A voting rights win that doesn't help NY Dems

Daily Point

Fight over New York House maps lives on

Nationally, Democrats are celebrating a big win in the Supreme Court Tuesday as a 6-3 majority rejected a fringe legal theory that would have barred state courts from reviewing state election laws.

“An amazing victory for voters and voting rights,” tweeted Marc Elias, the party’s top election law strategist whose firm won the case. Had it gone the other way, state courts would have been barred from interpreting their own state’s laws and applying their state’s constitutions to federal elections. That is what happened last year when New York’s top court threw out the Democrats' first redistricting plan.

A victory for North Carolina would have resulted in the unraveling of gerrymandering bans in Florida and Ohio and state independent redistricting commissions such as the ones in California and Michigan.

“We are incredibly relieved that the Supreme Court decisively rejected this dangerous theory,” said Abha Khanna, the Elias Group partner who argued the case.

The irony, however, is that the win limits the Democrats' options in New York where Elias, working with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, is trying to get new House maps drawn for the 2024 election.

“If they had adopted the independent state legislature theory, the Democrats' super majorities in Albany would have been able to impose their plan regardless of provisions in the state constitution prohibiting partisan gerrymandering, ” said John Faso, a former House member who was among the Republican strategists who succeeded in getting New York’s top court in Harkenrider v. Hochul to reject the 2022 gerrymandering. Now, the GOP is defending that ruling as Democrats are suing to get another shot at redistricting by claiming the Harkenrider ruling only applied to the 2022 election.

“It’s truly just academic now for New York,” said Jeff Wice, a New York election law expert who said the Democrats would likely have dismissed their current legal challenge, Hoffman v. New York Independent Redistricting Commission. With no court supervision, a Democrat-controlled legislature could design the map of its dreams.

Now that the Supreme Court made clear that the courts are the deciders, the Appellate Division, Third Department in Albany is expected to rule shortly. The losing party is expected to appeal that to the Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court. And that losing party is likely to ask the U.S. Supreme Court for review. Control of the House of Representatives is at stake.

And just because there is some clarity on the law today, that doesn’t mean anyone can be sure yet what the 2024 House maps will look like tomorrow.

— Rita Ciolli rita.ciolli@newsday.com

Pencil Point

All over China

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Final Point

Canvassing over Santos to reverse GOP gains

Since last year’s Long Island sweep of congressional seats by Republicans, Democratic and allied groups have been looking to chip away at the public image of the new incumbents. They seek to reverse the party’s losses in next year’s national election. These activists portray the widely shunned and indicted fabulist Rep. George Santos as shielded so far by the House Republican conference. A flyer recently surfaced in Queens and Nassau County that slams Santos’ colleagues for not voting to expel him as the Democratic minority urged. Long Island Republicans may have no incentive to keep Santos in office, of course, but as GOP conference members, they recently perceived no practical choice but to support House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s position that the chamber's ethics committee should finish probing him first.

Addressing the GOP members, the flyer says: “When given the chance to vote for his expulsion, you chose to delay it instead … It’s time to stop protecting George Santos.” One signature on the missive is from Lisa Tyson of the Long Island Progressive Coalition, a high-profile local activist. Two others are Maria Martinez, executive director of an organization called Empire State Voices, and Jonathan Box of a group called For the Many.

On its website, the For the Many Education Fund is identified as “a project of the Tides Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, and contributions are tax-deductible.” Tides Center is affiliated with Tides Advocacy, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that states on filings examined by The Point that its mission is to “make grants in support of social justice, the environment and the health of our democracy.” Its tax filings indicate numerous multimillion-dollar contributors — one of whom is known to be liberal billionaire George Soros, who’s regularly denounced by the right.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is seeking to highlight the fact that the all-GOP Long Island delegation voted for gun legislation supported by the National Rifle Association, as did upstate Republicans Marc Molinaro, Mike Lawler and Brandon Williams.

The House bill would have reversed a Biden administration change by which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives reclassifies pistols as short-barreled rifles if they have a stabilizing brace attachment. The current rule thus regulates those weapons more stringently. But the measure to eviscerate it failed last week in the Democratic-run Senate.

This aspect of the partisan scrum could be summed up as “Plan nationally, preach locally.” It explains how the names George Santos and George Soros can pepper the same New York conversation.

— Dan Janison dan.janison@newsday.com