Judge Approves N.Y. House Map, Cementing Chaos for Democrats
The new district lines, approved late Friday night, will create pickup opportunities for Republicans and force Democratic incumbents to run against each other.https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/21/nyregion/redistrict-map-nadler-maloney.html
https://archive.ph/zKBCB
A state court formally approved New York’s new congressional map late Friday, ratifying a slate of House districts drawn by a neutral expert that could pave the way for Democratic losses this fall and force some of the party’s most prominent incumbents to face off in primary matches.
The map, approved just before a midnight deadline set by Justice Patrick F. McAllister of State Supreme Court in Steuben County, effectively unwinds an attempted Democratic gerrymander, creates a raft of new swing seats across the state, and scrambles some carefully laid lines that have long determined centers of power in New York City. Jonathan R. Cervas, the court-appointed mapmaker, made relatively minor changes to a draft proposal released earlier this week whose sweeping changes briefly united both Republicans and Democrats in exasperation and turned Democrats against each other.
In Manhattan, the final map would still merge the seats of Representatives Carolyn Maloney and Jerrold Nadler, setting the two Democratic committee leaders, who have served alongside each other for 30 years, onto an increasingly inevitable collision course. Another awkward Democratic primary loomed up the Hudson in Westchester County, where two Black Democratic House members were drawn into a single district.
But the worst outcome for Democrats appeared to be averted early Saturday morning when one of the incumbents, Representative Mondaire Jones, said he would forego re-election in his Westchester seat. He said he would run instead in a newly reconfigured 10th Congressional District in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, a race that has already drawn the candidacy of Bill de Blasio, the former New York City mayor, but which no other sitting House member is expected to enter.
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Six Things to Know About New York’s New Congressional Map
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/05/six-things-to-know-about-new-yorks-new-congressional-map.html
https://archive.ph/mqSNI#selection-1227.0-1227.57
The chaos that has upended this year’s congressional races in New York entered a new phase overnight Friday, when a court-appointed special master — a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon named Jonathan Cervas — published new, court-approved district lines, dropped electronically in the middle of the night, that have literally redrawn the map of power in New York. Below are six things to know about how we got here, what it means, and what comes next.
“This looks like it’s been gerrymandered to make sure Black people are not represented. It is an outrage,” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand told me this week in response to a preliminary version of new congressional maps that cut Bedford-Stuyvesant in half and dropped Brooklyn’s two Black members of Congress, Hakeem Jeffries and Yvette Clarke, into the same district.
Chopping up Bed-Stuy would have been an especially bitter pill to swallow: for decades, the large Black community had been divided across several congressional districts, allowing white congressmen to win year after year. It took a 1966 lawsuit, Cooper v. Power, to create a united neighborhood that promptly resulted in Shirley Chisholm becoming the first Black woman elected to Congress in 1968.
Jeffries — an attorney widely considered to be in line to become Speaker of the House in the near future — had tweeted that the initial proposed maps “take a sledge hammer to Black communities. It’s enough to make Jim Crow blush.” He also openly floated the idea of a lawsuit to challenge the maps as a violation of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits diluting the power of communities of interest along racial lines.
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gambit in NY State Senate, that took away the real Dem majority for a a spell in the 2010's.
We have a HUGE, veto proof majority in the NY Senate now.
Also, The NY Assembly has been controlled by the Democratic Party since 1975 by MASSIVE margins, so the Rethugs could not have done shit.
Finally, as I stated above, it is mathematically impossible to draw a map in NY that gives them your claimed 21R 5 D majority.
You would have to draw illegal districts that rammed in millions of Dems into a few mega districts, that would be instantly struck down.
You cannot have a series of US House seats with a small, tiny number of Rethugs and also almost no Dems (so a Deep red micro district), and then slam in 1, 2, even 3 million Dems into a Blue blob mega trap district, then repeat that with another huge Blue blob trap district, then another, etc etc.
Let's not kid ourselves, this was completely intentional. Chump did it all when he failed to administer/manage the Census during Covid times and then he turned his back on all of it. He flipped the bird at all the American voters, especially in the populated eastern states. But I'll wager he doesn't care much about the western states either.
Not enough census workers were hired, and the door-to-door canvassing that was done in previous decades had to be vastly curtailed or else completely dropped. Numbers have been undercounted in most areas of the eastern seaboard, especially the urban areas. That means we'll all be under-represented in Congress and that's just fine with Chump.
Is there any way we can impeach Chump a THIRD time? I think he deserves it.
Patrick McAllister is a judge for the Steuben County Surrogate's Court in New York. McAllister won the seat in the general election on November 7, 2017. He filed with the Republican, Conservative, and Independence parties.
