Can Democrats Still Have a Chance at Redistricting in New York?

A year ago, Democrats were held accountable by New York’s Supreme Court for trying to reform the state’s congressional districts, and their tilted map was replaced with more neutral lines that helped Republicans flip four seats in the House.

With a rematch in 2024 approaching, Democratic leaders in Washington and Albany are rekindling a legal battle to reopen the map-making process and potentially pull the lines back in their direction.

Lawyers paid by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee are expected to plead Thursday before appellate judges in Albany for the court-drawn districts to be scrapped and map-making powers returned to the beleaguered. New York’s redistricting commission — and ultimately the state legislature that gerrymandered the lines in the first place.

The case will almost certainly come before the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, in the coming months. And while a ruling could lead to conflicting interpretations of the state constitution, its significance is undeniably political, with far-reaching implications for the balance of power in Washington.

According to current maps, drawn by a court-appointed expert, New York is one of the most competitive battlegrounds in the country. But if the legislature gets a say again, Democratic lawmakers could flip as many as six of the 11 seats now held by Republicans, offsetting potential Republican gains from a similar case unfolding in the Southeast.

“With the likelihood of Republicans retaking the lines in North Carolina once again, the legal battle for New York’s lines could determine whether Democrats remain in the fight for House rule in 2024,” said Dave Wasserman, a election analyst at the Cook Political Report.

He called the suit “quite close to the must-win for Hakeem Jeffries to have a shot at becoming a speaker.”

Legal experts are unsure about the Democrats’ chances of success. Republicans have already convinced a lower court to dismiss the case. But Democrats are again optimistic that the lawsuit will eventually be upheld given the shifting makeup of the state’s Supreme Court, where a new chief and associate justice pushed the bench to the left this spring.

Whatever happens, New York promises to be perhaps the most contested state in the country for home racing next year. Republicans performed better than expected in New York during the 2022 midterm elections, putting their candidates in a position to defend six districts that President Biden won in 2020, two by double digits.

“We think our chances are good, but it’s not something we rely on,” said Jay Jacobs, chairman of the Democratic party. “When it happens, it’s a bonus.”

But if one analysis by Mr. Wasserman has shown, even slightly reshuffling those six districts would make the task for Republicans nearly prohibitively expensive to win in some places. Both sides have begun to take that possibility more seriously.

The lawsuit was underway this week as Democrats in Albany used the final days of this year’s legislative session to try to bolster their electoral prospects in other ways. Democratic supermajorities in both legislative chambers seemed poised to pass changes that weaken New York’s new government-funded donor-matching program in a way that would benefit incumbents.

Fair Elections for New York, a coalition of government watchdog groups that had applauded the new system for attempting to reduce the influence of big money donors in politics, warned that the adjustments “could seriously set back progress,” as did the public financing system Comes into effect.

Republicans, who have aggressively pursued their own gerrymanders in other states, issued similar criticisms of New York Democrats over the government’s attempted redistribution. Savannah Viar, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said Democrats are “arming the courts to manipulate the game.”

“The Democrats, for all their rhetoric about fair elections and protecting democracy, are trying to undermine democracy in New York State,” said John Faso, a former congressman who helped orchestrate last year’s successful Republican lawsuit that brought the favored Democratic district. lines.

Like last year’s legal battle, the new case, Hoffmann v. Independent Redistricting Commission, to a 2014 series of constitutional amendments designed to remove partisanship from redistricting. They ban gerrymandering and create a new, bipartisan commission to draw legislative lines.

That committee failed to reach consensus in 2022. After members couldn’t even agree to meet to complete their work, the legislature took over the process and passed maps that strongly favored Democrats.

The Republicans sued, and the Court of Appeals ruled that the legislature had rrymanded the rules and violated the Constitution by continuing as usual when the committee stopped working. With time running out, the Supreme Court told a district court judge to appoint a neutral expert from out of state to draft replacement districts.

In the new lawsuit, which counts several New York voters as plaintiffs, Democrats are not defending the original cards. Instead, they argue that the court-approved map-making process also violated the state constitution.

“The people of New York are currently governed by congressional maps drawn by an unelected out-of-town special master and approved by a partisan, right-wing judge,” said Christie Stephenson, a spokeswoman for Mr. Jeffries. , the leader of the New York House of Democrats. She added that leaving the cards standing would be “undemocratic, unacceptable and unscrupulous”.

Democrats’ lawyers have asked the judges to step in to order the redistricting committee to reconvene more than 12 months after it stalled. This may prompt the committee to find a new agreement. If not, however, the legislature could step in and draw new lines, this time on a more certain legal basis.

Republican members of the committee and their allies disagree and are willing to argue that the court-made maps drawn up last year should hold for the remainder of the decade.

A lower court judge, Peter A. Lynch, agreed with that view last September, when he dismissed the lawsuit, pronunciation that there were no constitutional grounds for reopening the map-making process. Democrats appealed.

A panel of judges set to hear the case on Thursday is expected to rule in the coming weeks, after which it will likely be presented to the Court of Appeal.

The composition of the court has been the subject of a tense bipartisan battle since the retirement of former Chief Justice Janet DiFiore last summer, not long after she wrote the majority decision scrapping the Democrats’ redistricting plan.

Progressives leading the Senate rejected Hector LaSalle, the first chief justice candidate proposed by Governor Kathy Hochul, before finally accepting the elevation of a more liberal alternative in Justice Rowan D. Wilson.

The Senate objected to Judge LaSalle’s earlier rulings regarding abortion rights and labor unions. But Republicans and some neutral observers argued that liberal lawmakers were also looking for a judge more likely to take their view on redistribution issues.

Democrats denied that, but may indeed have a more receptive audience in Judge Wilson, who, as assistant judge, disagreed with the majority opinion in the 2022 redistribution case. Judge Wilson wrote that the Republicans had been unable to prove that the congressional map was impermissibly gerrymandered, and concluded that the state constitution gave the legislature ultimate power in redistribution.

Two other members of the seven-member court shared that view in whole or in part. If they keep those positions, that could leave the case to the other new member of the court, Caitlin Halligan, whose position is not clear to the court guards.

Grace Ashford reporting contributed.