Oh, there’s a surprise!

By Ted Potrikus

We New Yorkers used to leave it up to our state Legislature to fulfill the once-a-decade duty of redrawing congressional and state election district lines. They got so good at it they made the map of the state’s voting boundaries look like the inside of a lava lamp.

We New Yorkers got a little tired of it, so we voted in 2014 to amend our state constitution to establish an Independent Redistricting Commission. A bipartisan panel of 10 who would meet and thoughtfully accept and weigh public input to present in time for the 2022 elections a beautiful map of not-gerrymandered districts reflecting the state’s diverse population in glorious fashion. Our state Legislature, delighted to be relieved of the duty, would gratefully accept and approve the maps with a cheery “Well done!” The Empire State would stand as a beacon of electoral equanimity for all to admire.
Five Democrats, five Republicans. How noble.

What possibly could go wrong?

I mean, other than those five Democrats and five Republicans taking a years-long process down to the last possible second and abrogating their duty, with each side blaming the other in almost copycat press statements barking abject disappointment about their colleagues across the political aisle.
And then sending the job back to the state Legislature – the same bunch we distrusted enough the last time around that we voted to change our state’s constitution to take that job away from them.
As Gilbert Gottfried’s Iago shouted in the 1992 Disney cartoon adaptation of “Aladdin,” “Oh THERE’S a big surprise! I think I’m going to have a HEART ATTACK and DIE from NOT surprise!”

This Commission was set up to fail. They did so in spectacular fashion.

Somehow — somehow! — when the Commission indeed failed last week, the usually foot-dragging state Legislature snapped into action with a ruthless efficiency akin to Patrick Mahomes with 13 seconds left on the clock and came up with bills of mind-numbing complexity and length that carve our state into the aforementioned lava lamp and put most of Otsego County deeply into play in the upcoming congressional election.

New York, you’ll recall, loses a congressional representative this time around — and the new map says that Rep. Claudia Tenney’s Mohawk Valley seat is the one to go. The cartographers combined much of her current district with that of Rep. Antonio Delgado, a swing district that Democrats dearly want to protect in this presidential mid-term race. The resulting combined district covers a lot of square mileage but looks to be drawn in such a way that Democrats would have a decent edge headed into November.
Rather than primary announced Republican candidate Marc Molinaro, Ms. Tenney, who says she has a business in Chenango County, will run for a new seat they’ve drawn in the state’s Southern Tier..
I suspect the Legislature knew all along that the “Independent Commission “ would implode and planned well in advance for it, keeping its preferred map and enabling legislation hidden deep in someone’s super-secret computer files for quite some time now. I don’t care how much Red Bull and No-Doz you consume, you just don’t write bills like that on a moment’s notice. And by the time this edition hits your mailbox, the nick-of-time bills will have aged their required three days and won the required supermajority approval in the Assembly, where Democrats outnumber Republicans 106-42, and in the Senate, where Democrats hold a commanding 43-20 majority.

I’m not smart enough to debate the district lines themselves; that New York voters put Democrat supermajorities in place in both our state Senate and Assembly reflects the general will of the electorate, suggesting our new district lines do likewise. The same thing will happen in the states where Republicans outnumber the Democrats, and it’ll all lead to the zero-sum political game that happens once every decade when state lawmakers who hold the keys to the Senate and Assembly chambers decide who gets to run and where, with very flimsy evidence as to why.

Alas, that’s how it all works.

Which brings to mind that other line from Gottfried’s Iago – “Look at this. LOOK AT THIS. I’m so ticked off that I’m MOLTING!”