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      The Supreme Court Did the Right Thing. I’m Still Worried.

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      State legislatures are, and always have been, creatures of state constitutions, bound by the terms of those constitutions and subject to the judgments of state courts.This has important implications for the nature of state legislative power. The federal Constitution may give state legislatures the power to allocate electoral votes and regulate congressional elections, but that power is subject to the limits imposed by state constitutions.Imagine what could happen if that were not the case. Imagine, instead, that state legislatures had plenary power over federal elections, which would allow them to overrule state courts, ignore a governor’s veto and even nullify an act of Congress. State legislatures would, in essence, be sovereign, with unchecked power over the fundamental political rights of those citizens who lived within their borders.This change would both unravel and turn the clock back on our constitutional order, with states acting more like the quasi-independent entities they were before the Civil War and less as the subordinate units of a national polity.But that, apparently, is what some Republicans want.Recently, Republicans in North Carolina and Pennsylvania asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block congressional maps drawn by their state courts. Their argument was based on a revolutionary doctrine that would tee up this fundamental change to the American political system.The challenges, which failed, stemmed from the effort to gerrymander Democrats out of as much power as possible. In North Carolina, the proposed gerrymander was so egregious that the state Supreme Court ruled that it was in violation of the state’s constitution. The court drew a new map to rectify the problem. In Pennsylvania, likewise, state courts drew a new congressional map after Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, vetoed the heavily gerrymandered map produced by the Republican-led legislature.The North Carolina Supreme Court’s ruling and the Pennsylvania governor’s veto should have been the last word. Both were acting in accordance with their state constitutions, which bind and structure the actions of the state legislatures in question. For Republicans, however, those checks on their power are illegitimate. Their argument, in brief, is that neither state courts nor elected executives have the right to interfere with or challenge the power of state legislatures as it relates to the regulation of federal elections.Nestled at the heart of the Republican argument is a breathtaking claim about the nature of state legislative power. Called the “independent state legislature” doctrine, it holds that Article I, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution — which states that “the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of choosing Senators” — gives state legislatures total power to write rules for congressional elections and direct the appointment of presidential electors, unbound by state constitutions and free from the scrutiny of state courts.This isn’t a new theory, exactly. In his concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore in 2000 — joined by justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas — Chief Justice William Rehnquist argued that under Article II, any “significant departure from the legislative scheme for appointing Presidential electors presents a federal constitutional question.” Meaning, in short, that a state court could go beyond its authority in adjudicating state election law. The other two Republican-appointed justices on the court, Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor, declined to join Rehnquist’s concurrence, even as they voted to stop the counting and give George W. Bush the win.For 20 years, the doctrine lay dormant. It was resurrected, in 2020, by allies of Donald Trump, who needed some constitutional pretense for their attempt to overturn his defeat. Before the election, a number of state courts had ordered state governments to make accommodations for the pandemic, citing state constitutions. Elsewhere, governors, secretaries of state and state boards of election took matters into their own hands, bypassing the legislature (and using their own authority under the law) to accommodate voters. When, after the election, the Trump campaign sued either to throw out ballots or to invalidate results, its lawyers offered the “independent state legislature” doctrine as justification. So too did supporters of Trump who wanted Republican legislatures to void election results and choose electors who would give the president a second term.The basic problem with this doctrine is that it’s bunk. “The text of the Elections and Electors clauses is silent as to the role of state constitutions, but the subsequent history is anything but,” the legal scholar Michael Weingartner writes in a draft article on the theory of independent state legislatures. “Since the Founding, state constitutions have both directly regulated federal elections and constrained state legislatures’ exercise of their authority under the Clauses.” What’s more, over the past century, “nearly every election-related state constitutional provision was either approved and presented to voters by state legislatures or placed on the ballot and enacted by voters directly.” Even if the federal Constitution is vague on the full scope of state legislative power to regulate elections, both history and practice have fixed the meaning of the relevant clauses in favor of constraint. State constitutions (and state courts) do in fact regulate state legislatures as it relates to election law.Some proponents of the “independent state legislature” doctrine argue that theirs represents the original understanding of the Elections and Electors clauses in the Constitution. Another researcher, Hayward H. Smith, says otherwise. “The history demonstrates beyond cavil that the founding generation understood that ‘legislatures’ would operate as normal legislatures, not independent legislatures, with respect to both procedure and substance,” he writes. In fact, he notes, a review of every state constitution adopted in the 19th century reveals “that both explicit and nonexplicit limitations on ‘legislatures’ were widespread before, during, and after the Civil War.”There’s simply no basis for the claim that the Constitution grants state legislatures this kind of unaccountable power over the conduct of federal elections. It runs counter to the basic idea behind the American political system, that is, the sharing and separation of power among competing and overlapping institutions. It defeats the purpose of this delicate balance to give state legislatures plenary power over federal elections (to say nothing of how it is incongruent with the elite frustration over the scope of states’ power that gave rise to the Constitution in the first place).Thankfully, the Supreme Court rejected the challenge from Republicans in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Still, there may be four votes for the theory of the “independent state legislature.” In a 2020 dissent from the majority on the question of whether Pennsylvania should count certain mail-in ballots, Justices Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh appeared sympathetic to the doctrine. Neil Gorsuch endorsed it outright, writing that “The Constitution provides that state legislatures — not federal judges, not state judges, not state governors, not other state officials — bear primary responsibility for setting election rules.”Dissenting from the court’s decision in the North Carolina case, Alito called the question of state legislative power an issue of “great national importance,” a clear signal that he is open to the arguments of Republican legislators. Kavanaugh concurred. “I agree with Justice Alito that the underlying Elections Clause question raised in the emergency application is important, and that both sides have advanced serious arguments on the merits. The issue is almost certain to keep arising until the Court definitively resolves it.”It is unclear where the newest justice, the Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett, stands on the doctrine, although she appears to have voted with the majority in these particular cases.It is a good thing that the Supreme Court has decided not to throw out more than 230 years of precedent and practice for the sake of a bizarre and anti-democratic reading of the Constitution. But previous Supreme Courts have endorsed bizarre and anti-democratic readings of the Constitution — the Constitution itself has an uneasy relationship with American democracy — and this court, especially, has been more hostile than friendly to the more expansive view of our democratic rights.We can breathe a sigh of relief, for now, but when it comes to the future of the “independent state legislature” doctrine, the worst may still be on the horizon.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Vulnerable Democrats, Seeking Distance From the Left, Offer a Midterm Agenda

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      The plan aims to inoculate Democrats in conservative-leaning states from Republican attacks on cultural issues, underscoring how successful the G.O.P. has been at weaponizing them.WASHINGTON — A cluster of House Democrats from conservative-leaning districts is circulating a reworked legislative agenda for the coming election season that would embrace some of President Biden’s most popular initiatives and tackle rising prices while distancing lawmakers from the left’s most divisive ideas.The plan, obtained by The New York Times, seeks to inoculate the most vulnerable Democrats from the culture wars pursued by Republicans trying to win back the congressional majority. Its existence underscores how successful Republicans have been at weaponizing issues like pandemic-related school closures and “defund the police” efforts against Democrats in politically competitive districts.The draft agenda was written by Representatives Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, Steven Horsford of Nevada, Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, Dean Phillips of Minnesota and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan. It includes almost 75 bipartisan bills already drafted and broader bullet points such as “Combat Rising Costs for Food, Gas, Housing and Utilities,” “Reduce Prescription Drug Prices, Co-Pays and Deductibles” and “Fight Crime & Invest in Law Enforcement.”Rather than proposing cuts to funding for police departments, for example, it suggests financing the hiring of additional officers, especially in rural and small-town departments — though it would also fund body cameras and training, demands from liberal critics of law enforcement. Taking on Republican efforts to end mask mandates and school closures, the agenda includes legislation to “re-establish faith in America’s public health system and ensure preparedness for future pandemics, so that our economy and schools can remain open.”The plan avoids other items popular with progressives, such as a $15 minimum wage and a universal, single-payer “Medicare for all” insurance system, but it embraces some of the most broadly popular health care initiatives in Mr. Biden’s now-moribund Build Back Better Act: an agreement to allow Medicare to negotiate the prices of some of the most expensive drugs on the market and an expansion of Medicare to cover vision, dental and hearing care.Representative Steven Horsford of Nevada, one of the authors of the draft agenda.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesWith their wafer-thin congressional majority and a president whose approval ratings are mired around 42 percent, Democrats are facing formidable headwinds in November’s midterm elections. The document, though stuffed with actual legislation, is more notable for its political message than for its policy details — in part because it omits any mention of how to pay for its initiatives.Some of its headline initiatives are not backed by the legislation below those programs. The plan promotes “Combating the Climate Crisis,” for instance, but the bills listed on that topic address the reliability and resilience of the electricity grid, top concerns for climate change deniers.But the agenda’s authors hope to at least revive a sense of momentum in a Democratic Congress that has entered the doldrums since enactment of a $1.2 trillion infrastructure law in November, followed by the Senate’s stymying of House-passed climate and social safety net legislation and a far-reaching voting rights bill.It is no accident that the document is circulating just before Mr. Biden’s State of the Union address on March 1, and the following week’s House Democratic “issues” retreat.The dozens of bills listed in the agenda all have Democratic and Republican authors, many of them endangered either by anti-Democratic momentum or by challengers endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump.One such bill, written by Representatives Debbie Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, and Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, would make permanent Medicare tele-health expansions undertaken during the pandemic. There is a diabetes prevention bill by Representatives Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado, and Tom Rice of South Carolina, a Republican who, like Ms. Cheney, voted to impeach Mr. Trump. An expansion of tax-favored education savings accounts is co-sponsored by Ms. Spanberger and Representative Fred Upton of Michigan, another Republican who voted to impeach. Also included is a significant expansion of eligibility for child and adult nutrition programs, drafted by Representatives Suzanne Bonamici, Democrat of Oregon, and Jaime Herrera Beutler, a Washington Republican facing a serious Trump-backed challenge for her impeachment vote.There are even incentives for utilities to invest in cybersecurity written by Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, the Democrat who has raised the contempt of the left by blocking the social policy and climate change bill in the Senate, and refusing to join his party in changing the filibuster rule to pass voter protection legislation over Republican opposition.But most striking is how the draft agenda takes on issues that appear to be dominating the campaign trail, even if they have not generated much debate on the floors of the House and the Senate.To beat back inflation, one bill the group is pushing would “prohibit” foreign governments from participating in cartel-like activities, a hit at OPEC that would have no real impact. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission would be granted the authority to order refunds for natural gas bills “that are unjust, unreasonable, unduly discriminatory or preferential.” And assistance would be given to new and small meat processors to combat monopoly pricing from the few dominant meat processors, an effort already underway by the Biden administration.Rising crime rates across the country would also receive attention, through an expansion of existing grants to local law enforcement, new safety requirements for ride-hailing companies, stronger reporting requirements for electronic communication service providers to help track child predators and a new federal crime designation for “porch pirates” who steal packages from home stoops.One measure included in the agenda appears to accept the Republican talking point that the coronavirus was created in a laboratory in China, then covered up by the World Health Organization — assertions that have been challenged repeatedly by scientific researchers.The Never Again International Outbreak Prevention Act, by Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick, Republican of Pennsylvania, and Conor Lamb, a centrist Democrat running for the Senate in Pennsylvania, “would provide accountability with respect to international reporting and monitoring of outbreaks of novel viruses and diseases, sanction bad actors and review the actions of the World Health Organization.” More

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      How Bruce Blakeman Used a Mask Rebellion to Revive His Career

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      Since a surprise win on Long Island, Bruce Blakeman has been on a seemingly single-minded mission to challenge and defy Gov. Kathy Hochul over mask mandates.Bruce Blakeman, who has emerged as the leader of suburban Long Island’s revolt against mask mandates, has lost his fair share of elections.In 1998, Mr. Blakeman — a lifelong Republican — was trounced in a statewide election for comptroller. A year later, he was stunned to be voted out of the Nassau County Legislature, losing his perch as its presiding officer and majority leader. After toying with a run for New York City mayor in 2009, he then lost a congressional race to Representative Kathleen Rice of Long Island in 2014.But Mr. Blakeman’s surprising November win in the race for Nassau County executive — upsetting Laura Curran, a moderate, first-term Democrat — has led, after so many races, to his informal anointment as the state party’s unlikeliest new star.Helping to fuel his rise has been Mr. Blakeman’s seemingly single-minded political mission to challenge and defy Gov. Kathy Hochul, the state’s top Democrat, over her mask mandates, as well as rising crime rates and bail reform, which have proved potent issues for Republicans.“Bruce Blakeman is on the scene; he’s a major Republican leader in this state,” said Nick Langworthy, New York’s Republican Party chairman. “Everybody counted him out, but now Bruce has a great platform. And what I admire about him is he really wants to use it.”Mr. Blakeman, the Nassau County executive, in Mineola. His victory was part of a wave of Republican wins in the county.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesOn Wednesday, Ms. Hochul announced that she would end some rules on indoor masking. Infection rates and hospitalizations have rapidly declined as the Omicron variant of the coronavirus has waned. She added that counties and individual businesses could still require masks, framing that decision as empowering for local leaders.Extending that sort of restriction seems unlikely in Nassau, at least as far as the county government is concerned. Shortly after being inaugurated in early January, Mr. Blakeman made headlines by issuing a flurry of executive orders directing county agencies to stop enforcing mask mandates, and proclaiming that local school districts had to vote on whether or not to grant children what he called “the constitutional right” to cast off masks in the classroom.Whether those orders are legal or not — and Ms. Hochul says they clearly weren’t, considering that state orders outweigh local dictums — the defiant stance resulted in Mr. Blakeman’s ascension to the role of sought-after rabble-rouser, complete with repeated appearances on Fox News and a hero’s welcome in Republican circles in Albany.All of which, Mr. Blakeman insists, stems from a genuine concern for parental rights, not political gain.“I think good government is good politics,” Mr. Blakeman said in a recent interview in the State Capitol. “And part of good government is listening to your constituents.”Mr. Blakeman’s opponents counter that such platitudes are a mere disguise for an ambitious and oft-thwarted politician who has found his moment amid the polarization of the Trump era.“He’s following the tried-and-true Republican playbook,” said Jay Jacobs, who serves as both the Nassau County Democratic Party chair, as well as state chairman for the party. “You either scare the voters or make them angry.”Mr. Blakeman’s sudden celebrity has already paid dividends in one way: Less than a week after he announced his executive orders, his party selected Nassau County as the host for its 2022 convention later this month, noting the “historic Republican resurgence” in the county.Mr. Blakeman’s victory was part of a wave of Republican wins in Nassau, including by Anne Donnelly in the race for Nassau County district attorney, the first time that a Republican has held that position since 2005.White-maned, blue-eyed and fond of snazzy three-piece suits, Mr. Blakeman, 66, exudes a kind of old-school New York political swagger, complete with providing Page Six fodder, in part because his ex-wife, Nancy Shevell, is married to Paul McCartney.Politics is a bit of a Blakeman family business: Mr. Blakeman’s father, Robert, was a state assemblyman, and his younger brother, Bradley, was on President George W. Bush’s White House staff. One of five siblings who grew up in Valley Stream, on the Queens border, Mr. Blakeman recalls using Halloween as a campaign outing for his father.“I’d go out with an empty bag and a full bag of literature,” Mr. Blakeman said. “I came back home with a full bag of candy and an empty bag of literature.”After college and law school stints in Arizona and California — working for Republican campaigns and as a driver and aide to the former first lady Nancy Reagan — Mr. Blakeman returned to Long Island to serve as a partner in his father’s firm before being appointed Hempstead town councilman in 1993. He won a full term on the council later that same year, before being elected to the County Legislature in 1995.Mr. Blakeman at a meeting of the Nassau County Legislature in 1996. His father, Robert, was a state assemblyman.Vic DeLucia/The New York TimesLast winter, he had come full circle, once again serving as a member of the Hempstead Town council, when the Nassau County Republican chairman, Joseph G. Cairo Jr., approached him about taking on Ms. Curran.He was ambivalent, he said, because he was in “a very comfortable place in my life” and “wasn’t sure I wanted to go into that kind of a battle.”But, Mr. Blakeman said, he saw an opening as he looked at polling, saying that while Ms. Curran was popular, “she was upside-down on every important issue,” including bail reform. A 2019 law passed by Democrats in Albany had effectively abolished bail for many nonviolent felonies and most misdemeanors.To that end, Mr. Blakeman ran a law-and-order and anti-tax campaign. He seemingly galvanized concerned suburbanites and die-hard Trump conservatives into a winning coalition, despite Democrats outnumbering Republicans by about 25,000 in the county, with a tranche of some 200,000 independent voters.The margin was thin, with Mr. Blakeman beating Ms. Curran by less than 1 percent, or about 2,100 votes.Mr. Cairo said that Mr. Blakeman’s opponents “tried to portray him as being a loser, and that he’s only doing this because he’s Cairo’s friend.”Mr. Blakeman proved to a dogged campaigner, however, impressing even some Democrats.“I would see him along the way and he’d say, ‘Tom, we’re going to win this.’ And I would say, ‘Really?’” said Thomas DiNapoli, the state’s comptroller, a Democrat, and a figure in Nassau County politics for more than three decades. “But he believed in himself.”Mr. Blakeman also won, said Lawrence Levy, the dean of suburban studies at Hofstra University, because he “leveraged concerns over bail reform and property tax assessments in ways that appealed both to his base and the sort of moderate independent who abandoned Trump in 2020.”That combination, however, will prove to be difficult to maintain, Mr. Levy said.“He is trying to thread a political and ideological needle,” he said. “He is getting a lot of attention for taking very conservative populist positions with Trump-style rhetoric, ostensibly to deliver on promises he made to his base. But he’s also trying not to entirely alienate the sort of suburban swing voter that decides national and local elections.”Mr. Blakeman spoke at a press conference in Mineola about the funeral of Officer Wilbert D. Mora of the New York Police Department in February.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesStill, Mr. Blakeman’s victory gave particular hope to Republicans on Long Island, where liberals had celebrated in 2018, after an anti-Trump sentiment led to four State Senate seats flipping to Democrats on the island. The party then took control of the chamber for the first time in nearly a decade.And while new redistricting maps may dash any Republican dreams of seizing the State Senate — the Democrats hold a 23-seat advantage in a 63-seat chamber — Robert Ortt, the Republican minority leader, said Mr. Blakeman showed the potential potency of “bail reform and crime and public safety” in elections all across the state.“It’s a template from the standpoint that it’s a huge issue,” Mr. Ortt said, adding that “public safety is an issue we all campaign on.”Even before taking office, Mr. Blakeman was invited to Albany in mid-December to headline an anti-bail-reform rally in the State Capitol and once again took an opportunity to criticize Ms. Hochul as someone “who likes to lecture me on the law.”“When you look at this bail reform law it is nothing more than a get-out-of-jail-free card,” he said, citing examples of gun charges in his county related to defendants released without bail. “It’s madness, it’s crazy and enough is enough.”In a county in which President Biden won, of course, Mr. Blakeman may well have to walk a fine line between appealing to moderates and the Republican base. Asked about President Donald J. Trump, he said he was “a very effective president,” but added: “Our personalities and delivery style are very different.”His ascension in Republican ranks has fostered some chatter that perhaps Mr. Blakeman — who lives in the well-to-do enclave of Atlantic Beach with his wife, Segal Blakeman, a lawyer — might want to challenge Ms. Hochul at some point.But Mr. Blakeman denies this, saying he supports this year’s front-runner for the Republican nomination, Representative Lee Zeldin, and is happy staying put in Nassau.“I have zero plans,” he said. “This is a great job, I love it. And I get to stay home.” More

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      The Supreme Court Fails Black Voters in Alabama

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      You know the Rubicon has been crossed when the Supreme Court issues a conservative voting rights order so at odds with settled precedent and without any sense of the moment that Chief Justice John Roberts feels constrained to dissent.This is the same John Roberts who in 1982, as a young lawyer in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, fought a crucial amendment to the Voting Rights Act of 1965; whose majority opinion in 2013 gutted one-half of the Voting Rights Act and who joined an ahistoric opinion last summer that took aim at the other half; and who famously complained in dissent from a 2006 decision in favor of Latino voters in South Texas that “it is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”Yes, that Chief Justice Roberts. What the 5-to-4 majority did was that far out of line.The unsigned order that drew the chief justice’s dissent Monday night blocked the decision by a special three-judge Federal District Court ordering the Alabama Legislature to draw a second congressional district in which Black residents constitute a majority. Alabama’s population is 27 percent Black. The state has seven congressional districts. The lower court held that by packing some Black voters into one district and spreading others out over three other districts, the state diluted the Black vote in violation of the Voting Rights Act.The Supreme Court will hear Alabama’s appeal of the district court order in its next term, so the stay it granted will mean that the 2022 elections will take place with district lines that the lower court unanimously, with two of the three judges appointed by President Donald Trump, found to be illegal.Chief Justice Roberts objected that the ordinary standards under which the Supreme Court grants a stay of a lower court opinion had not been met. “The district court properly applied existing law in an extensive opinion with no apparent errors for our correction,” he wrote. Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, also dissented in a more extensive opinion that accused the majority of using the court’s emergency “shadow docket” not only to intervene improperly on behalf of the state but also to change voting rights law in the process.This is no mere squabble over procedure. What happened Monday night was a raw power play by a runaway majority that seems to recognize no stopping point. It bears emphasizing that the majority’s agenda of cutting back on the scope of the Voting Rights Act is Chief Justice Roberts’s agenda too. He made that abundantly clear in the past and suggested it in a kind of code on Monday with his bland observation that the court’s Voting Rights Act precedents “have engendered considerable disagreement and uncertainty regarding the nature and contours of a vote dilution claim.” But in his view, that was an argument to be conducted in the next Supreme Court term while permitting the district court’s decision to take effect now.While the majority as a whole said nothing, Justice Brett Kavanaugh took it upon himself to offer a kind of defense. Only Justice Samuel Alito joined him. Perhaps the others — Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — chose not to sign onto his rude reference to Justice Kagan’s “catchy but worn-out rhetoric about the ‘shadow docket.’ ” Or perhaps his “To reiterate: The court’s stay order is not a decision on the merits” rang a little hollow when, as Justice Kagan pointed out, “the district court here did everything right under the law existing today” and “staying its decision forces Black Alabamians to suffer what under that law is clear vote dilution.”In other words, when it comes to the 2022 elections, for Black voters in Alabama the Supreme Court’s procedural intervention is the equivalent of a ruling on the merits.Or maybe the others couldn’t indulge in the hypocrisy of Justice Kavanaugh’s description of the standards for granting a stay. The party asking for a stay, he wrote, “ordinarily must show (i) a reasonable probability that this court would eventually grant review and a fair prospect that the court would reverse, and (ii) that the applicant would likely suffer irreparable harm absent the stay.”But wait a minute. Weren’t those conditions clearly met back in September when abortion providers in Texas came to the court seeking a stay of the Texas vigilante law, S.B. 8, which was about to go into effect? That law, outlawing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and authorizing anyone anywhere in the country to sue a Texas abortion provider for damages, was flagrantly unconstitutional, and the law was about to destroy the state’s abortion infrastructure. But did Justice Kavanaugh or any of the others in Monday’s majority vote to grant the requested stay? They did not. Chief Justice Roberts did.It’s impossible not to conclude that what we see at work is not some neutral principle guiding the Supreme Court’s intervention but simply whether a majority likes or doesn’t like what a lower court has done. In his opinion, Justice Kavanaugh sought to avoid that conclusion by arguing that when it comes to election cases, the Supreme Court will more readily grant a stay to counteract “late judicial tinkering with election laws.” But there was no late “tinkering” here. The legislature approved the disputed plan in November, after six days of consideration, and the governor signed it. The district court conducted a seven-day trial in early January and on Jan. 24 issued its 225-page opinion. The election is months away — plenty of time for the legislature to comply with the decision.Disturbing as this development is, it is even more alarming in context. Last July, in a case from Arizona, the court took a very narrow view of the Voting Rights Act as a weapon against vote denial measures, policies that have a discriminatory effect on nonwhite voters’ access to the polls. That case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, was brought under the act’s Section 2, which prohibits voting procedures that give members of racial minorities “less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” Justice Alito’s opinion for a 6-to-3 majority set a high bar for showing that any disputed measure is more than just an ordinary burden that comes with turning out to vote.It was an unusual case, in that Section 2 has much more typically been used as it was in Alabama, to challenge district lines as causing vote dilution. Obviously, at the heart of any Section 2 case is the question of how to evaluate the role of race. In its request for a stay, Alabama characterized the district court of having improperly “prioritized” race, as opposed to other districting factors, in ordering a second majority Black district. In response, the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, representing the Alabama plaintiffs, called this a mischaracterization of what the district court had actually done when it took account of the compactness and cohesion of the Black community and the history of white Alabama voters refusing to support Black candidates.Stripped to its core, Alabama is essentially arguing that a law enacted to protect the interests of Black citizens bars courts from considering race in evaluating a redistricting plan. Justice Kagan’s dissenting opinion contained a warning that granting the stay amounted to a tacit acceptance of that startling proposition. She said the stay reflected “a hastily made and wholly unexplained prejudgment” that the court was “ready to change the law.”The battle over what Section 2 means has been building for years, largely under the radar, and now it is front and center. The current Supreme Court term is all about abortion and guns. The next one will be all about race. Along with the Alabama case, Merrill v. Milligan, the Harvard and University of North Carolina admissions cases are also on the docket — to be heard by a Supreme Court that, presumably, for the first time in history, will have two Black justices, and all in the shadow of the midterm elections. The fire next time.Linda Greenhouse, the winner of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008. She is the author of “Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme Court.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Senators Look to Fix 1887 Electoral Act Putting U.S. Democracy at Risk

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      A bipartisan group of lawmakers wants to fix the Electoral Count Act, the obscure law used to justify the Jan. 6 riot. Is it even possible?The Electoral Count Act is both a legal monstrosity and a fascinating puzzle.Intended to settle disputes about how America chooses its presidents, the 135-year-old law has arguably done the opposite. Last year, its poorly written and ambiguous text tempted Donald Trump into trying to overturn Joe Biden’s victory, using a fringe legal theory that his own vice president rejected.Scholars say the law remains a ticking time bomb. And with Trump on their minds, members of Congress in both parties now agree that fixing it before the 2024 election is a matter of national urgency.“If people don’t trust elections as a fair way to transition power, then what are you left with?” said Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine who has been leading the reform efforts. “I would argue that Jan. 6 is a harbinger.”‘Unsavory’ originsThe Electoral Count Act’s origins are, as King put it, “unsavory.”More than a decade elapsed between the disputed election that inspired it and its passage in 1887. Under the bargain that ended that dispute, the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, agreed to withdraw federal troops from the occupied South — effectively ending Reconstruction and launching the Jim Crow era.The law itself is a morass of archaic and confusing language. One especially baffling sentence in Section 15 — which lays out what is meant to happen when Congress counts the votes on Jan. 6 — is 275 words long and contains 21 commas and two semicolons.Amy Lynn Hess, the author of a grammatical textbook on diagraming sentences, told us that mapping out that one sentence alone would take about six hours and require a large piece of paper.“It’s one of the most confusing pieces of legislation I’ve ever read,” King told us. “It’s impossible to figure out exactly what they intended.”King has been working through how to fix the Electoral Count Act since the spring, when he first started sounding the alarm about its deficiencies. His office has become a hub of expertise on the subject.“It just so happens I have a political science Ph.D. on my staff,” King said. “And when I assigned him to start working on this, it was like heaven for him.”Last week, King and two Democratic colleagues, Senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Dick Durbin of Illinois, introduced a draft discussion bill aimed at addressing the act’s main weaknesses.King said he hopes it will serve as “a head start” for more than a dozen senators in both parties who have been meeting to hash out legislation of their own.One leader of that effort, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a Democrat, vowed on Sunday that a reform bill “absolutely” will pass. Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican of Alaska, said the lawmakers were taking “the Goldilocks approach” — as in, “we’re going to try to find what’s just right.”But finding a compromise that will satisfy both progressive Democrats and the 10 Republican senators required for passage in the Senate won’t be easy. Already, differences have emerged over what role the federal courts should play in adjudicating election disputes within states, according to people close to the talks.Mr. Worst-Case ScenarioFew have studied the Electoral Count Act more obsessively than Matthew Seligman, a fellow at Yale Law School.In an exhaustive 100-page paper, he walked through nearly every combination of scenarios for how the law could be abused by partisans bent on stretching its boundaries to the max. And what he discovered shocked him.“Its underexplored weaknesses are so profound that they could result in an even more explosive conflict in 2024 and beyond, fueled by increasingly vitriolic political polarization and constitutional hardball,” Seligman warns.He found, for instance, that in nine of the 34 presidential elections since 1887, “the losing party could have reversed the results of the presidential election and the party that won legitimately would have been powerless to stop it.”Seligman refrained from publishing his paper for more than five years, out of fear that it could be used for malicious ends. He worries especially about what he calls the “governor’s tiebreaker,” a loophole in the existing law that, if abused, could cause a constitutional crisis.Suppose that on Jan. 6, 2025 — the next time the Electoral Count Act will come into play — Republicans control the House of Representatives and the governorship of Georgia.Seligman conjures a hypothetical yet plausible scenario: The secretary of state declares that President Biden won the popular vote in the state. But Gov. David Perdue, who has said he believes the 2020 election was stolen, declares there was “fraud” and submits a slate of Trump electors to Congress instead. Then the House, led by Speaker Kevin McCarthy, certifies Trump as the winner.Even if Democrats controlled the Senate and rejected Perdue’s electoral slate, it wouldn’t matter, Seligman said. Because of the quirks of the Electoral Count Act, Georgia’s 16 Electoral College votes would go for Trump.“When you’re in this era of pervasive distrust, you start running through all these rabbit holes,” said Richard H. Pildes, a professor at New York University’s School of Law. “We haven’t had to chase down so many rabbit holes before.”Now, for the hard partThe easiest part in fixing the Electoral Count Act, according to half a dozen experts who have studied the issue, would be figuring out how Congress would accept the results from the states.There’s wide agreement on three points to do that:Extending the safe harbor deadline, the date by which all challenges to a state’s election results must be completed.Clarifying that the role of the vice president on Jan. 6 is purely “ministerial,” meaning the vice president merely opens the envelopes and has no power to reject electors.Raising the number of members of Congress needed to object to a state’s electors; currently, one lawmaker from each chamber is enough to do so.The harder part is figuring out how to clarify the process for how states choose their electors in the first place. And that’s where things get tricky.The states that decide presidential elections are often closely divided. Maybe one party controls the legislature while another holds the governor’s mansion or the secretary of state’s office. And while each state has its own rules for working through any election disputes, it’s not always clear what is supposed to happen.In Michigan, for instance, a canvassing board made up of an equal number of Republicans and Democrats certifies the state’s election results. What if they can’t reach a decision? That nearly happened in 2020, until one Republican member broke with his party and declared Biden the winner.Progressive Democrats will want more aggressive provisions to prevent attempts in Republican-led states to subvert the results. Republicans will fear a slippery slope and try to keep the bill as narrow as possible.King’s solution was to clarify the process for the federal courts to referee disputes between, say, a governor and a secretary of state, and to require states to hash out their internal disagreements by the federal “safe harbor date,” which he would push back to Dec. 20 instead of its current date of Dec. 8.The political obstacles are formidable, too. Still reeling from their failure to pass federal voting rights legislation, many Democrats are suspicious of Republicans’ motives. It’s entirely possible that Democrats will decide that it’s better to do nothing, because passing a bipartisan bill to fix the Electoral Count Act would allow Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate minority leader, to portray himself as the savior of American democracy.Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who heads the Committee on House Administration, has been working with Representative Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican, on a bipartisan House bill. But she stressed that their ambitions are fairly limited.“We’ve made clear this is no substitute for the voting rights bill,” Lofgren told us. “The fact that the Senate failed on that shouldn’t be an excuse for not doing something modest.”What to read tonightJill Biden, the first lady, told community college leaders that her effort to provide two years of free community college isn’t in Democrats’ social spending bill, Katie Rogers reports.Republican campaigns have intensified their attacks on Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a trend that Sheryl Gay Stolberg described as representative of “the deep schism in the country, mistrust in government and a brewing populist resentment of the elites, all made worse by the pandemic.”Peter Thiel is stepping down from the board of Meta, according to its parent company, Facebook. Ryan Mac and Mike Isaac hear that Thiel, who has become one of the Republican Party’s largest donors, wants to focus his energy on the midterms instead.Chief Justice John G. Roberts joined the three liberal members’ dissent to a Supreme Court order reinstating an Alabama congressional map. A lower court had ruled that the map violated the Voting Rights Act, Adam Liptak reports.STATESIDEBallots being tabulated at the Maricopa County Recorder’s office in Phoenix on Nov. 5, 2020.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesVoting rights push goes localArizona, as we’ve noted, has become a hotly contested battleground, and the two parties have clashed continuously over the rules that govern how elections can and should be held. Just last week, the Republican speaker of the State House spiked a bill that would have allowed the Legislature to reject election results it didn’t like.A new ballot initiative led by Arizonans for Fair Elections, a nonprofit advocacy group, would do the opposite: expand voter registration, extend in-person early voting and guard against partisan purges of the voter rolls, along with a host of other changes that groups on the left have long wanted.It would essentially overturn an existing law that was litigated all the way to the Supreme Court last year, resulting in a 6-3 decision favoring the Republican attorney general. Arizonans for Fair Elections expects to announce its plans on Tuesday.The move comes at a time of frustration for voting rights advocates, whose push for legislation to enact similar changes at the federal level ran into a wall of Republican opposition.Will the local approach fare any better? A citizens’ initiative that passed in 2000 established Arizona’s independent redistricting commission, so there’s a precedent. To get on the ballot this year, the group needs to obtain 237,645 valid signatures by July 7.“Our Legislature for many years has been trying to chip away at the right to vote,” said Joel Edman, a spokesman for the initiative. “We’re at a big moment for our democracy.”Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Overhaul of Electoral Count Act Will Pass, Manchin Says

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      Senators working to overhaul the law said recent revelations about former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election made their work even more crucial.WASHINGTON — Two senators working on an overhaul of the little-known law that former President Donald J. Trump and his allies tried to use to overturn the 2020 election pledged on Sunday that their legislation would pass the Senate, saying that recent revelations about the plot made their work even more important.In a joint interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Senators Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, and Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, said their efforts to rewrite the Electoral Count Act of 1887 were gaining broader support in the Senate, with as many as 20 senators taking part in the discussions.“Absolutely, it will pass,” Mr. Manchin said of an overhaul of the law, which dictates how Congress formalizes elections.He said efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to exploit “ambiguity” in the law were “what caused the insurrection” — the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. That misreading of the statute led to a plan by Mr. Trump and his allies to amass a crowd outside the Capitol to try to pressure Congress and Vice President Mike Pence, who presided over Congress’s official count of electoral votes, to overturn the results of the election.Ms. Murkowski said the rewrite could be expanded to include other protections for democracy, such as a crackdown on threats and harassment against election workers.“We want to make sure that if you are going to be an election worker,” Ms. Murkowski said, “you don’t feel intimidated or threatened or harassed.”A bipartisan group of at least 15 senators — which includes Mr. Manchin and Ms. Murkowski and is led by Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine — recently began discussions with another group that features top Democrats who have studied the issue for months. That group includes Senator Angus King, independent of Maine; Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota; and Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois.Mr. King’s group last week released draft legislative text for a rewrite of the Electoral Count Act that would address deficiencies exposed by Mr. Trump’s plan. The bill would clarify that the vice president has no power to reject a state’s electors and ensure that state legislatures cannot appoint electors after Election Day in an effort to overturn their state’s election results.It would also give states additional time to complete legitimate recounts and litigation; provide limited judicial review to ensure that the electors appointed by a state reflect the popular vote results in the state; enumerate specific and narrow grounds for objections to electors or electoral votes; raise the thresholds for Congress to consider objections; and make it harder to sustain objections without broad support by both chambers of Congress.In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. King called his group’s draft “very nonpartisan” and said it included the input of conservative and liberal legal scholars.“Hopefully we can join forces and get a good bill,” Mr. King said of Ms. Collins’s group.The latest push to clarify the law follows a series of revelations about a campaign by Mr. Trump and his allies to try to overturn the 2020 election, including the surfacing of memos that show the roots of the attempts to use so-called alternate electors to keep Mr. Trump in power and the former president’s exploration of proposals to seize voting machines.On Friday, Mr. Pence offered his most forceful rebuke of Mr. Trump’s plan, saying the former president was “wrong” to insist that Mr. Pence had the legal authority to overturn the results of the election. Those comments came on the same day the Republican National Committee voted to censure two members of the party, Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, in a resolution that described the events of Jan. 6 as “legitimate political discourse.”Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger are the only Republican members of the special House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, which left more than 150 police officers injured and resulted in several deaths.The resolution drew criticism from some congressional Republicans on Sunday.Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas, said on ABC’s “This Week” that he did “not agree with that statement — if it’s applying to those who committed criminal offenses and violence to overtake our shrine of democracy.”In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Marc Short, Mr. Pence’s former chief of staff, said that “from my front-row seat, I did not see a lot of legitimate political discourse.”Mr. Short blamed Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the election on “many bad advisers who were basically snake-oil salesmen, giving him really random and novel ideas as to what the vice president could do.”He described being taken to a secure room in the Capitol with Mr. Pence on Jan. 6 as rioters stormed the building, some chanting, “Hang Mike Pence.” He said Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence did not talk that day.Mr. Short and another top Pence aide, Greg Jacob, recently testified before the committee, a step Mr. Pence’s advisers have hoped would stop the committee from issuing a subpoena for Mr. Pence. Representatives of Mr. Pence have been negotiating with the committee’s lawyers for months.“That would be a pretty unprecedented step for the committee to take,” Mr. Short said of a subpoena for the former vice president, adding that it would be “very difficult for me to see that scenario unfolding.”Emily Cochrane More

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      Jan. 6 Was a Warning. Will Lawmakers Do Anything to Protect the 2024 Election?

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      The transfer of political power is perhaps the most delicate moment in the life of a democracy. It follows an election which the party in power lost and its opponents won. Inevitably, feelings are raw, tempers are short, and mistrust can run high … all as control of the nation is changing hands.Because politics is how a self-governing society resolves its differences peacefully, it is essential that the rules of this transfer are as clear as they can be. If they are not, they can be exploited to create confusion and discord. In the extreme, as the world saw on Jan. 6, 2021, ambiguity on the page opens the door to bloodshed in the streets — exactly what the rules aim to avoid.This is why Republicans and Democrats in Congress are right to train their sights on fixing, at long last, the 135-year-old federal law that sets out the process for tabulating the electoral votes that decide who becomes president, known as the Electoral Count Act.Legal experts have been raising the alarm over the act for years. Its most consequential provision, dealing with Congress’s counting of electoral votes, is “a virtually impenetrable maze,” one scholar wrote in 2019. This was the provision that President Donald Trump, assisted by a posse of partisan lawyers, zeroed in on to encourage arguably unconstitutional behavior by Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress, potentially criminal behavior by Rudy Giuliani and his dozens of fake electors, and obviously criminal behavior by hundreds of rioters who laid siege to the Capitol.It doesn’t matter whether any of these people actually believed the wild claims about how the Electoral Count Act works, if they had heard of it at all. The law’s confounding language created the space for a seductive narrative about a stolen election, and a legal path to take it back.More than a year later, Mr. Trump continues to lie about the law, revealing in the process his utter contempt for the most basic democratic principles. “Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away,” Mr. Trump said late last month in a statement opposing E.C.A. reform. “Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power — he could have overturned the election!”No, he could not. Mr. Pence acknowledged as much on Friday. “I had no right to overturn the election,” he said. Yet that much should have been crystal-clear even before 2020. Since it wasn’t, and since Mr. Trump shows every indication of planning to run again in 2024, it is imperative that Congress clarifies the law now — before anyone casts a ballot in that election, and before knowing which party will be in charge of the Senate or the House of Representatives. It’s not hyperbole to say that American democracy is at stake.To understand the mess of the Electoral Count Act requires a brief history lesson. The law arose out of one of the most controversial elections in American history, the 1876 presidential race, a nail-biter with disputes over electoral votes in several states, leading to an ad hoc congressional commission that haggled for months and did not settle on a clear winner until days before the inauguration. Rutherford B. Hayes, who in the end was awarded the presidency over the Democrat, Samuel Tilden, wrote that “radical change” was needed immediately to prevent a similar battle from tearing the nation apart. Still a decade went by before Congress took action, and the law it ultimately passed confused more than it clarified.Today, three reforms matter above all: clearly defining the role and powers of the vice president, of Congress and of the states in electing the president. All three are central to achieving the fundamental goal, which is to ensure that voters, and not partisan political officials, get to choose their leader.Let’s take each of the players in turn.First, the vice president. Contrary to the self-serving fantasies of Mr. Trump and the lawyers who schemed with him, like John Eastman, the vice president’s role on Jan. 6 is a straightforward one. Starting at 1 p.m., the job is to open the envelopes and announce the electoral-vote counts from each state, in alphabetical order, then call for any objections. That’s it.She or he has no authority to unilaterally reject electors from the states. The law already lays out this process, but its outdated language is vague and should be clarified in a way that leaves no room for mischief.Next, Congress. The national legislature has many responsibilities, but sitting as a presidential-recount board is not one of them. Whenever a state submits a single, uncontested slate of electors, as all 50 states did in 2020, Congress’s job is to accept it. The problem is that the Electoral Count Act makes it easy to throw a wrench in the works by allowing objections to a state’s submission if only a single senator and a single representative sign on. This sets off hours of debate and delay — a recipe for chaos, as Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley demonstrated with their grandstanding around baseless allegations about voting irregularities that had been rejected by every court to consider them.To avoid a repeat of this shameful and reckless behavior, Congress should raise the bar significantly — by requiring the assent of one-quarter or even one-third of both houses to lodge an objection, and a supermajority to sustain one. It should also strictly limit the grounds for raising an objection in the first place.What if a state submits two conflicting slates of electors? And what if the two houses of Congress disagree over which slate is valid? That’s a different sort of problem, and while it didn’t happen in 2020, it did in 1876 and could cause a major crisis again in 2024 — if, say, a Trump-aligned governor who believes that election was stolen refuses to certify a valid popular-vote count that favors the Democratic nominee, and instead authorizes his state’s Republican electors to cast their ballots for Mr. Trump. (Think that sounds crazy? Then you haven’t been listening to David Perdue, the former senator running for governor of Georgia.) In such a scenario, the Electoral Count Act needs to make it clear that Congress should accept the electors who were chosen in accordance with state law.This is where the courts, and especially the federal courts, play an essential role. The law should leave no doubt that judges — and not political actors — have the last word in resolving any vote-counting disputes that arise between Election Day and mid-December, when electors meet in state capitals to cast their ballots.Last, but far from least, are the states themselves. Under the Constitution, state legislatures have the authority to appoint their electors however they choose. They can let the voters do it, as all 50 states do today, or they can do it themselves, as many states did in the early years of the Republic. The key point is, there are no backsies. Once a legislature has settled on a method, it may not change its mind because it’s not happy with the results on Election Day. If a state uses the popular vote to appoint electors, it is required to count those votes fairly and accurately, and to appoint electors in line with the outcome. As the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives said last week in rejecting a bill that would have given the legislature the power to overturn the popular vote, “We gave the authority to the people. And I’m not going to go back and kick them in the teeth.’’Yet there is a glaring loophole in the federal law: If a state fails to make a choice by its prescribed method on Election Day, the legislature may step in and do as it pleases. This provision, even older than the Electoral Count Act, was written to address a narrow set of scenarios specific to the mid-19th century. Today it only invites abuse, as state legislatures can try to spin any outcome they don’t like as a “failed” election.Congress needs to limit this provision to real “failures” — a major natural disaster, terrorist attack or some other catastrophe, and even then only if it is impossible to arrange for a popular election afterward.Electoral Count Act reform is not the voting issue Democrats were hoping to push through Congress. They are rightly furious with Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, along with every Senate Republican, for thwarting two badly needed bills that would have attacked many forms of voter suppression and partisan gerrymandering. Still, the current push to reform the act, whose proponents include Senators Angus King, Amy Klobuchar, Susan Collins and Mitt Romney, is worth the effort — not only because it will help protect the integrity of the presidential election, but because it may well be the only reform with enough bipartisan support to pass in this polarized moment.If its essential components do pass, Democrats can take comfort in knowing that politicians and lawmakers will have a much harder time undermining a valid vote. Republicans, who like to talk about the importance of states’ rights in our federalist system, can be reassured that Congress will stay in its lane and leave the power to appoint electors with the states, where it belongs.None of this would be an issue, of course, if the United States simply counted up all the votes and saw who won. In 2020, over seven million more Americans chose Joe Biden than chose Mr. Trump, a resounding victory that would have been impervious to all the legally dubious shenanigans Mr. Trump and his allies tried to pull. Even in the closest election of the last half century, in 2000, the national popular-vote margin was more than half a million — far more than the margins of victory in all the disputed states of 2000 and 2020 combined.But as long as we have the Electoral College, the process needs to be as clear and as foolproof as possible. Making it so will not guarantee that things run perfectly. After all, a political movement that is categorically unwilling to accept electoral defeat can do a lot of damage. But just because we can’t plan for everything is not an excuse to do nothing. When you make the perfect the enemy of the good, you get neither.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      G.O.P. Lawsuit Casts N.Y. Congressional Maps as Brazen Gerrymandering

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      A Republican-led legal effort faces an uphill battle to overturn newly drawn congressional districts, which Democrats have defended as lawful.A Republican-led group of voters filed a lawsuit late Thursday challenging New York’s freshly drawn congressional maps as unconstitutional, a day after Democratic lawmakers in Albany approved district lines that would heavily favor their party in its battle to retain control of the House.The 67-page suit argued that the new district lines violated a 2014 state constitutional amendment meant to protect against partisan district drawing, saying that Democrats had “brazenly enacted a congressional map that is undeniably politically gerrymandered in their party’s favor.”“This court should reject it as a matter of substance, as the map is an obviously unconstitutional partisan and incumbent-protection gerrymander,” said the lawsuit, which was brought by a group of 14 voters.The lawsuit, which was widely expected, is likely to face an uphill battle: State courts have traditionally been reluctant to reject maps drawn by lawmakers, and it can be difficult to prove that maps that favor one political party were drawn illegally.But the lawsuit was filed in State Supreme Court in Steuben County, a Republican stronghold in the state’s Southern Tier where judges may be more sympathetic to claims of Democratic political gerrymandering.The outcome of the challenge could hinge on how a state judge interprets an anti-gerrymandering provision in the 2014 amendment that has not been tested in court before, as well as the process lawmakers followed to draw the lines.“The question is whether the court will reject 50 years of precedent and reject the plan,” said Jeffrey Wice, a senior fellow at New York Law School’s Census and Redistricting Institute.Understand Redistricting and GerrymanderingRedistricting, Explained: Answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.New York: Democrats’ aggressive reconfiguration of the state’s congressional map is one of the most consequential in the nation.Texas: Republicans want to make Texas even redder. Here are four ways their proposed maps further gerrymandered the state’s House districts.The judge could uphold or reject the maps, and potentially compel Democrats to redraw them — or appoint a special master to do so in a nonpartisan way should the Legislature prove unable to. The decision, if appealed, may eventually wind its way to the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court.Democrats have rejected the charge of gerrymandering, arguing that the new lines are a fair representation of a state that is overwhelmingly Democratic and where population changes over the last decade have only served to further depopulate conservative rural areas and grow urban and suburban communities that tend to be more favorable to their party.The newly drawn maps in New York position Democrats to potentially flip three House seats in November, the largest projected shift in any state.The challenge against the maps comes as both parties continue their attempts to leverage the redistricting process nationwide, with Republicans often doing so more effectively because of their majorities in large states like Texas. Republican maps are being challenged in several states.State lawmakers in New York had long been in charge of drawing the lines, but the 2014 amendment created a 10-member bipartisan redistricting commission tasked with drawing balanced maps devoid of the type of gerrymandering that had plagued the state over decades.But the commission, as many in Albany expected, became deadlocked and failed to agree on a single set of maps last month. That mean that, under the process outlined in the law, the power to redraw the maps was reverted to the Legislature, where Democrats hold supermajorities in both chambers.Shortly after, Democratic lawmakers moved swiftly to draw and consider their own district lines. No public hearings were held, a move that was decried by Republicans and good-government groups, but which Democrats justified as necessary in order to comply with a time-sensitive electoral calendar.Democrats passed the maps on Wednesday and Gov. Kathy Hochul, a fellow Democrat, signed them into law the following day.“We are 100 percent confident that the lines are in compliance with all legal requirements,” said Mike Murphy, a spokesman for Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the Democratic majority leader in the State Senate. “They are a gigantic step forward for fairer representation and reflect the strength and diversity of New York like never before”Democrats in New York currently hold 19 seats, while Republicans control eight seats. The new maps, which include one less seat as a result of population loss, would favor Democrats in 22 of the state’s 26 congressional districts.The lawsuit filed on Thursday outlined instances, from Staten Island and Brooklyn to Long Island and the North Country, in which, the plaintiffs said, lawmakers deliberately redrew district lines to give Democrats an overall edge.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More