the newly signed congressional districts. This would give new candidates the opportunity to join the Democratic and Republican primary fields, and a plaintiff in the lawsuit specifically cites one possibility: former Governor Andrew M. Cuomo.
