Eventually, New York politicians will have a congressional district map from which politicians from both parties can run.
But what the district lines will look like is still up in the air as the Icelandic Saga of redistricting tells the story of partisan politics and grubby deal-making.
It happened just so. The first attempt at redrawing the congressional district lines as required by the 2020 census didn't go so well. A bipartisan commission redrew lines that the Democratic majority in the assembly thought were just too generous to Republicans.
After rejecting the bipartisan map, Democrats didn't pull any punches. They drew a silly, blatantly partisan gerrymandered map that would have destroyed the Republican Party in New York. The Democratic-drawn map would have given the donkeys 22 of 26 House seats.
Republicans screamed bloody murder and sued. The result was the New York High Court tossing that map and naming a "special representative" to draw fairer lines.
The result was earth-shattering. Republicans picked up four seats in the U.S. House and handed the GOP a majority.
But the Democrats weren't done. They went back to court and challenged the map that the special representative of the court drew on the grounds that the representative didn't follow constitutional procedures.
Of course not. Democrats blew up that process when they rejected the first map that the bipartisan commission drew.
Now, another bipartisan commission has released a new map. And Democrats are already wishing they "shouldn't-a, hadn't-a, oughtn't-a swang" on on the first map.
The commission’s map includes modest tweaks that would help Democrats flip one seat in Syracuse, and would most likely make a pair of vulnerable incumbents — one Democrat and one Republican — safer in the Hudson Valley.
But it does not touch lines on Long Island or in Westchester County, both major suburban battlegrounds where Democratic campaigns were looking for a leg up, or on Staten Island, where the party has long coveted a right-leaning seat. Even subtle shifts in those areas could have made a handful of Republican-held seats virtually unwinnable for incumbents in November.
That's a helluva lot better than losing all but four seats out of 26 that the first Democratic partisan map called for. It would also give Republicans a fighting chance to keep all four seats they won in 2022.
Democrats are now faced with a dilemma. Their near-super majority in the state assembly means that they can reject the bipartisan commission's map for the second time and draw their own. If they did that, Republicans would be in court before the ink dried on the suit, and Democrats may find themselves worse off than if they just accepted the second map.
Members of the bipartisan commission were pleased with their work.
Ken Jenkins, the commission’s Democratic chairman, called it a “victory for the commission process and for small-d democratic participation in the State of New York.” Meanwhile, his GOP partner, Charles H. Nesbitt, saw the deal as a “historic moment.”
But Ms. Stewart-Cousins and Speaker Carl Heastie of the Assembly are likely to face intense pressure in the coming days, both from people close to Mr. Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, who has spent a year blasting the current lines as unfair and a small fortune on a lawsuit trying to scrap them, and from other partisan interests.
Though Mr. Jeffries did not comment, Democratic lawmakers and political strategists fumed that the proposal too closely resembled the very map they were trying to replace, which was drawn by a court-appointed special master from Pennsylvania. And they questioned why New York would settle when Republicans use their own monopolies in other states to enact stark gerrymanders.
"They do it too, only worse" is the argument of a child.
Jeffries has been using lawfare across the country trying to find an advantage in at least a dozen states, looking to pick off a couple of Republican seats by challenging the maps based on the Voting Rights Act. Time is growing short, however, and even if the New York gerrymander is accepted, Republicans are in a position to win three additional seats in North Carolina, although that map is still facing a challenge in court.
Democrats will have one more chance to destroy the GOP in New York. The fate of control of the U.S. House hangs in the balance.
