Posts Tagged ‘Queens Chronicle’
Saying that the state Legislature has “hit bottom” when it comes to redistricting, a panel of national legal experts on Tuesday urged Gov. Cuomo to use the threat of a veto to implement long-term change to the way Albany draws its political lines.
The group of experts from across the country, all of whom have studied redistricting in New York, spoke one day after a panel of judges in Brooklyn federal court began taking control of drawing the Congressional lines —which legislators have failed to do as they were supposed to.
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Queenswide: Experts call on governor to take redistricting power from pols (Queens Chronicle)
Saying that the state Legislature has “hit bottom” when it comes to redistricting, a panel of national legal experts urged Gov. Cuomo on Tuesday to use the threat of a veto to implement long-term change to the way Albany draws its political lines.
“I think what we’ve seen in the current redistricting process, if you can call it a process, is the Legislature having hit bottom,” Richard Briffault, the vice dean of Columbia Law School, said during a conference call on Tuesday, one day after a federal court became involved in redrawing New York’s Congressional lines because state legislators failed to do so. “I don’t think they’ve ever done such a bad job. It’s not just the lousy lines that were published — they actually haven’t done the job.”
Gov. Cuomo is reforming the state government in leaps and bounds, but many members of the Legislature haven’t gotten the memo yet. So the redrawing of lawmakers’ districts for the Assembly, Senate and U.S. Congress following the Census has been typical of the Albany of years past: behind schedule, nonsensical in many respects and, of course, utterly politicized.
Now the federal judiciary may step in to clean up the mess our lawmakers, especially members of the Republican-led Senate, have made of the redistricting process. Judge Dennis Jacobs, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, on Tuesday named a three-judge panel to consider whether a special master should be appointed to oversee the redrawing of the lines.
Queens legislators and residents lambasted the state group tasked with redrawing district lines that will cement New York’s political landscape for the next decade, accusing its members of splitting apart communities and pitting democratic lawmakers each against each other.
One member of a good government organization —Bill Mahoney from the New York Public Interest Research Group — even called the proposed redistricting maps for the state Senate “clearly the most gerrymandered lines in recent New York history.”
Chanting “Veto the lines,” a group of leaders from Queens and Nassau County gathered for a rally in Elmont, LI, to voice their disapproval of the proposed redistricting lines that have been drawn in New York State, which some called “unfair” and “illegal.”
Every decade Census numbers are used to draw the state Senate and Assembly District lines with the goal of better representing the changing demographics of a particular area. However, critics say the maps often lead to gerrymandered districts that favor incumbents.
And the winner is … districts that are not gerrymandered.
The 2012 New York Redistricting Project unveiled this week the winning Congressional and state Senate maps drawn by students who wanted to voice what they hope happens at the legislative level —specifically, that political lines will be untangled so incumbents will not be unfairly favored and groups with similar interests could stay together.
Last week saw two significant events in the ongoing battle to redraw New York State’s electoral map. In the first, the legislature’s redistricting committee formally subtracted the state’s 60,000-plus prisoners from the population count of the communities where they are incarcerated and instead counted them as residents of their districts of origin — a hard-fought victory for Democrats that was fiercely opposed by Republicans in New York’s closely contested state Senate. Days later, a lawyer for Senate Republicans released a memo calling to expand the size of the Senate to 63 seats, drawing howls of protest from Democrats.
From Assemblyman Mike Miller (D-Woodhaven) potentially losing almost all of Glendale to Woodside and East Elmhurst possibly being carved from Assemblyman Michael DenDekker’s (D-Jackson Heights) district, Queens residents could soon be looking at a dramatically different political landscape once the state Legislature wraps up a redistricting process that some residents and politicians worry will be flawed without the input of an independent group.
