New York State Chief Judge Rowan Wilson has used his center seat on the seven-member Court of Appeals, the highest bench in the state, to try to help the Democrats win some congressional contests.
While we, like Wilson, want the Democrats to take over enough of the 11 districts that elected Republicans last year and make Hakeem Jeffries the House speaker, our preference is for Jeffries and his allies to field better candidates and run better campaigns.
Wilson, aided by Associate Judge Caitlin Halligan skipping a crucial case and going into hiding based on the flimsiest of excuses (that she is friendly with a pro bono lawyer for the League of Women Voters, which isn’t even a party to the case) may not help the Democrats, but Wilson absolutely damaged the court, making it look foolish and divided and partisan.
With Halligan out of the way, Wilson brought in an accomplice, lower court Justice Dianne Renwick, to tip the high court to his 4-3 decision yesterday that undoes the high court decision from last year that correctly and properly decreed that the congressional and state Senate maps had to be drawn by a outside non-partisan expert, since the hopeless and hapless bipartisan New York State Independent Redistricting Commission and Democratic Legislature both bungled the task.
The IRC couldn’t agree on anything, so the Legislature shoved the IRC aside and produced ridiculously gerrymandered maps. The Court of Appeals said no and a Carnegie Mellon cartographer made the maps, which everyone agrees are very fair, allowing voters to decide who wins.
But wait, said the Dems, while that was fine for 2022, shouldn’t the IRC and Legislature get another chance in 2024? No, and the Court of Appeals majority from 2022 was clear, says the judges who made up the majority of the majority. They meant for the new lines to last for 10 years, not just two.
But there are only three of those judges now and Wilson, who was the main dissenter last year, aided with Renwick’s handy vote, now has four. It is almost the exact same court makeup, with the difference of one person. Chief Judge Janet DiFiore left and was replaced by Halligan-cum-Renwick. Everyone else is the same and everyone else voted as they did last year. But last year’s ruling is the one that should have mattered under the principle of stare decisis.
In his opinion, Wilson offered a history lesson about redistricting every decade, starting in 1982, but he left out his own court’s history on this from last year.
In fact, he dismissed it, writing that “reading the [2022 decision] tea leaves — which all parties have attempted to do, each claiming something in that writing supports one position or the contrary — is meaningless given our holding today.”
So Wilson has taken his revenge from losing last year and he is shameless about it.
