New York Democrats Seize Chance To Draft More Favorable Congressional Map

The New York state Legislature, the place Democrats have supermajorities in each chambers, voted to reject a congressional map drafted by the state’s bipartisan Independent Redistricting Commission earlier this month.

The map drawn by the state’s 10-person fee, evenly break up between Republicans and Democrats, had largely preserved the map on which Republicans flipped 4 U.S. House seats in November 2022. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a Brooklyn Democrat, faulted the fee’s new map for, amongst different issues, bettering the electoral place of Rep. Marc Molinaro, an higher Hudson Valley Republican.

New York Democrats weren’t about to ratify a congressional map in opposition to the desires of Jeffries, whose shot on the speakership rides on a powerful exhibiting in his dwelling state. The votes within the New York state Assembly and Senate rejecting the fee’s map clear the best way for Democrats to attract their very own extra favorable boundaries as quickly as later this week.

The uncommon mid-cycle redistricting happened as a result of the brand new liberal majority on the state’s highest court docket, the New York State Court of Appeals, successfully reversed the ruling of the court docket’s extra conservative majority almost two years in the past. The excessive court docket discovered that when its predecessors appointed a particular grasp to attract the map in April 2022, relatively than giving the legislature an opportunity to draft alternate options, the court docket violated the legislature’s constitutional authority over redistricting.

Legal deserves apart, the partisan stakes of the mid-cycle redistricting course of have all the time been clear. Democratic lawmakers have been hoping to attract congressional district boundaries that may enhance the occasion’s possibilities of retaking the 4 House seats that they misplaced in 2022 with out working afoul of the state structure’s ban on partisan gerrymandering.

Empire State Democrats now have the chance to behave on that ambition and conduct a do-over of their botched 2022 effort at engineering a partisan benefit inside the parameters outlined within the state structure.

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