NY’s congressional map spurs a game of political chicken in Albany

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 where the political chicken comes into play.

Top Democrats, including House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, have suggested — if not said outright — that state lawmakers should reject the map and redraw it. They argue it’s far too close to the districts currently in place.

“It is important that the Legislature ensure — as the constitution contemplates — that the people of New York state be afforded a fairly drawn congressional map,” Jeffries spokesperson Andy Eichar said in a statement.

But such a move would all but certainly draw a Republican lawsuit and put the matter back in court, where the GOP could claim Democrats are violating an anti-gerrymandering clause in the state constitution that prohibits the map from being drawn to benefit a particular party.

That’s one of the same arguments the GOP successfully used to force a new map in 2022, after Albany Democrats drew boundaries that included 22 districts that Democratic President Joe Biden won in 2020.

“These folks got caught red-handed in 2022 with a very partisan gerrymander which violated the constitution,” said John Faso, a former Republican congressmember who has helped lead his party’s redistricting efforts. “For the life of me, I don't understand why they would want to go back into court.”

State Senate Democrats met privately on Monday to talk about next steps. But they’ve remained publicly silent since then, perhaps as they wait to see what their counterparts in the state Assembly decide in their own private meeting, which is tentatively set for Friday.

Democratic lawmakers weren’t eager to talk about their options. At least six legislators declined interview requests or didn’t return calls or texts for comment on Wednesday and Thursday.

Meanwhile, some top state Republicans are publicly prodding GOP lawmakers to vote in favor of the proposed map, which could complicate matters for the Legislature’s Democrats by making it tougher to vote the measure down if they’re not unified. The group includes Faso and former Rep. Lee Zeldin, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in 2022.

“At this point, based on what's in front of us, yes,” Faso said when asked whether Republican lawmakers should vote for the commission’s proposal.

But so far, the leaders of the Senate and Assembly GOP aren’t revealing their intentions. Republicans are expected to meet to discuss the map on Monday.

The support from Zeldin, Faso and others has been enough for some Democratic leaders to raise concerns about the proposal. That includes state Democratic Party Chair Jay Jacobs, who issued a statement last week saying Zeldin’s support “should give us all pause and require a thorough examination” of the map.

Jacobs didn’t return a call seeking comment on Thursday. Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who will have to sign or veto whatever lines the Legislature passes, declined to weigh in on Wednesday, telling reporters: “I will not be putting my finger on the scale.”

If Democrats do reject the map, state law restricts the Legislature to only tweaking the commission’s proposed map and bars them from shifting more than 2% of a district’s population. But the Legislature’s Democratic majorities could easily repeal that section of law, if they so choose.

But repealing that law could come with potential risk. Faso said Republicans would use it to try to bolster their legal argument that Democrats engaged in gerrymandering.

Some Democrats are pursuing legislation to require redistricting lawsuits to be filed in Albany County, a move they claim would cut down on “judge shopping” — when a person files a lawsuit in a particular county in hopes of getting a judge who's more sympathetic to their cause.

In 2022, Republicans filed their initial gerrymandering lawsuit in Steuben County, a Republican county west of the city of Elmira in New York’s Southern Tier.

“This bill would standardize the process for challenging reapportionment, and prevent plaintiffs from shopping around for the venue that might be most favorable to its narrow interests,” state Sen. Zellnor Myrie, a Brooklyn Democrat who sponsors the bill, said in a statement.

Republicans reject the idea that they “judge shopped” in 2022, noting the state’s top court and a mid-level appeals court — which both have Democratic majorities — upheld the Steuben County judge’s ruling.