Gov. Cuomo is vowing to veto any new district lines drawn up by a legisla tive redistricting task force instead of by an independent commission.
“My position is crystal clear,” he said Wednesday. “It has been for some time. I said when I was first running that we have to stop the gerrymandering and . . . that’s what this has been all about from Day One.”
It’s all about reform, in other words.
As if.
Political boundaries change every 10 years, post-Census, to reflect population shifts. It’s a life-and-death process for politicians — who, as always, can be counted on to put their own needs first.
But from the peoples’ perspective, the size, shape and demographic texture of a legislative or congressional district are irrelevant — so long as it’s virtually impossible for anyone other than the bosses’ choice to get on a ballot in the first place.
Which, alas, is the case in New York.
And nobody — not Cuomo, not the so-called good-government groups and most especially not the political bosses — wants that to change.
The fact is, New York has the nation’s most restrictive ballot-access laws — permitting entrenched political power-brokers to anoint their favorites and bar anti-organization challengers.
Case in point: Cuomo recently called a special election for Sept. 13 to fill Anthony Weiner’s congressional seat and six vacant seats in the Assembly.
That means the candidates for those seats will be chosen not by the voters but by the party leaders — in the case of Weiner’s seat, that means Queens County Democratic boss Joseph Crowley.
He handpicked Assemblyman David Weprin in accordance with “the manner prescribed by the rules of the party.”
Anyone with other ideas had barely one week to gather 3,500 petition signatures — every one of which would have to survive challenges by party election lawyers steeped in the arcane regulations that are meant precisely to keep insurgents off the ballot.
Cuomo, his reformist rhetoric notwithstanding, conspired with Crowley & Co. to make matters worse by picking late Friday afternoon of the July 4th weekend to set the election — further narrowing the likelihood of a challenge.
So think of him as Gov. Cahoots.
Bottom line: The reason the same faces keep reappearing in Albany year after year is because party bosses write the election laws to guarantee that their candidates are unopposed, or virtually so, for as long as they stay in line.
A fair and independent redesign of legislative and congressional districts is all well and good — even as the Democrats who tend to dominate the process do their best to draw the Republican Party permanently out of existence.
But nothing is really going to change until the ballot-access laws change.
That should be the true goal of all would-be reformers in New York, from Andrew Cuomo on down.
Anything less is just hypocrisy.