Democratic state legislators approved new congressional maps two weeks ago to give members of their own party as many as three more seats and eliminate as many as four of the Republicans’ eight seats.
State Republican Party Chairman Nick Langworthy blasted the legislation.
“New York Democrats have hijacked the redistricting process and this week passed and signed into law the most filthy, textbook gerrymandering that will destroy competitive elections in New York if allowed to stand,” Langworthy said. ”Democrats brazenly subverted the will of the people who voted twice by referendum to take redistricting out of the hands of politicians and give district drawing powers to an independent, bipartisan panel.”
The legislation was signed the next day by Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat.
The redistricting was certainly not the most “filthy” gerrymandering that has ever taken place. Just look at what Republican-controlled legislatures in Texas and Alabama have done.
But otherwise we agree with Langworthy.
Partisan gerrymandering does destroy competitive elections by grouping voters in districts favoring candidates of one party over another.
With two-thirds of the new boundaries set nationwide, mapmakers are on pace to draw fewer than 40 seats — out of 435 — that are considered competitive based on the 2020 presidential election results, according to a New York Times analysis of election data. Ten years ago that number was 73.
The result of all these noncompetitive districts is elections that are effectively determined by party primaries. This, in turn, means electing candidates who appeal to their party’s base and not independents and members of the other party.
Langworthy is also correct that the decision subverted the will of the people who voted in 2014 to put district drawing powers for Congress, the state Senate and the state Assembly in the hands of a 10-member commission.
But the commission, with former state Sen. and former Mineola Mayor Jack Martins serving as Republican chair, became deadlocked and failed to agree on a single set of maps.
That meant the power to redraw the maps reverted to the Legislature, where Democrats hold supermajorities in both chambers.
Democratic lawmakers then moved swiftly to draw and consider their own district lines.
No public hearings were held, a move that was criticized by Republicans and good-government groups. Democrats justified the lack of hearings as necessary to comply with a time-sensitive electoral calendar. Baloney would be the genteel way of responding to this assertion.
But then again the U.S Supreme Court just used the same nonsense to overturn a lower court decision that found Alabama had drawn its maps in a racially biased manner.
We’d like to think Langworthy was sincere in what he says bout fair elections, but then there is the record of what he does.
Langworthy was among Republican National Committee members who voted to censure two of its own members of Congress for the crime of helping investigate a pro-Trump mob that on Jan. 6, 2021, sought to overturn the presidential election.
The Republican National Committee justified the move in part by declaring that efforts to investigate the insurrection amounted to the persecution of individuals engaging in “legitimate political discourse.”
By comparison, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky described the attack as a “violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, after a legitimately certified election, from one administration to the next.”
Langworthy’s world-class hypocrisy did not prevent a Republican-led group of voters from filing a lawsuit challenging New York’s freshly drawn congressional maps as unconstitutional.
New York Democrats have rejected the charge of gerrymandering, arguing that the new lines are a fair representation of a state that is overwhelmingly Democratic and where population changes over the last decade have only served to further depopulate conservative rural areas and grow urban and suburban communities that tend to be more favorable to their party.
Though they have not said so publicly, many state Democrats privately have called for redrawing New York’s congressional maps to favor Democrats to offset the partisan gerrymandering taking place in Republican-controlled states.
There is another place where New York’s gerrymandering could be stopped – Congress.
House and Senate Democrats have approved two major pieces of legislation to prohibit a wide range of voting abuses, including gerrymandering.
But the legislation has been blocked by Republicans and the refusal of Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema to override the filibuster to approve it.
We have yet to hear Langworthy or other Republicans call on GOP members to endorse the voting rights legislation.
New York Republicans could also demonstrate the sincerity of their commitment to nonpartisan redistricting in Nassau with the upcoming redrawing of the county’s 19 legislative districts.
Nassau Republicans used a 10-9 advantage in seats in 2014 to draw a map with 12 districts with more Republican registered voters than Democrats. Even though Democrats had a 20,000-vote advantage among registered voters in the county – 344,078 to 323,696.
As of Feb. 21, 2021, the number of registered Democrats in Nassau had risen to 434,327, 40 percent of the electorate, while the number of registered Republican voters had basically stayed the same at 335,771, a margin of nearly 100,000 less with their share of registered voters dropping to 31 percent.
The county’s minority population has grown to more than 40 percent of Nassau’s headcount at a time when only three of the Legislature’s 19 members are members of minorities.
Despite the Democrats’ edge in registered voters, Republicans built their advantage in seats to 12 in November in an election that saw Bruce Blakeman elected county executive. In that role, he would have to vote on redistricting lines drawn by the county Legislature.
Nassau Democratic legislators proposed the creation of a redistricting commission to determine legislative boundaries in September 2021.
But they have yet to hear a response from county Republicans. And we are not optimistic we will.
The Nassau County Republican Party made clear its support of the GOP’s pro-Trump faction this week by endorsing Lee Zeldin, a congressman from Suffolk County and vocal supporter of the former president, as the Republican nominee for governor.
Zeldin was one of 121 House Republicans to vote against certifying the presidential election results in both Arizona and Pennsylvania. This came after the assault against the Capitol that threatened the lives of members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence and left more than 150 police officers injured.
He then became the lone dissenting vote by the Long Island congressional delegation on a bill to create a 9/11-type commission to investigate the most serious attack on our election system since the Civil War.
Perhaps Presiding Officer Richard Nicolello (R-New Hyde Park) and Blakeman will demonstrate that Langworthy and other Republicans across the state are sincere in their opposition to gerrymandering and ensure a fair redrawing of lines for county Legislature districts.
Or perhaps that opposition is just politics as usual.
