US House Redistricting: New York

[jimrtex]

So if one were going to draw 9 geographically logical districts in upstate it would be:

Buffalo-Niagara Falls (2 districts)
Rochester
Syracuse+ (Rome, Utica?)
Albany-Schenectady-Troy-Saratoga (minus)

The 4 rural districts would then be:

South Tier - Finger Lakes, with perhaps some pieces extending up between Buffalo and Rochester or Rochester and Syracuse.  It will be referred to as Southern Tier, but won't really be that.

North Country, but extending south towards Albany, Utica, Rome, or Syracuse to get enough population.

Mid Hudson, but extending north into the Albany area to make room for the final district.

Binghamton-Ithaca plus wherever it can get enough population, so extending up into the Mohawk Valley or towards the Hudson and down the Delaware to keep it somewhat
compact. 

Everything from Orange and Putnam south considered NYC suburban, with the exception of the part necessary to get enough population for 9 upstate districts?

[jimrtex]

Is Anthony Weiner saving Gary Ackerman's career?

Look at a map. Weiner's district should be the one to go.

Weiner's district on the chopping block?

[jimrtex]

In Ohio, if R's were going to pass a disgusting map they had to do the black snake to Akron. That's not because the law actually demanded it - the law as its interpretation now stands technically doesn't demand any Black seat in Ohio at all: Any seat that stays in Cuyahoga fails the Gingles test because it's under 50.1 and any that head out to Akron fail the Gingles test because they do not represent a community of interest. Catch-22. It's because D's were going to use any easyish tangent to sue against an R gerrymander, and its existence puts the them in the Catch. These considerations don't apply here. One consideration does apply both here and in Ohio: the map doesn't need to be precleared.

Bronx, New York (Manhattan), and Kings (Brooklyn) counties are required to preclear (those bad old liberals had a literacy test, and Blacks didn't vote in as large numbers), and we can't update our metric because we know it would identify Minnesota and Hawaii as the racist hellholes that they are.

I think you would have a hard time convincing the DOJ or a judge that a district in Queens has no impact on districts drawn across the Queens/Kings border.

[jimrtex]

The court Texas map was drawn by a Dem judge who had improper contacts with Dem politicians, and the map was dumped and he was removed from the case.  

Federal courts are required to defer to State legislatures and State courts unless it is absolutely necessary for them to act.

As soon as the apportionment numbers came out in 2000, the Dems started suing because Texas didn't have 32 congressional districts.  They sued in both State court and in federal court.  They sued in Travis County so they could get a Democrat state judge, and they filed in the Eastern District in federal court because they thought they could get more favorable judges (one was Ann Richards' Secretary of State back when she was comparing redistricting to hog butchering and suggesting that federal judges would be better suited to a high chair than an elevated bench), and they didn't like the decisions from the Southern District where the 1990s litigation had happened (in 2011, the Western District gets the honors).

After the legislature failed to redistrict, and there was no indication that a special session would be called, the state court took jurisdiction, and the federal court said they would defer until a certain date in 2001 that was would allow them to act before the filing period, which begins in December preceding an election year.  The trial was actually held before both the state and federal court.

The State judge drew an extremely reasonable map, and then announced that he would be making a few minor tweaks before announcing his opinion, in response to some requests from the then Speaker of the House Pete Laney (who though a Democrat would be presumed to be representing the House).  It probably was not unlawful for him to have contact with the judge.

The state judge then came out with a drastically redrawn map.  This got appealed to the Texas Supreme Court who ruled that the judge had violated due process because he had never held hearings on his proposed order, and they then remanded it back to the district court.

The federal court then decided even if the state judge who had just been slapped around got around to holding new hearings, it would be too late, and they took over.

While State courts may exercise some political and legislative judgement in redistricting matters, federal courts are only expected to do the minimum necessary to remedy a map (this is why in 1996 they left all the weird boundaries that were found to be political gerrymanders, while removing all the weird district boundaries that were found to be racial gerrymanders.

The federal court decided their job was only to equalize population and draw two new districts.  While they took a lot of kinks out of the map, they left the general outlines of the map which included packs of Republican areas.   In effect, they were preserving the legislative intent of the 1991 Democrat legislature.  They specifically told the lawyer for the Texas NAACP Morris Overstreet (who had been a Texas appeals court judge) that no matter how sympathetic they were to his case, they did not have authority to draw a Black majority district in southwest Houston, and should petition the Texas legislature.

Clearly the 1st Amendment right to petition for a redress of grievances does not exist for a short time window every 10 years, and so when Morris Overstreet and like-minded Texans like Tom Delay petitioned the Texas legislature to draw congressional districts in 2003, the legislature drew new boundaries.  The 2001 federal court drawn boundaries were only remedial and intended to permit the 2002 election be held, but they preserved the 1990s Martin Frost gerrymander.

All the decisions from 2003 onward made it clear that the Texas legislature was fully entitled to replace the court-drawn plan from 2001 (which had preserved the 1990s Democrat gerrymander) and this "mid-decade redistricting" claim was nonsense.  It was the same federal court that drew the 2001 boundaries that approved the 2003 boundaries (one judge had died and was replaced).  The reason that the case took so long for the Supreme Court to rule on was that they had remanded it back to the district court after the Jubilier decision.   So the district court and 5th Circuit had approved the Texas map twice, along with the DOJ, before the US Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision decided they didn't like fajita strip districts.

I don't know the "principles" to which you refer that a court "should" follow, but what I think I know is that a fair court will have no interest in maintaining some bipartisan incumbent protection erose  gerrymandered monster. That map should be tossed into the garbage. I certainly hope it is. The principles of which I am aware are compactness, respect for communities of interest and jurisdictional boundaries, and that sort of thing, except to the extent the VRA forces a violation of those principles.

They did in Texas.

Clearly the New York legislature has never considered compactness, communities of interest, or jurisdictional boundaries as a basis for drawing districts.  What right does a federal court have to impose California sensibilities on New York?

[jimrtex]

While federal courts generally follow the "least change" rule, state courts do not is my understanding. And state courts generally handle this task unless you get that incredible saga that jimrtex described in Texas. I believe a state court drew the NY map in 2001.  It was not a least change map is my recollection - at all. No, it was a sensible map.  And then the legislature cut a deal and drew its monstrosity to protect incumbents. I think I  know what  a state judge would do with the existing map - kill it!  

As I said before, I hope a state judge does draw a map just like last time. That will be the only way to find out of course just whose cyrstal ball is more accurate. In any event, I'm happy with my map now, even if Lewis is not.

I think federal courts will defer to State courts after the tanning the federal district judge in Minnesota received during the 2000s redistricting.  Of course he not only had ignored the Minnesota court, he had enjoined it from doing anything.

My understanding is that State courts are exercising legislative authority on behalf of their States, and the federal courts would just as soon not get involved in interpreting State constitutions for the States.  And in some States, the state courts are given specific authority in redistricting matters (eg California).  This gives the State courts more of a legislative authority, and so they can more actively draw lines.

A map drawn by a state judge in New York would have to be pre-cleared.

[jimrtex]

In the case of the MN state courts in 2002 there was little regard for the traditional 4-corners plan, and they switched to a 5 and 3 plan.

The proposal by Governor Ventura was so logical it could not be ignored.

[jimrtex]

Pity you guys picked up on the Orthodox Jewish submission. I was going to put up a poll, with all the usual suspects listed, from myself to BRTD to Muon2 to Sbane to NY Jew to Lewis to Brittain33 and so on, and ask who do you think would like the map best. But now the answer has been given away.

Here is their entire map.

Wow, that Staten Island-Ozone Park district is really something else.

It is no problem. Most folks know how to swim these days. Bridges are just for the physically challenged.

NY had a Rockland-Richmond-Kings district at one time.

[jimrtex]

One quick point I would like to make here in the Orthodox Jewish seat argument is that if such a seat is drawn to grant representation specifically to the Orthodox Jewish minority is that for such a seat to do just that, the main premise would be that the seat needs to be drawn so that the Orthodox community is able to elect the representative of their choice. It does not need to be majority Orthodox Jewish. We often use this standard with other minority groups throughout the country in redistricting. Note, I am not arguing that the Orthodox Jewish community is large enough that representation should be legally required, but if it is, the district needs to be drawn so that other groups will not drown out the Orthodox vote. This means that the other groups cannot be too heavily partisan against the Orthodox prefered candidate (which right now seems to be Turner).

The question I don't understand is how they make a case. To appeal to the federal court they would have to argue that they are a racial or language minority. Religion is not covered by the 15th amendment, and probably by the 1st amendment it can't be used.

European languages are not covered, so they would have to claim that they speak Hebrew at home, rather than Yiddish, and then encourage people to say they can only speak English "well" (the census found that too many people were saying they could speak English "well", so that the language test is less than "very well").  Since the standard is based on both numbers 10,000 or a percentage, they could start by getting Hebrew-language ballots in Brooklyn.

[jimrtex]

During what period was that district drawn like that?

From 1792 to 1796 there was a Richmond-Westchester district (The Bronx was not set off until much later), but in mid-decade redistricting, Richmond was added back to the Long Island district.

Then 1822-1840 Kings, Richmond, and Rockland (New York City only included Manhattan)

Then Richmond was with Queens and Suffolk (Nassau wasn't created until later).

It was in 1892 that Richmond started being placed with Manhattan.  In the 1950s it was moved to Brooklyn.  The 1960s district was Richmond and SE Brooklyn, and in the 1970s back to Manhattan.

[jimrtex]

Well, if there are lots of Sefardim in the Orthodox block, that makes it worse: they can't be part of the same linguistic minority, as they don't speak Yiddish. They can't be part of the same religious minority, because it is not protectable. That leaves the racial designation, which is both borderline anti-semitic and not even very certain to succeed, as it is pretty hard to identify them w/ the Ashkenazim in any way that is not reliant on religion. Tough - I guess, any arguments relying on the joint numbers of Sefardim and Ashkenazim might not be allowable.

A coalition district?  Do Sefardim and Ashenazim vote for different candidates in contested primaries?

[jimrtex]

anyone hear that Slaughter broke her foot? Hopefully she can serve one last term and then retire. Who would a good dem candidate be for the seat? Maybe Harry Bronson?

She can't run?