For all their bickering, Democrats and Republicans seem to agree: The balance of power in Washington could be decided by the future of New York’s congressional map.
But what that map will look like still has yet to be determined.
State lawmakers will vote on new boundaries for New York’s 26 congressional districts as soon as Monday, when the Legislature returns to the Capitol after a prescheduled 11-day recess. They’ll be required to cast an up-or-down vote on a proposal drawn by a bipartisan commission that gives Democrats a boost in a key upstate swing district while leaving most other districts intact.
But that pending vote is spurring a multilevel game of political chicken in Albany, with no one quite sure how it’ll resolve itself or whether the state’s congressional map will again find its way back to court.
The potential political ramifications are enormous. Republicans currently have a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives. Democrats are targeting at least a half-dozen Republicans in swing districts in New York alone.
“This is all uncharted,” said Jeff Wice, a New York Law School professor who has decades of experience in legislative redistricting. “We haven’t seen it before.”
The ongoing battle is the culmination of more than two years of legal wrangling between Democrats and Republicans over the state’s once-a-decade redistricting process, when congressional and state legislative districts are redrawn to account for population shifts in the census.
Republicans forced a court-drawn congressional map in 2022, which led the GOP to pick up key swing seats that allowed it to narrowly take control of the House. Democrats got the map overturned last year and the state Independent Redistricting Commission approved a new proposal last week.
Now, it’s up to the Democrat-dominated state Legislature to approve the proposal by a two-thirds vote or reject it, which would permit Democrats to step in and draw a new map themselves.
That’s…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply