GOP asks Supreme Court to save lone NY House seat

Ever since the gerrymandering battle was ignited with Trump asking Texas to redraw its maps, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has wanted to get into the fight.

However, she is handcuffed by the Independent Redistricting Commission that is charged with drawing the maps (she has expressed interest in disbanding the board).

It turns out, a judge did her dirty work for her, but now the GOP is appealing to the Supreme Court to get its seat back.

Handcuffed

While Texas and California were jousting, Hochul was frustrated over the fact that she could not further gerrymander her maps and get into the fight.

She stated, “I'm tired of fighting this fight with my hand tied behind my back. With all due respect to good government groups, politics is a political process.”

“The reason we are able to draw the lines is because we're Democrats, because the majority of people in the state elected us to be leaders, and when we say that we can't use that power to the fullest, then we're abdicating the responsibility that we all have.”

As the maps currently sit, there is really only one seat that has consistently delivered for Republicans, so the Democrat Party decided to take the fight to the courts to have its lines redrawn.

Unconstitutional

Hochul’s hand-picked judge, State Supreme Court Justice Jeffrey Pearlman, just ruled that the lone GOP seat is not constitutional.

The seat is for NY-11, which is currently occupied by Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (D-NY).

Malliotakis ripped the decision, stating that it was "a frivolous attempt by Washington Democrats to steal this congressional seat from the people and we are very confident that we will prevail at the end of the day."

Elias Law Group Partner Aria Branc, the firm that represented the Democrats in the fight, was very pleased, stating, "We are pleased that the court correctly recognized that the current district lines have systematically diluted the votes of Black and Latino Staten Islanders, despite decades of demographic growth in those communities.”

Supreme Court Will Decide

With the clock ticking on midterms, Malliotakis stated that the GOP will fight this with everything they have, stating, “We will use every legal option at our disposal, including an appeal to the US Supreme Court.”

She added, “Despite having a voter registration advantage in New York’s 11th Congressional District, Democrats can’t beat me on merit, policy and debate.

“So what do they do? They file a meritless lawsuit claiming our district disenfranchises minorities to take out the first minority to represent the district and steal our seat.”

This should be an easy win for the GOP before the Supreme Court, based on the previous rulings the court has made this close to the election. As the court did in the Texas case, it allowed the maps to stand due to the proximity of the primary elections, and I would expect the same here. That, of course, does not mean the seat is safe for 2028, as Dems will likely go right back to court to challenge this as soon as the next cycle is over.