A New York Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that new Democrat constituencies violated the state’s ban on guerrilla fraud, partially upholding a lower court ruling that would block the state from using the lines in this year’s critical by-elections.
A split panel of five Rochester judges said Democrat legislators had drawn a new House of Representatives map “to discourage competition and favor Democrats”, deliberately ignoring the will of voters who recently approved a constitutional amendment banning the practice.
“We are pleased that the petitioners have established beyond a reasonable doubt that the legislature acted with party intentions,” a majority of three judges said in a statement. Two judges disagreed.
Governor Katie Hochul and senior legislative leaders are expected to immediately appeal the decision to the state’s highest court, the New York Court of Appeals. Judges there, all of whom were appointed by democratic governors, said they could hand down a final verdict as early as next week.
The result in New York will have significant consequences in the wider struggle for control of the House of Representatives. Leaders of the National Democrats rely on maps drawn by their party in New York to help offset Republican gains.
Without them, Democrats are at risk of escaping this year’s cycle of reorientation, being overtaken by Republicans for a second decade in a row. Republicans’ profits were on the verge of rising after Florida lawmakers approved a map drawn by Gov. Ron DeSantis this week that would create four new seats suitable for Republicans.
The decision was the second in a row for Democratic Party cartographers in New York, and this time it came to an appeals court that was considered party-friendly.
What you need to know about redistribution
“Like other state courts in the country, the courts in New York do not find it particularly difficult to decide whether the card is a guerrilla hero commander,” said Michael Lee, a senior adviser to the Democracy Program at the Brennan Justice Center. “It’s very difficult to defend a card like New York’s, and in the end, if it croaks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.”
However, Mr Lee added, Thursday’s decision was only the second of three actions in the legal drama of restructuring in New York.
On Thursday, judges at the New York State Supreme Court Appeals Department ordered the Democrat-led legislature to immediately rework the map by April 30 or leave the task to a court-appointed neutral expert. Judges remained largely silent on another key issue: whether some of the primary elections scheduled for June should be postponed to August to include new districts.
The congressional lines adopted by Democratic super-legislatures in February will give Democrats a clear lead in 22 of the state’s 26 congressional counties by relocating party-friendly voters to redrawn locations on Long Island and Staten Island. in Central New York and packing Republicans into fewer areas. Republicans currently own eight counties on a map drawn by a court-appointed special master in 2012.
State leaders have come up with some good news from the latest decision. The panel rejected more general parts of the decision of the lower court judge, Patrick F. McAllister of Stuben County, that lawmakers do not have the power to draw any maps after the newly formed New York District Redirection Commission failed. to agree on a plan for the state.
As a result, the appellate court’s decision restored the state Senate and assembly cards that Judge McAllister had discarded.
Mike Murphy, a Senate Democrat spokesman, said they were “pleased” that the appeals court had upheld the legislature’s right to draw maps this year and predicted that the Supreme Court would restore congressional maps.
“We have always known that this case will end in the Court of Appeals, and we look forward to hearing on our appeal and maintaining the congressional map,” he said.
John Faso, a spokesman for Republican-backed voters who are challenging the cards, said they would file their own complaint to try to cross out state legislative cards. But he called Thursday’s decision a “great victory”.
The wider legal dispute addresses two interrelated issues: whether the mapping process properly adheres to the procedures set out in an amendment to the 2014 state constitution, and whether the maps themselves violate the accompanying ban on drawing areas for guerrilla gain.
The procedural changes made in 2014 were designed to eliminate the process of drawing lines from politicians by setting up an external committee to seek public opinion and draft a bipartisan proposal for the House of Representatives, the US Senate and congressional areas. If the committee had reached an agreement, the role of the legislature would have been to ratify the cards.
How US redistribution works
Map 1 of 8
What is redistribution? This is redrawing the boundaries of congressional and state legislative districts. This happens every 10 years after the census to reflect population changes.
How it works? The census dictates how many seats each state will receive in Congress. Map makers then work to ensure that all regions of the country have approximately the same number of residents to ensure equal representation in the House.
Who draws the new cards? Each country has its own process. Eleven states leave mapping on an outer panel. But most – 39 states – have prompted state lawmakers to draw new maps for Congress.
If state legislators can draw their own districts, won’t they be biased? Yes. Guerrilla mapmakers often move the lines of districts – imperceptibly or rudely – to unite voters in a way that progresses toward a political goal. This is called gerrymandering.
Is gerrymandering legal? Yes and no. In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts have no role in blocking guerrilla warlords. However, the court left intact parts of the Voting Rights Act that prohibit racial or ethnic manipulation.
But the commission was widely seen as insufficient from the start. Democrat and Republican leaders appointed an equal number of members, and when it came time to recommend maps to lawmakers in January, the panel crashed into a dead end along party lines, sending separate proposals to Albany.
After the legislature rejected both, the committee chose not to exercise its legal right to fire another shot at new maps. At that moment, the Democrats, who control the Senate and the Assembly, quickly drafted, presented and adopted their own maps.
In an oral argument Wednesday, a Republican contenders’ lawyer argued that the legislature has no right to continue until the committee presents a second set of cards for consideration, and that the cards they adopted for Congress and the State Senate are illegally arranged under the new constitutional rules.
The language in question in the state constitution dictates that areas “should not be attracted to discourage competition” or in order to favor or injure a particular candidate or political party.
“In 2014, New Yorkers made it clear that they wanted to stop the constant manipulation of the legislature every decade,” said Republican attorney Misha Zeitlin. “However, in the first election cycle, driven by the 2014 amendment, two branches of the New York government, the executive and the legislature, engaged in the cry of a nationally inconvenient Germanman.
The lawyers of the state leaders of the Democratic Party categorically rejected the accusation, arguing that they have the right to draw the cards and they did it fairly.
Alice Goldman Reiter, a Democrat advocate in the Senate, posed a particular problem with Republican computer simulations that were used to argue that the cards were aggressively skewed toward Democrats. She said the simulations failed to take into account other constitutional requirements that have affected card makers, such as the need to preserve communities of interest in various enclaves such as Brooklyn.
“No court has ever established beyond reasonable doubt party intentions based solely on computer simulations, and absolutely these simulations should not be the first,” she said.
On Thursday, a majority of judges found the simulations reliable. They also cited the guerrilla mapping process – Democrat lawmakers did not consult with their Republican counterparts when drawing the lines of Congress – and the healthy reading of the new lines to justify their conclusion.
The order was signed by Judge Stephen K. Lindley, appointed by the Democrats; and John W. Centra and John M. Curran, both nominated by the Republicans.
Two other judges, both appointed by Democrats, disagree. In written disagreement, Judges Gerald J. Whelan and Joan M. Winslow said they had found that computer models were flawed and that the majority was wrong to guess the legislators’ intentions simply because they had launched a party lawsuit.
Add Comment