Court hearing next week on NY lines

Daily Point

Next turn in district lines

There is a court hearing in Albany next week that Democrats hope will lead to the party gaining House seats in the 2024 elections with the goal of taking control of the chamber.

The Democrats are seeking to overturn a 2022 Court of Appeals decision that ordered a special master to redraw congressional district lines that were found to be excessively gerrymandered. The Democrats want the court to give the state’s Independent Redistricting Commission another opportunity to design the House map.

This is a long-shot bid to Republicans, who argue that redrawing district lines for next year’s election will again violate the state constitution, which lays out a specific road map for the process. “Every Dem in DC is still in a state of disbelief over last year’s case. Our case is quite strong; theirs is weak,” said John Faso, a New York Republican elder who has been advising the party on the litigation.

However, P. Benjamin Duke, a Democratic Party attorney who filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the new case, says the courts should reconsider.

“Even if a court-imposed remedy was justified for the 2022 election, the courts’ takeover of the map-drawing function last year shouldn’t put a chokehold on the constitutionally-mandated IRC redistricting process for an entire decade,” he argues.

Guest essays by Faso and Duke will be published by Newsday next week.

Undergirding the new litigation is the Democrats thinking that they fixed the state’s top court to give them the political result they want. The Cook Political Report said Wednesday that the “buzz” in D.C. that there will soon be bluer districts in New York is so strong that its guru Dave Wasserman took a run at designing a new state map.

Confirming the conventional wisdom on Long Island right now that freshman GOP member Nick LaLota in the 1st district could be hard to beat and that there are not many possibilities on an island, the new maps focus on adding blue strongholds to two other Republican districts. Those are CD3, where the indicted George Santos is trying to hang on, and CD4, where Anthony D’Esposito captured the seat vacated by Kathleen Rice.

This new look by the Cook Report tracks some of the original hyper-gerrymandered districts that state Democrats initially attempted to put in place, just less so. For CD3, the North Shore Nassau/Queens seat once again crosses Long Island Sound to arrive in coastal Westchester County, capturing Democratic strongholds there such as New Rochelle and Mamaroneck. As The Point has been reporting, Democrats are keen to make Tom Suozzi, former Nassau County executive and former holder of the seat, their standard-bearer, partly because they believe voters who are still queasy about being defrauded by Santos will want someone they already know. But would that assumption apply to Westchester voters?

And in CD4, the Republican stronghold in the Five Towns area again gets thrown into Rep. Greg Meeks’ Queens district, while heavily Democratic Westbury gets added. That would give political newbie and Olympic gold medal winner Sarah Hughes a good cushion to oust D’Esposito, assuming she wins an expected primary against 2022 nominee Laura Gillen who is looking for a rematch against D'Esposito.

Overall, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is looking to harvest at least five blue seats in New York, including two from Long Island, to help them regain control of the chamber.

— Rita Ciolli rita.ciolli@newsday.com

Reference Point

70 years later, Long Live Lilibet

Seventy years ago, Newsday’s editorial board found itself looking across the pond at what it called “a fairy tale come true.”

The occasion was the impending coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and the board was smitten by the ceremony and its participants, in a piece that appeared on June 1, 1953 called “Long Live Lilibet.”

“It has all the elements of the finest whimsy and imagination,” the board wrote. “Even better, this is a story of real people, and happening in our time.”

The board went on to describe “the beautiful princess,” her “dashing, handsome young prince,” and their “beautiful children” before describing the ritual that would unfold the following day in an admiring and detailed play-by-play.

“Nothing can match the ceremony,” the board wrote. “The masterpieces of Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen are as naught. This is a genuine fairy tale.”

The editorial was accompanied by a cartoon from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Vaughn Shoemaker, whose main claim to fame was creating a character quite unlike Britain’s royal family — John Q. Public.

In his coronation cartoon, Shoemaker depicted a circus tent labeled “CORONATION.” A worker hammers a tent pole into the ground, watched by the British lion in his cage with the golden carriage that would carry the queen behind it. One can’t help but notice that the tent has several patches in it, which might be a comment on spunky Britain emerging from the ravages of World War II but also could be read nowadays as prescient given the tattered image the monarchy would acquire over the decades.

But the editorial board wasn’t having any of that in 1953, instead seeing in the timelessness of Elizabeth’s coronation an occasion for modern optimism.

“Because the traditions of the ceremony, and the pattern of monarchy, date back unchanged for centuries, the crowning of the 40th sovereign since the Norman Conquest is an event to inspire hope,” the board concluded. “If such a story can survive political upheavals, revolutions, wars and catastrophes, the world is going to survive.”

We all learned in the intervening seven decades that traditions guarantee nothing. No one used “fairy tale” to describe last month’s coronation of Elizabeth’s son, Charles III, and few were counting on the event to “inspire hope” about the future — except perhaps hope that the monarchy itself might survive.

— Michael Dobie michael.dobie@newsday.com, Amanda Fiscina-Wells amanda.fiscina-wells@newsday.com

Pencil Point

Cars get priority lane

For more cartoons, visit www.newsday.com/nationalcartoons