For the second consecutive time, a court-appointed special master will handle New York’s congressional redistricting. It’s notable — though hardly surprising given the deeply partisan state of politics here — that our representatives have failed to properly carry out this most basic and important task twice.
New Yorkers from Buffalo to Brookhaven should be embarrassed.
In 2012, the federal judges who decided a special master should manage congressional redistricting noted it was due to an “unwelcome failure of state government.” Likewise, last month, in overturning the Legislature’s attempt at congressional redistricting, a Steuben County Supreme Court justice wrote that the map was “beyond a reasonable doubt” illegally enacted with “political bias” in violation of the state constitution.
New York’s top court, the Court of Appeals, affirmed the lower court’s decision Wednesday and threw out the state Senate map as well, writing that the process is at this point “incapable of legislative cure.”
Read the full commentary in the New York Post.
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