Judge Approves N.Y. House Map, Cementing Chaos for Democrats [View all]

[Celerity]

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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