Legislature shoots down congressional maps in favor of their own
/
The New York State legislature shot down the New York Independent Redistricting Commission’s congressional maps in favor of drawing their own this week.Screenshot from Redistricting & You/CUNY Graduate Center
By Ryan Schwach
Democrats in the state legislature voted on Monday to toss out congressional redistricting lines drawn by a bipartisan commission, choosing to draw and propose their own maps – which have little impact on district boundaries in Queens.
Not long after the New York Independent Redistricting Commission released new congressional maps for the Empire State per an order from the Court of Appeals, the state legislature, led by Democrats, rejected those maps and drew their own. It is expected that lawmakers will vote imminently to approve the maps, creating another episode in the state’s long redistricting saga.
On Monday, the State Senate and State Assembly voted overwhelmingly, 17 to 40 and 47 to 99 respectively, to toss out the IRC maps.
In the Senate, all but one Democrat – Brooklyn representative Simcha Felder – voted to reject the maps, and all Republicans voted in favor of the maps.
In the Assembly, only South Brooklyn Assemblymember Jaime Williams split from party lines.
This is the second time in as many years that the legislature has rejected the bipartisan commission’s work in favor of drawing their own maps.
These maps, which are likely to be sent through both chambers of the state house on Wednesday, see very few changes overall and almost none for Queens, keeping in line with laws which stipulate that lines drawn by the legislature cannot exceed a 2 percent diversion from the map submitted to them by the IRC.
The legislature kept all of the IRC’s lines – themselves not all that different from current boundaries – intact for Queens’ districts 5, 6 and 7, represented by Gregory Meeks, Grace Meng and Nydia Velázquez.
The legislature also kept intact changes the IRC made earlier this month to Meng and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s districts.
In both the IRC’s map and the new legislature lines, Ocasio-Cortez’s district no longer stretches south to the Long Island Expressway, chopping much of Corona from her district and putting it in Meng’s.
The Corona part of AOC’s district now stops at 44th Avenue.
The 14th District now also stretches further west to include Jackson Heights in the district. Also cut from AOC’s district was Citi Field, which sits in Meng’s district under the draft map.
AOC’s district also changed marginally in other parts of her territory, gaining parts of the South Bronx and losing Co-Op city. These changes are unlikely to affect AOC’s 2024 reelection bid, but do have the potential to have an impact on the Democratic primary for the adjacent 16th District, where incumbent Democrat Jamaal Bowman faces a primary challenge from former state legislator George Latimer.
Further to the south, Democrat Tom Suozzi – who recently returned to the 3rd Congressional District to the Democrats – received some district changes which could be beneficial to his November election.
The legislature’s new lines stretch Suozzi’s Queens and Long Island district into Suffolk County, picking up heavily Democratic areas in the city of Huntington.
Also, Suozzi’s district will no longer include the neighborhoods around Massapequa Park, an area that voted heavily Republican in the 2020 presidential election.
This effort from the legislature is the fifth time that state congressional lines have been drawn since the 2020 census.
The map from the legislature, which is similar to the IRC’s maps, is itself similar to the maps drawn by a special master, who was tasked with creating the state’s Assembly, Senate and congressional maps after the Court of Appeals ruled that the legislature had illegally drawn gerrymandered district maps after the IRC had initially failed to submit a set of maps by their constitutional deadline at the start of 2022.
But last year, the Court of Appeals sided with a group of Democrats who argued that New Yorkers hadn’t seen their constitutional right to a congressional map drawn by the IRC come to fruition. The top court, led by Chief Judge Rowan Wilson, ordered the IRC to redraw the map and submit it to the legislature before the end of February.
It is likely that the new legislature drawn maps could spark another Republican-led lawsuit, drawing the redistricting processes further into the decade.
By Tuesday, Republican Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt had already called out the new maps as an attempt to gerrymander the state for Democrats.
“Instead of voting to approve fair maps approved by a bipartisan 9-1 vote of the Independent Redistricting Commission, Albany Democrats are once again poised to create their own gerrymandered maps in another shameful power grab,” said Ort. “Since the creation of the IRC, Democrats have continually circumvented the will of New Yorkers and attempted to rig the system to benefit themselves.”
In turn, Queens representative and Senate Deputy Majority Leader Michael Gianaris told City & State that the IRC’s map “run afoul of the constitutional guidelines that exist,” and said that district lines split ip communities of interest.
Generally, the legislature needs to wait three days for a bill to age before acting on it, and since the legislature containing their new maps were released on Monday, they would need to wait until Thursday to vote.
They could however move faster with permission from the governor, who has the power to waive that waiting period. When asked about that option by reporters in Schenectady on Tuesday, she said it was an “option,”’ as reported by WNYC.
