There Oughta Be a Law

This was the year redistricting was supposed to work. Guess what?

Everyone but the winners in New York State’s unfair system of drawing election districts agrees New Yorkers deserve better. This was the year they were supposed to get it. But nothing has changed.

In a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one, the Legislature has once again drawn maps that will all but guarantee they have to split the spoils of running the Assembly and Senate.

The lawmakers who promised to do better went back on their word. The governor who promised to veto unfair lines may be going soft. The good-
government groups that hoped for change have once again been ignored.

At a meeting of the Legislative Task Force on redistricting four days after the maps were released, New York Public Interest Research Group’s Bill Mahoney chided Senate Republicans for insisting the maps, which he called the most gerrymandered in history, were not drawn in a partisan way. He begged LATFOR co-chair Sen. Mike Nozzolio to prove otherwise.

“I would absolutely love to have my cynicism shattered,” Mahoney said. “I believe you have interpreted [the constitution] as you best saw fit to serve your partisan interest, and not best to represent the people of New York.”

Nozzolio, visibly agitated, ran his fingers along the inside of his buttoned-up collar, as if to give himself more room to breathe.

Of course, not everybody sees this as a tragedy of democracy. Plenty of people see it as a natural consequence of a ruthless life-or-death process, in which politicians facing an existential threat shouldn’t be expected to play nice.

Republicans say the Democrats blew their chance to retain their Senate majority and aren’t fit to govern.

“We can only go by what we’ve seen, and the Democrats were in the majority for two years and it was a total disaster,” said Scott Reif, a spokesman for the Senate Republicans. “They raised taxes by $14 billion, and despite all that, they overspent their budget. Talk about dysfunction and scandal and not being able to get the trains to run on time. It was difficult for them to ever get 32 votes, even when it was a good bill.”

People on all sides of the fight say this year is worse than ever. Gov. Andrew Cuomo doesn’t seem to mind if Senate Democrats are thrown under the bus by a Republican majority that has proven to be a better partner in governing.

The Republicans are fighting to keep their party from total irrelevance. Democrats who showed no interest in fairness during their brief stint running the Senate find few shoulders to cry on now.

Photo illustrations by Joey Carolino

In a Capitol that has welcomed strong leadership from Cuomo, redistricting remains untamed. No one fully controls this year’s process. And no one with a hand on the levers of power will admit that New Yorkers were lied to.

***

A few hours after newly drawn district maps were published on the Internet in late January, Democratic Sen. Liz Krueger gave her own new district a quick once-over.

“But if you pick up the maps in total and you look,” she said, “you just go, ‘These are just squiggles!’ ”

Other senators were similarly surprised. Like Sen. Michael Gianaris.

“I found out when Ken Lovett of the Daily News called me at 11:30 at night,” said Gianaris. He later said in a radio interview that the district seemed design specifically “to screw me.”

Or Sen. Dan Squadron: “I saw my district lines when I clicked on them on the LATFOR website, after the press release went out.”

And on it went—Senate Democrats charging Senate Republicans with malevolence and pettiness in their mapmaking, Assembly Republicans leveling similar accusations at Assembly Democrats, and even Cuomo calling the maps “wholly unacceptable as written.”

But the accusations of conspiracy from all sides are wrong, if only for the reason that no one—not the Senate Republicans, not the Assembly Democrats, not the good-government groups, not even Cuomo—has enough control of the redistricting process to successfully execute a plan for good, or evil.

In past decades when a plan couldn’t be decided on, it was thrown to a court. A special master appointed by a Republican presidential administration could be reliably counted on both to give deference to states’ rights and to affirm plans that kept Republicans in power. This will be the first year since 1982 when a Democratic administration held power over the Justice Department, meaning that if Cuomo vetoes lines, it could be bad for Republicans.

“No one knows where it’s going to land, so they’re all groping for a deal,” one consultant said of the frenetic negotiations. “Nobody’s bluffing, because nobody has all the cards. No one can win big anymore.”

***

Redistricting reform is a perennial favorite of good-government groups, but the issue took off in 2010 following a string of scandals and lawmaker arrests, and candidates campaigned on a platform of cleaning up Albany.

People wanted to change the system that protected incumbent lawmakers and bred corruption. In a richly ironic twist, for example, former Bronx Republican Sen. Guy Velella had gerrymandered his district to include Rikers Island, where he ended up serving time after his conviction on bribery charges.

So when Cuomo announced his intention to run for governor, he pledged to reform the redistricting process, making it the first bullet point in a release promising he would “clean up” Albany.

“We must remove legislative redistricting from partisan elected politicians and place it in the hands of an independent commission that works only for the people,” he wrote that May.

A few months earlier, former New York City Mayor Ed Koch had created the New York Uprising PAC with the specific intention of shaming lawmakers into promising to vote for independent redistricting.

Koch gave lawmakers a July 21, 2010 deadline to sign a pledge before they would be declared “enemies of reform.” That was less than four months before Election Day.

Not taking any chances, Skelos and his Republican senators signed their names to the pledge on the last possible day.

They have reneged on their word. When Cuomo sent them a bill to create an independent commission, they never took it up.

***

And so when the maps came out this year, they were even more outrageous than usual. The Associated Press called one district “the lobster” and another “the claw.” Citizens Union decried a new Asian-American Senate district as “absurdly drawn,” and questioned the logic behind others.

Six incumbent Democratic senators have been drawn into districts with one another, as were two Republican Assembly members, in a maneuver designed to maximize each majority’s grip on power.

Democratic Sen. Tony Avella’s Queens district was “only contiguous at low tide,” said Citizens Union’s Alex Camarda, meaning that at all other times, Avella would need a canoe or snorkel to traverse the district end to end.

Freshman Republican Assemblywoman Claudia Tenney questioned the logic behind her new district, seemingly drawn to make way for a Democrat in the next district over.

“New Hartford certainly has nothing in common with Coxsackie or Schoharie County at this point,” she said to LATFOR members, before Assemblyman and LATFOR co-chair John McEneny corrected her pronunciation of “Coxsackie.”

“See, I don’t even know,” she said in frustration. Her only familiarity with the new town drawn into her district was “seeing it on the Thruway sign.”

Every decade, initial maps are deliberately designed to provoke outrage, said Democratic redistricting expert Todd Breitbart: The most ridiculous districts are “decoys” designed to draw attention away from other problems in the larger plan.

The decoy strategy was clearly exposed in 2004, when Republican documents from the 2002 redistricting were revealed in court. They showed maps designed to create trouble, like one in Brooklyn the Republicans labeled “Mischief, Brooklyn.”

Breitbart says the strategy is simple: Changing the worst of those decoys will make it appear as though the Legislature compromised and improved the process, when in fact the system remains broken.

***

Granted anonymity to step outside their party positions and talk like humans, Albany lawmakers describe two problems at the heart of this year’s redistricting process—one mathematical, one rhetorical.

New York State’s voters are increasingly Democratic, while reliably Republican districts upstate have lost population as the manufacturing economy eroded. Over time it has become harder for Republicans to maintain their majority unless they cast voodoo on the maps.

But many people have a vested interest in making sure Republicans keep control of the Senate, numbers be damned.

Sources close to Cuomo say the governor would rather keep the status quo, especially after a year when the mixed-party houses have given him a host of legislative victories.

When Senate Democrats ran the chamber, ethical laughingstocks like Pedro Espada, Carl Kruger and Hiram Monserrate made a mockery of their newfound power. All three of them are gone, left to fight their legal battles, but the governor is wary of giving power back to their conference.

“The business community is very happy,” said one Republican consultant. “It slows radical ideas in the Legislature. There are a lot of interests that are pleased with split government, who will not make a big stink when these lines get forced through.”

Yet legislators who promised to support independent redistricting—especially the Republican Senators who broke their vows en masse—get sympathy from old Albany hands who believe they did what they had to do at the time.

“The Senate never should have told Ed Koch it was going to do anything independent,” said another Republican consultant who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“I don’t know what they were thinking at the time, but I would have to say it was pure political expediency,” he said. “I think the Senate Republicans were doing and saying whatever they had to, to get through that election cycle, and it ultimately won’t matter because the voters don’t care about the district lines.”

***

That’s what many of them hope, in any case.

Rumors first sprouted last spring that Skelos and his conference made a quiet deal with Cuomo: Let us do what we have to, to keep our Senate majority, and we’ll let you do what you want on same-sex marriage and your other priorities.

Whether it is true is irrelevant: Recent events have cemented the perception in Albany that it is.

Larry Schwartz, secretary to the governor, and Jeremy Creelan, special counsel on public integrity and ethics reform, have been building a reservoir of legal and technical information on redistricting, in order to give Cuomo the foundation he needs to make decisions on the subject.

“The governor’s legal staff is paying more attention to legal issues and to the policy and legal merits of what is being done than has been the case with any previous governor,” said one redistricting expert.

“Andrew wanted to come to a compromise,” said one source with knowledge of the governor’s thinking. “He’s been floating ideas to them.”

Assembly Democrats, safely ensconced in a majority they stand little chance of losing, have been more honest in their defense of the partisan redistricting process.

McEneny has argued, for instance, that self-interest could never be taken out of the process, even with an independent commission. Better to have lawmakers who are familiar with districts help draw the lines, he said.

“It’s naive to believe that people who are embroiled in public politics don’t know where people live,” he said at a recent LATFOR hearing.

Cuomo has never officially gone back on his promise to veto lines that aren’t redrawn by an independent commission. But he won’t actually use the V-word anymore—and seemed to be stepping away from the fight, by saying it doesn’t matter to New Yorkers after all.

“It’s not that they’re not receptive to it,” he said late last month. “I don’t think they believe that it is on their top tier of priorities. You know, it is a technical issue of how you’re going to structure a legislative body. It’s not about them; it’s not about their family; it’s not about their job; it’s not about their taxes; it’s not about their child’s education.”

The governor who tries to wrestle every other problem in Albany now shrugged his shoulders about his very first bullet point for cleaning up the Capitol.

“I don’t know that anyone knows where it ends. You have to have an election, so at one point you have to have lines so we can have an election, but between now and then I think we let the process play out,” he said. “I am sure this will wind up in the courts anyway.”

***

“I’ll be darned if I let them run on the old lines,” Gov. Mario Cuomo growled back in 1992, of the Legislature’s latest batch of gerrymandered maps.

But that June, the first Governor Cuomo signed the plan anyway, even while denouncing it. The maps were approved with only one change by the Justice Department that fall.

Some believe the younger Cuomo will respond to this year’s maps in the same way. He’ll grumble about the partisan process, but in the end, he’ll sign them.

Cuomo and the Senate Republicans will survive the lie, experts predict. Republicans have vastly outraised Democrats in Senate fund-raising, and with the defection of four Democrats from the conference, there is little chance they will regain the majority. Part of an announced compromise could include a constitutional amendment, but many people doubt it will pass.

“It’s a smokescreen,” one prominent Republican said. “They always say ‘constitutional amendment’ when they want a good talking point. It has to pass two consecutive Legislatures and then put it on the ballot. There’s no way that ever happens. I wouldn’t fall for that. That doesn’t happen. That just doesn’t happen.”

Cuomo, he said, will say he did all he could.

“He throws his hands up, life goes on, next issue. A couple of bad editorials come out, the public doesn’t give a damn, and then you’ve got 10 years to recover from it,” the Republican said. “If you polled, you’d be lucky if you got one or two percent of the people that care about that.”

The consultant paused a moment, and then apologized for sounding so cynical, before predicting the way it would go down over the next few weeks.

“It’ll be two days of outrage,” the source said, “and then it’s on to the budget.”

lnahmias@cityandstateny.com