Nassau GOP subverts democracy
Part of a standing-room-only crowd at Monday's Nassau Legislature hearing on electoral maps in Mineola Credit: Howard Schnapp
If Nassau Republicans wanted to encourage participation in the redistricting of the county legislature, they would have supplied maps of the new districts that the hundreds of attendees at Monday's hearing could actually read. And maps of the old districts, too.
They would have scheduled more than one public comment session, or scheduled this one at a time other than 10 a.m. on a workday. They wouldn't have tried to move the public comment portion of the meeting to the end of the agenda, making speakers, mostly Democrats, wait hours to talk. They backed down and allowed residents to speak first only because the audience and the legislators supporting them appeared on the verge of a violent overthrow. Eight hours later, the speakers were still coming.
Instead the Republicans made a mockery of fair districting by holding up their plan as a boon to minority voters in the face of a Nassau minority population apoplectic with anger.
Legislative Presiding Officer Peter J. Schmitt (R-Massapequa) and the county attorney have seized upon one part of Nassau's clear-as-chowder charter and declared they must redistrict the county immediately, finishing the process just weeks after the 2010 Census numbers were released and just weeks before the process for the 2011 election begins. Confronted with all the parts of the charter they cannot conform to -- the process must include a districting commission created 18 months before the next election, districts must be publicized 10 months and approved at least eight months before the election, and redistricting will be every 10 years (the last was in 2003) -- the Republicans say it's no problem.
They'll simply conduct a rushed, secretive, expensive and courtroom-bound process now, then, two years from now, do the whole thing over again, only properly.
Yesterday's meeting featured outraged attendees of all races, an overcrowded chamber and overheated exchanges between legislators. Among the most animated speakers were residents of Democratic areas including the Village of Hempstead, slated to be divided into three districts, and those from Great Neck and the Five Towns, both of which would be split in two.
In a county that a recent study called the most segregated in America, 11 white Republican legislators claim their plan increases minority representation, while minorities appear to oppose it unanimously.
The politics of setting districts are a constant. The Democrats, when they've drawn the lines, have not been angels. But the process this year, because of the speed and silence and lack of input with which it has been handled, goes beyond the normal unfairness of partisan power brokering.
It is a subversion of the system.
The passage of this plan next Monday by a party-line 11-8 vote is all but assured -- just as assured as the court challenge. Regardless of what the judges decide, the process has been garbage: secretive, cynical, repulsively partisan and purposely designed to exclude the public rather than enfranchising it.
