53.0°,
Mostly Cloudy Redistricting is a process designed to fail
In chess, you can’t control the game unless you control the board. The same can be said about politics, and since the early days of the republic, state legislatures have had virtually complete control of the congressional and legislative redistricting process.
After each census, states are required to draw new district boundary lines — a controversial process that far too often is steeped in partisanship. In fact, New York state lawmakers just approved those lines in recent weeks, making a number of changes, felt primarily when it comes to who represents us where in Congress.
Nothing about redistricting is popular — especially when population declines force the Legislature to remove congressional districts completely, as New York had to do this year. That’s why then Gov. Andrew Cuomo introduced in 2011 what would eventually become a state constitutional amendment removing redistricting powers from the Legislature — which drew district boundaries for itself — and putting it in the hands of an “independent” commission.
We use “independent” ironically because it really wasn’t. The majority and minority parties in the Legislature each appointed four members, and those eight members chose two more people who were not registered members of either party. The commission held hearings and then drew new districts late last year.
What its members couldn’t do was come to a consensus. Without what would essentially be a bipartisan agreement, the entire process was thrown back to the very Legislature that held the power to draw the maps in the first place.
Even if the commission had somehow found a way to agree on a final set of maps, it still required approval from the Legislature. In that scenario, the Legislature would only need to reject the maps drawn by the commission twice before it regained its original power to draw the maps its members chose.
It’s like buying your wife a bowling ball for your anniversary, with the finger holes drilled to fit your own grip.
Did anyone really believe that an independent commission could craft district maps on its own that the State Legislature would actually approve? The odds were stacked against the panel from the very start, creating not an independent commission, but simply the appearance of one, while the process of drawing maps remained the same as it has been for the past couple of centuries.
Gerrymandering is an age-old problem, and it’s hard not to look at some of the new districts — like the stretching of U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi’s congressional district from northern Nassau County straight up past Little Neck Bay, and west to the East River and into Westchester County — and not see highly creative boundary drawing.
Yet we can’t seem to get out of our own way to prevent it. A slight shift of a district line here, and a tuck there, can be the difference between true representation and an electorate skewed to support an elite few.
Representation is the very essence of democracy. But if we’re not drawing district lines fairly, are we truly represented?
