New York Democrats just can’t help themselves. They’ll do whatever they have to in order to rig House elections in their favor.
But now they’re running up against the clock and the new House district lines may not be in place in time for the June congressional primary, Politico reports.
Who else saw that coming?
You can hardly blame the Dems for wanting another bite at the apple. After all, it was New York congressional seats that helped deliver a House majority to the Republicans in what was otherwise a washout GOP year in 2022.
But remember the useless agony we had to endure before the House lines for that election were approved.
New Yorkers voters had approved a referendum to place the process in non-partisan hands. That’s because nobody trusted hyper-partisan members of the state Legislature to draw the lines fairly.
So we got a non-partisan commission to draw the lines. Which sounded great on the surface, but the effort was doomed to fail from the beginning. That’ll happen when you place equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans on any commission or panel. They are all but guaranteed to deadlock. Which the redistricting commissioners did, with two separate sets of House boundaries being issued.
It was almost like state lawmakers knew that a non-partisan commission would fail. Which, amazingly, allowed Democratic state lawmakers to grasp the redistricting pen and draw the lines.
Funny how things work out, right? That’s how you circumvent the expressed will of the voters.
And, of course, instead of drawing anything approaching fair and appropriate House district lines, the Dems drew bulletproof districts for themselves and eliminated GOP seats. Gov. Kathy Hochul quickly signed the maps into law.
More egregiously, the Dems drew a district that linked Staten Island, which voted twice for Donald Trump for president, with the hyper-liberal Park Slope part of Brooklyn.
To say Park Slope’s issues aren’t Staten Island’s issues doesn’t begin to cover it. All you have to know is that the lines were so Dem friendly that former Mayor Bill de Blasio, one of the most loathed elected officials among Staten Islanders, was actually looking at running for Congress from Staten Island.
Even the state’s Dem-led Court of Appeals couldn’t stomach the blatant House gerrymandering that the Dems had perpetrated and ordered a court-supervised special master to draw the lines. Those lines were in effect for the 2022 elections.
Many of us expected those lines would stay in place for the requisite decade until the next census-driven redistricting cycle.
But the Dems went to court and the Court of Appeals agreed that the non-partisan commission should take another crack at drawing the lines. Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James backed that lawsuit.
New draft lines are due by Feb. 28, according to Politico, even though local boards of election would like lines in place by Feb. 1 in order to keep with the election calendar.
None of it looks to be even remotely possible. The commissioners have to actually have to agree on one set of lines. Then the Legislature will have to vote on them.
Last time we went through this process, House primaries were pushed from June until August.
Nobody knows what kind of delays we’ll face this year. The commission hasn’t scheduled a public meeting since a session was held around Christmas.
Which means whatever work is being done is being done behind closed doors. What’s worse, Politico says that the commissioners are not planning to schedule any public feedback sessions this time around.
There was nothing wrong with the lines we had for the 2022 House races. The districts produced by the special master were fair and competitive. Except to the all-powerful Dems, who want nothing more than sure things when it comes to elections.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. And the Dems think it’s the Republicans who are usurping voting rights.
Hochul, New York Dems paving way for yet another House redistricting disaster (opinion)
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28.01.2024
New York Democrats just can’t help themselves. They’ll do whatever they have to in order to rig House elections in their favor.
But now they’re running up against the clock and the new House district lines may not be in place in time for the June congressional primary, Politico reports.
Who else saw that coming?
You can hardly blame the Dems for wanting another bite at the apple. After all, it was New York congressional seats that helped deliver a House majority to the Republicans in what was otherwise a washout GOP year in 2022.
But remember the useless agony we had to endure before the House lines for that election were approved.
New Yorkers voters had approved a referendum to place the process in non-partisan hands. That’s because nobody trusted hyper-partisan members of the state Legislature to draw the lines fairly.
So we got a non-partisan commission to draw the lines. Which sounded great on the surface, but the effort was doomed to fail from the........
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