ALBANY- A mid-level state appellate court heard arguments last week in a court case that may lead to yet another iteration of congressional districts in time for the 2024 election.
Lines drawn by legislative Democrats in 2022 would have made their party the favorites in 22 of 26 congressional races. The lines were challenged by a coalition of Republican groups who said they were unconstitutionally gerrymandered. The state Court of Appeals ultimately decided in their favor, overturning lines drawn by the legislature.
The court placed the task of drawing the new lines in the hands of a special master who created the congressional districts that are in place today. In November, Democrats were only able to win 15 of 26 seats in the state, far fewer than than had hoped. Since then, party leaders in Washington and Albany have been looking for a way to reverse their fortunes and the latest court case is a part of that effort.
“For all their pontificating and high-minded rhetoric about trying to defend democracy, well here they’re trying to subvert it,” former Rep. John Faso (R, Kinderhook), who has helped guide the GOP’s legal strategy around redistricting in recent years, said after the hearing. “Their goal here, if they win, is to put this case back into the backrooms of Albany and D.C. so they can gerrymander the whole state.”
A Constitutional Amendment passed in 2014 created a bipartisan Independent Redistricting Commission which was supposed to draw congressional and state legislative districts in the wake of the 2020 census. When that commission failed to reach agreement, Democrats in the Assembly and Senate drew and adopted their own maps.
Democrats argue that the decision made by the court in 2022 should only impact that year’s races, and not races until the next redistricting is scheduled in 2032. They want the decision on more permanent lines to be returned to the Independent Redistricting Commission as mandated by the state constitution.
“The IRC has a constitutional obligation to finish drawing New York’s congressional map,” said attorney Aria Branch of the Elias Law Group, a Democratic-aligned firm which brought the case. The court “drew a map in emergency circumstances for the 2022 elections only. That emergency is now over.”
Presumably if Democrats are successful the process would start over, giving them another bite at the apple to produce partisan friendly maps for their members and challengers. The added wrinkle is that the Court of Appeals has changed since 2022, with a more liberal majority now in charge. The belief among some insiders is that the revamped court would rule in favor of Democrat drawn lines this time around.
