Supreme Court clears the way for Democrats to redraw the floor plan of the New York House of Representatives
New York’s highest court on Tuesday ordered the state to redraw its congressional map a statement That immediately threw New York’s political landscape into chaos and reopened a process with far-reaching national implications.
It is now widely expected that state Democrats will try to shift from two to six Republican-held seats, from Long Island to Syracuse, to their party — a major pre-election intervention in the 2024 battle for the House of Representatives, which an important battlefield could change.
Powered by a new liberal majority, the state Court of Appeals effectively wiped out the highly competitive map that helped Republicans flip four seats and win the majority in the House of Representatives. It said the neutral lines, which it imposed last year, were only intended as a temporary solution.
By a four-three vote, the court ordered the state to resume a map-making process that would ultimately return control of the state’s 26 congressional districts to the Democratic-controlled state Legislature. The court had taken away that power in 2022 after an attempted gerrymander.
Democrats will still face a statewide ban on partisan gerrymandering and reckon with potential political backlash. But only small changes are needed to dramatically improve the party’s chances and threaten Republicans’ slim majority — now three seats, after the expulsion of New York Republican George Santos — in Washington before the campaign season ever starts.
Republicans, who opposed a redraw, vowed to challenge any new map they believe violates the gerrymandering ban, raising the specter of another protracted legal battle in just weeks.
The New York case was one of the latest disputes open nationwide in an unusually active series of legal challenges stemming from last year’s decennial redistricting cycle. Based on past voter trends, it appears the outcome is now likely to give Democrats a small national advantage over Republicans.
The Supreme Court and other federal judges had already ordered several Republican-led states to redraw maps that had diluted the power of black voters. The changes could give Democrats two to three seats in the Deep South.
But Tuesday’s ruling could also offset recent Republican redistricting gains in North Carolina, where a new conservative majority on the Supreme Court paved the way for an aggressive gerrymander that could give Republicans three to four seats.
The dispute in New York dates back to early 2022, when nearly every state was redrawing its House districts based on population shifts in the 2020 census.
New York voters had passed a constitutional amendment that for the first time gave a bipartisan commission the authority to do that work, but the panel stalled and failed to complete its work. The Democratic-dominated state legislature moved to adopt its own map. And after Republicans filed a lawsuit, the Court of Appeals ruled that the Democrats’ plan was an unconstitutional gerrymander and violated the constitutional amendment.
The court then hired a neutral special master to draft a replacement map. Fighting on these lines, Republicans flipped four districts last November to claim 11 of the 26 seats in the House of Representatives.
A group of New York voters brought the current lawsuit not long afterward, asking the court to return the map-making process to the commission and the state legislature, ostensibly to give fellow New Yorkers more say over district boundaries.
But the partisan motivation was always clear: The lawsuit was funded by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Washington and advocated by Elias Law Group, the national party’s favorite firm.
Republicans strongly opposed the effort. They made technical arguments about the timing of Democrats’ lawsuit and a constitutional provision they said banned redrawing district lines in mid-decade. A Republican lawyer made his objections most clearly last month in oral arguments: Democrats had learned no lesson, he said, and would engage in “a festival of gerrymandering” if the court gave them another shot at the map.
The Court of Appeal made clear on Tuesday that it was not convinced by these arguments. It directed the redistricting commission to reconvene immediately to complete its work, no later than February 28.
The panel, which is evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, could theoretically find common ground on a new map. But New York’s Constitution gives the Legislature ultimate authority to accept, reject or amend any committee proposal, and Democrats there are unlikely to adopt a map that doesn’t improve their election chances to some extent.
The majority opinion largely revolved around technical constitutional issues that differed from those brought before the body in April 2022.
But the sharp turnaround in the outcome also coincides with important changes in the panel since that ruling.
Janet DiFiore, a moderate legal scholar, retired as chief justice last summer, not long after writing the majority decision rebuking the Democratic Legislature. Judge Rowan D. Wilson, her more liberal replacement, disagreed and has taken a much broader view on the state legislature’s role in redistricting.
The three justices who dissented from Tuesday’s ruling — Michael J. Garcia, Madeline Singas and Anthony Cannataro — had all joined Judge DiFiore in the majority last time. All seven members of the bench were appointed by Democratic governors.
It could now be several months before New York adopts new district lines, leaving lawmakers in both parties in limbo. However, Republicans clearly have more to lose.
They were already defending six districts that President Biden won in 2020, including those represented by first-term Congressmen Anthony D’Esposito and Nick LaLota on Long Island, Mike Lawler in the Lower Hudson Valley, Marc Molinaro in the Catskills and Brandon Williams around Syracuse.
While Democrats are not expected to try to return to the kind of aggressive gerrymander shot down in 2022, it would only take much smaller boundary changes in the suburbs of Long Island or along the banks of the Hudson to multiple seats to create much more. difficult for Republicans to win in a year of high presidential election turnout.