Congressional elections in 2024 are still nearly a year away, but a new court ruling is likely to have a significant impact on which party will prevail with control of the U.S. House on the line. NBC News reported:
A New York court on Tuesday agreed to allow the state to redraw its congressional map, a significant win for Democrats hoping to retake the U.S. House in 2024. In a 4-3 opinion issued Tuesday afternoon, the court ordered the state’s redistricting commission to draw a new map by Feb. 28, 2024. The state’s Democratic-controlled legislature will ultimately get final say over the map, however, and Republicans have warned the legislature is likely to gerrymander the map again.
My MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim explained that the court’s decision has the potential to “significantly shift the balance of power in Congress,” which is absolutely true. When New York’s commission-drawn map was created, it allowed Republicans to flip four seats in the Empire State.
Given the GOP’s tiny majority in the House, New York’s soon-to-be-replaced map played a key role in creating the Republican majority, which might not otherwise exist.
With this in mind, some GOP members from New York didn’t seem especially pleased with the state court’s ruling. Rep. Mike Lawler, for example, whose district boundaries are poised to get a significant touch-up, told NBC News that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries “is a corrupt partisan hack.”
That’s not true, though it does reflect Republican agita.
House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik issued a joint statement with the state GOP chair that read in part, “The decision today opens the door for Democrats to rig our congressional district lines so that elections are decided not by the voters, but by politicians in a back room.”
This comes on the heels of a related statement from the New York congresswoman over the summer, when she suggested that to gerrymander a district map is to “cheat.”
On the…
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