Redistricting's a power tool for Skelos

For State Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, it may be better to have pledged and "weaseled" than never to have pledged at all.

Last summer, in the heat of the drive to recoup control of the upper house, Skelos and the other Republican conference members signed a pledge for independent redistricting. Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, who solicited the pledges as part of his civic campaign against gerrymandering, promptly touted Skelos & Co. as "heroes of reform."

But this week, Koch met with Skelos - and soon announced that the majority leader from Rockville Centre would "weasel out" of his pledge. Koch noted that Skelos had suddenly and suspiciously discovered constitutional problems with legislating nonpartisan redistricting - and spoke instead about a constitutional convention to address chronic gerrymandering. In other words, that may mean, wait 10 years.

Nobody should be shocked. Skelos, after all, won back the Senate majority just in time for seats to be redistricted for 2012 and beyond.

His party's enrollments have been eroding long-term against the Democratic numbers. His majority is only 32-30, the bare minimum. His is the only state Republican office with clout. The redistricting pen offers a key tool in his power kit.

Skelos can rationalize his reticence as utterly bipartisan. His counterpart, Democratic Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, with nearly a two-thirds majority in the lower house, has never been hellbent on handing over redistricting power to purportedly fair and objective appointees.

On a panel co-sponsored by the League of Women Voters at Hofstra University Thursday was Ed Lurie, former executive director of the Republican State Committee and the state Senate Republican Committee. He presented the argument he's made in other public forums: that this reform is less sensible than it's cracked up to be.

"The very act of redistricting is a political act," Lurie said. "If these nonpartisan committee members are smart enough to know what they're doing, what they're going to do is hide their personal agendas behind a label of good government. What needs fixing and for what purpose?" he demanded to know.

This argument could run some persuasive interference for the recently returned masters of the Senate. But at Hofstra, it of course met with a range of counterarguments.

As she has many times before, Barbara Bartoletti, legislative director of the state League of Women Voters, described the current method of redistricting as "a rigged system to keep legislators in power. As it currently exists it allows legislators to choose you the voter, before you choose them."

The lawmakers' power to redistrict is also "one way leadership maintains its power . . . over its rank and file," she said. "It does not work for the voter."

Keesha Gaskins, of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's law school, cited a half-dozen states, including California, that have redistricting panels. She said in the course of her presentation: "You don't know what gerrymandering looks like until you know what it is accomplishing."

Eric Lane, a Hofstra law professor, acknowledged, "You're not getting politics out of redistricting," but said it should be detached from legislators' grip. "The politics of doing it is so raw in the legislature - because it is always about me, about I, about myself."