The failure of state Democrats to gerrymander Congressional district boundaries to favor their candidates led to the Republicans taking over the House of Representatives and changing the course of politics in America. Now they’re pulling out all the stops to change the lines back to the way they want them and upend the GOP house members from New York who turned the tide.
In a surprise ruling last year, the Court of Appeals, the state’s high court, threw out the gerrymandered maps drawn by the Democrats and put the issue to a special master. New lines were drawn that were seen as more balanced and representative of the people who live in them. One district had lines so convoluted to favor Democrats that it ran from north of New York City to take in enough Democrats to overcome the votes of Long Island Republicans as it stretched across Yonkers and the Bronx on its way to Suffolk’s North Shore.
State voters passed a referendum in 2014 calling for a fair process to draw district boundaries for members of Congress and state legislators, noted Assemblyman Joseph DeStefano, a Republican from Medford who saw his district lines altered as well. “A bipartisan commission was to be set up to create the lines, but the Democrats who control the legislature weasel-worded the bill. They made sure the commission would be deadlocked at every step so that the process would again be controlled by the Democrat politicians,” he said of the redistricting, which is required every 10 years to correspond to the national census. Complicating the issue was the fact that New York lost two congressional seats as population declined due to people “voting with their feet” by bailing out of the state in record numbers.
The rejection of the resulting lines by the Democrat-controlled Court of Appeals caught the establishment off guard, and Gov. Kathy Hochul is making sure that won’t happen again. A swing vote on the court, Judge Caitlin Halligan, a friend of the governor’s, has conveniently recused herself from the issue and Chief Judge Rowan Wilson replaced her with Dianne Renwick, a judge who’s already ruled in favor of the Democrats in a similar boundary case.
“It defies belief how far the Democrats will go to skirt the law and the will of the people to keep themselves in power,” DeStefano said. “Their manipulation of election districts to cut out Republicans is illegal, but we won’t see that addressed because they have tampered with the judicial system as well.”
Voters in the new districts on Long Island sent four Republicans to Washington: Nick LaLota in the 1st to replace Lee Zeldin, incumbent Andrew Garbarino in the 2nd, George Santos, who replaced a Democrat in the 3rd, and Anthony D'Esposito in the 4th, who also replaced a Democrat. They make up four of the slim nine member GOP majority in the house, a governing body that made history last week by ousting Kevin McCarthy as majority leader in a “motion to vacate” and replacing him with Louisiana Rep. Michael Johnson.
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Dianne T. Renwick, Presiding Justice of the New York State
Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department File Photo
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With former President Donald Trump vying for his old job back against President Joe Biden next year, control of the House takes on increased importance, either as a continuing check on a Democrat chief executive or a possible ally to a new president to address America's most critical issues: the soaring national debt, inflation, foreign wars, and a border crisis sending millions of illegal immigrants into U.S. cities and other communities.