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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We'll start with some big 2024 election news that came out right after yesterday's show. Maybe you've heard the headline, "A New York State appeals courts threw out the state's congressional district lines." If the ruling stands, an independent redistricting commission will have to redraw them from scratch. Democrats are encouraged, Republicans are ticked off, and while this might sound like parochial New York politics infighting, the way this turns out is actually important to every single American whose interests are at stake in national politics.

Because as we saw last year, control of Congress flipped from Democrat to Republican, largely because of the new Republican friendly districts that helped give us the likes of George Santos, and it squeezed Congressman like Mondaire Jones and Sean Patrick Maloney out, in what we used to think of simply as blue New York. No matter what side you're on, what a mess? Is there any good way to establish congressional districts in any state that's not just about partisan advantage, but that's as fair as possible to every resident and that is really the best way to have an electoral democracy?

Let's talk about all this. My guest is Jeff Wice. He is a redistricting expert. In fact, he's director of the New York Census and Redistricting Institute at New York Law School. He was a longtime counsel to the New York State Legislature, that's who's lying to the court throughout last year. As far back as the 1980s, according to his bio page, he developed the first national Democratic Party Redistricting Assistance Program, and then served on President Clinton's census monitoring board. Jeff, thanks for coming on to this. Welcome to WNYC.

Jeff Wice: It's a pleasure to be with you this morning. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: What I want to do is actually start on the big picture, and then look at what's happening in New York right now, that could help decide control of Congress in next year's crucial elections, so civics first politics second, okay?

Jeff Wice: Okay.

Brian Lehrer: Why does the House of Representatives have 435 districts? That's just 435 people representing 330 million Americans? Where did that number 435 come from?

Jeff Wice: The 435 districts were set by federal statute, and that number could be changed. What's important to keep in mind is that the House of Representatives is a portion among the states. The number of the districts each state receives is based on a mandate in the US Constitution, that the House of Representatives be comprised of representatives elected by the people who come from districts, and who come from districts that are equally populated, fair representation, or one person, one vote, but that there should be an equal distribution amongst the members of the people they represent. So the 435 could change, but it's been set by Congress. It's been that way since Alaska and Hawaii joined the Union in 1960.

Brian Lehrer: The districts have to be relatively equal to each other all across the country and population, that's what the Constitution has to say about it. How many people is that roughly per district in 2023?

Jeff Wice: In New York, it's about 770,000 people. It varies state to state because it's based on a 1940s era algorithm driven formula. The Congress developed something called the method of equal proportions that each state is entitled to one district, so that once you assign one district to each state, that's 1 through 50 districts, 51 through 435 are allocated to the states based on the number of people remaining in the States. It gets down to differences where New York State could have kept its 27 districts that it had in the last Congress had 89 people more have been counted.

Basically, the size of a parked New York City subway car, but instead, Minnesota had about 25 people in excess based on their formulas so New York lost the seat and Minnesota kept the seat. Every person counts in the census. It really gets down to the nitty gritty.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Each state decides their districting rules because congressional districts do not cross state lines, and the number of seats, as you were saying, is based on the total state population in the most recent census. For example, Florida has been going up, New York going down in recent decades. Florida just passed New York after the 2020 census, so it now has 28 seats in the House of Representatives to New York's 26. New York lost one seat after the last census in 2020.

Is that why we're having this tug of war over the district lines because New York had to contract by one seat, and so the battle is over the new lines that would determine if it's a Democratic or a Republican-leaning district that got dissolved?

Jeff Wice: In essence, it was a combination, but in essence, you're correct. New York State had 45 congressional districts during World War II. New York now has 26 districts. That's the same number the state had back in the 1820s. New York State lost five districts after the 1980 census. That's because the population shrank, as in other states, particularly in the south and the west picked up. What happens when you lose a congressional district is that you've got to contract, perhaps two districts into one district.

They all need to be redrawn so that literally each district falls between one person in difference between the size of the districts. That's a pretty precise requirement, but when you have to lose a district, you've got to collapse districts and the process is controlled by the state government. New York has a somewhat independent commission, not entirely independent, but the final determination is made by the legislature and the governor. At least under law, it's made by the legislature and the governor. Right now, we have a democratic trifecta of Democrats controlling the governor's office, the Assembly, and the Senate.

In previous decades, we had a split legislature, Republican Senate, Democratic assembly where compromises were made on how the districts changed direction.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, your comments, questions, deep history lessons, complaints, or anything else on redistricting congressional lines, generally for the best practice for democracy or the contentious polarizing high-stakes news of the day, New York State's district lines drawn last year, which helped Republicans take control of Congress. A court says, "No, New York State has to start over." 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call in or text your comment, question, complaint, or ideal notion of electoral democracy. If you can do that in text to 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692, text or call.

Let's keep going on the civics lesson with NYU Professor Jeff Wice, and keep working our way toward the present high-stakes drama in yesterday's court order. Here's a deep track from the show, Jeff. Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch was here on August 31st, 2010, promoting what became the last big cause of his political life, getting the state to establish what you just mentioned, an independent redistricting commission to draw these lines in a nonpartisan way. 2010, of course, was the census year too and he was asking candidates for state legislature to make a pledge. Listen.

Mayor Ed Koch: There are actually three pledges that we've asked the legislators to sign. They are, one, that they will vote for legislation that will provide for an impartial commission to redraw the lines that have to be drawn next year as a result of the new census.

Brian Lehrer: He then went on to describe his two other pet reforms, but his number one there was nonpartisan independent redistricting commission, an independent commission. Did Ed Koch get his end-of-life political wish?

Jeff Wice: He got it a little bit. He got it somehow, but not all the way. What happened was Ed Koch was very effective in running a two-three-year campaign to get state legislators to agree to support legislation to create an independent redistricting commission. That would be a commission of non-state legislators who would draw the lines and keep the legislature itself from drawing the wrong lines, or as we often say, preventing the legislators from picking their voters instead from what Ed Koch wanted. He wanted the voters to pick their legislators.

What happened was, in 2012, in what's often called in Albany parliament, the big ugly, its budget, its pensions, its health, all these different issues thrown into one big bill. The legislature capitulated essentially then Governor Andrew Cuomo negotiated a plan with Senate Republicans, essentially, to create a quasi-independent commission for 2012-- I'm sorry for 2020 and to let the legislature in 2012 for the last time draw its lines for the Senate, the assembly, and Congress by itself without any independent commission interference. As the trade-off, Cuomo insisted that the legislature approve a constitutional amendment to go to the voters that we create a commission for 2020 and in the future.

Koch didn't get what he wanted exactly in 2011-2012, but the voters did get the opportunity in 2014 to vote on and subsequently approve a state constitutional amendment creating what's now called the New York State Independent Redistricting Commission.

Brian Lehrer: New York State voters may not remember that, but we voted a few years after Koch was on the show for basically what he was advocating there, and voters put it into the state constitution.

Jeff Wice: That's correct.

Brian Lehrer: All right. That now brings us to the much more recent history of last year when the census took one seat from New York's congressional delegation and this independent redistricting commission that we voted for had to play musical chairs, basically, and determine who no longer had a seat to sit in. Spoiler alert, they failed to do that. That's where we'll pick up the story in a minute and bring it up to the present through the election of the George Santos and friends generation last year, and what the court did yesterday that puts it all back into play again. Guess what? Professor Wice, our lines are full.

You think we don't have redistricting gerrymandering wonks in our audience on the radio? Yes, we do. It gets curiouser and curiouser around yesterday's court decision. If you're curious about how the story ends, stick around.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue at the intersection of civics and politics as we try to explain yesterday's New York State Court ruling that would force the redrawing of congressional district lines in the state for the 2024 election. Control of Congress could hang in the balance. Our guest is redistricting expert Jeff Wice from New York Law School, who's also been an adviser to the National Democratic Party on redistricting and a counsel to the New York State legislature. Before we bring it up to the present, before we leave the history portion of this conversation, I see that former state Senator Alessandra Biaggi, a progressive from the Bronx, is calling in and wants to add a piece of history to this herself.

Senator, still call you Senator. I think you keep that honorific even when you're out of office. Welcome back to the show. Thank you for calling in.

Alessandra Biaggi: Thank you so much, Brian. Professor Wice, I appreciate that you're bringing the arcane into the zeitgeist more and more every day. There's just one thing that I felt like I couldn't be quiet about as it comes to redistricting. There was one thing that happened in 2020 that really prevented the legislature and all of the census counters from doing their job, which was former Governor Andrew Cuomo holding back the $20 million allocation of funding that the legislature allocated during the budget, so we could hire census counters and properly count the number of people that were in New York.

The result was that he held that money until almost the last second that he could possibly hold on to it. As a result, the clock ran out. It's not necessarily that New York lost population, but we ran out of time to count the number of people because as we know, especially in New York City, the population actually increased. Our loss of that congressional seat, in my humble opinion, is in direct correlation to the fact that our former governor really hindered the census counting process.

Brian Lehrer: That's interesting. Of course, I think what they really say is New York state's population did grow between 2010 and 2020, but it grew slower than Florida's and some other states in the Sun Belt, and that's why they gained and we lost. Jeff Wice, what do you say-

Jeff Wice: Yes, I agree.

Brian Lehrer: -to that knock on Governor Cuomo, and maybe we didn't get a full count?

Jeff Wice: No, we did not get a full count. Senator Biaggi is entirely correct. I spent most of 2020 working on outreach efforts all across New York State on behalf of a group that we call New York Counts 2020. I'll just note, make it very simple, that in every single day where Andrew Cuomo held a press conference to discuss the situation with the COVID pandemic, not once did he ever mention the census. His staff asked him to, but he wanted to stay on focus and on message. Even though California lost a congressional district, I think $90 million that state spent helped them from further losses.

New York State, the legislature, as the Senator indicated, appropriated a lot of money for census efforts to help local governments and not-for-profit organizations. When push came to shove, Cuomo finally, in August of 2020, freed up about $7 million or $8 million to go to counties. Many could not even accept the money because it was too late in their own budget approval processes to even accept the money. We can't let that ever happen again. I've been in touch with Governor Hochul and Secretary of State, Robert Rodriguez, and we are working already on not letting that happen again. The Senator is exactly on target.

Brian Lehrer: It won't come up again until 2030. Senator, do you have any-- I don't know if conspiracy theory is the right term, but was there any reason that Governor Cuomo would not have wanted the maximum possible count in New York? He would want as many members of Congress from his state if he was in office as possible, wouldn't he?

Alessandra Biaggi: I think it's a very generous interpretation of our former governor. If I had to have the best of intentions interpretation of former Governor Andrew Cuomo, even though he was, of course, a registered Democrat, he was the Democratic governor from New York, he despised the fact that Democrats took control of the legislature because what did it mean? It meant that he lost more of his power and control from the executive chamber. I don't necessarily think that he woke up in the morning and said, "Well, I wish that New York would lose congressional seats," but I think he reveled and enjoyed so much to hinder any Democrat that was not himself because it would take away from his own power.

Brian Lehrer: I guess that suggests one other little wonky fact here, which is that even though this conversation is focusing only on congressional redistricting because control of Congress is such a huge thing, what the court also threw out last year was the redistricting for your body, the New York State Senate. If it was progressive districts like yours that gained more population, as may have been the case, it would have even been more of a progressive to the left of Cuomo State Senate than it turned out to be. That would have been very relevant to him reason that had nothing to do with Congress, but to aim for an undercount. Is that your theory?

Alessandra Biaggi: That's exactly spot on, Brian. Exactly right.

Brian Lehrer: Stay in touch. Thanks for calling us.

Alessandra Biaggi: Thank you for having me.

Jeff Wice: Before you go, Senator, it was a pleasure to work with your grandfather on redistricting in 1980. I'm dating myself a little bit here, but I worked very closely with your grandfather when he represented a Bronx district.

Brian Lehrer: Mario Biaggi.

Alessandra Biaggi: Oh, thank you for sharing that. [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: Former member of Congress, one-time Mayoral candidate. All right, Senator Biaggi, thank you very much. Can we go to another caller. Here's Dan in Manhattan, who appears to be a high school teacher who teaches AP government. Dan, you're on WNYC. Welcome to the wonk fest.

Dan: [laughs] Thanks. I enjoy a good wonk fest during my summer vacation. I did want to corroborate real quick before I get to my point that I'm so glad you're bringing up how Andrew Cuomo did so much damage to the Democratic Party and high school teachers unions, et cetera. My question is about each side of redistricting. It's hard to get a good debate in an AP Gov class sometimes in this area because so many of the kids are so liberal. This is one that split my colleagues down the middle and my students down the middle and so on, which is should we redistrict fairly and aim for the good government thing?

Like a 1511 or 1610 map in New York state based on geography, which could possibly continue to bring us Speaker McCarthy instead of Speaker Jeffries, or if North Carolina is going to go 10-3 in a purple state, and if the Republicans are going more or less cheat and makeup [chuckles] 10 or 15 extra states or extra districts, should the Democrats get revenge and aim for the 21 to 5 or 22 to 4 map in New York State? Are we capitulating if we do the right thing?

Brian Lehrer: This has come up before with the language of why should blue states engage in unilateral disarmament if red states are going to do partisan gerrymandering to the max and not ring their hands about it as much as we're doing here today, right?

Dan: I've got to say the debate evolved a little bit during the last two years as the Republican party, and it's not exactly related, but the Supreme Court got more and more, and certainly McCarthy and that ridiculous holdout of before he was elected speaker. As it got more and more extreme, a few students would change their mind and say, "Wow, this is just such an unprecedented once in 240 years," barely democratic, Republican party that we have to arm ourselves. Let's draw the map. If they're going say, "Oh, it's 10-3 in North Carolina, we're going to make it 22-4 in New York State."

It sounds like your guest who's obviously an expert, expert, expert on this, is taking the moral good government side. Could you just address each side of this to I'm sure a very democratic audience? Do we want to be moral and continue to have Speaker McCarthy and Matt Gaetz having power or on the other hand, do we want to capitulate and therefore give up our values of being pro-democracy? [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: As a good AP government teacher, you have framed the issue really clearly. I will just disclose again that our guest has been a counsel to the Democratic Party in particular on this but you hear the moral dilemma that he's laying out, Jeff.

Jeff Wice: I'm going to speak really more as a lawyer, as a professor not having a partisan pass, which I don't really work on now. The issue in New York as opposed to, let's say Texas or North Carolina is a bit of a legal one, and it goes back to the Cuomo 2014 amendment. New York's state constitution has language in it that says, amongst the criteria, the rules that the districts have to be drawn under, compact districts, equi populous districts, honoring and making sure that minority voting rights are respected, making sure that jurisdictional lines aren't split unnecessarily.

There's one that says that districts shall not be drawn to favor or disfavor political parties or candidates. Last year when the challenge was before the state courts over the congressional plan, of all the six or seven criteria, none of which were ranked in priority order. The court focused in on only one criteria. Thou shall not favor or disfavor a political party or candidates, and that still holds. If the Democratic state legislature draws a map that overreaches, that minimizes Republican opportunities, and maximizes Democratic opportunities to the extent possible, then the state might end up in the very same position it was in last year.

Now having said that New York is a blue state. It's a state that last year, we saw Lee Zeldin running a very effective campaign, democratic candidates not doing that well, but New York is a blue state. Aside from the other circumstances that we can't control, crime, the economy, whatever's happening in current events, you could draw districts that are relatively compact that follow, recognize boundaries that are equi populous, that honor minority voting rights. The districts may objectively favor more Democrats than Republicans. This is a zero-sum game, and as you said, one party will control Congress and one won't so that you can't really create districts that are 50-50 everywhere. That's not realistic.

You should draw districts that follow the law. I think what the task is going to be, facing the commission and the legislature in redrawing the congressional map, should yesterday's decision hold after the Court of Appeals hears an appeal is to draw a plan that comports with, that follows the state criteria. That may be a Democratic favorable plan, but it has to be a legal plan.

Brian Lehrer: Dan, thank you for a great call. We really appreciate you launching that phase of the conversation. To put a pin in this, Jeff, and to be fair to, I guess, Republican states or the overall outcome of the system that we have, I've read that the percentage of seats in the House of Representatives today does basically reflect the percentage of Americans nationally who voted Democratic or Republican. In fact, Ballotpedia, which I looked up this morning preparing for this, Ballotpedia says Democrats actually got slightly more of a percentage of house seats last year than their share of the National House vote. Maybe the system we have is not that bad.

Jeff Wice: It changes year to year based on other circumstances we can't predict. No one thought that the crime issue would resonate so heavily outside New York City to bring in so many more Republican candidates, both in the state assembly, the congressional delegation in the state Senate. There are other factors, the algorithms that you use to predict elections often, they miss the mark, and the object right now, I think before the commission and the legislature is to follow the law and draw a new plan and see what happens.

Brian Lehrer: Jeff Wice with us, director of the New York Census and Redistricting Institute at New York Law School, as we talk about the court ruling yesterday, forcing New York State to redraw its congressional district lines once again. Now for those of you who've been with us since the top of the hour, we've gone through some of the basics of how congressional district maps are drawn. Now we get to last year when the 2020 census had taken one seat away from New York's congressional delegation, and this independent redistricting commission that was supposed to take partisan politics out of the process had to draw district lines that its members could agree upon, and they failed. What happened?

Jeff Wice: Well, New York has a commission whose task is to recommend to the state legislature a congressional district plan. That commission of 10 members has 4 appointees from the Senate, 4 from the assembly split down the middle by Republicans and Democrats. Of those eight members, you have four Democrats, four Republicans. They then pick two additional members, neither of whom can be Republican or Democrat. An independent was picked and a conservative party member was picked, but it ended up as a five-five commission, five Democrats, five Republicans. It deadlocked when the commission tried to produce a congressional map at the beginning of the process, it failed.

Instead, it sent two competing maps to the legislature, plan A and plan B. Under the state constitutional rules, both of those maps were rejected by the legislature, which then tasked the commission with developing a second set of maps. That's where the problem, the chaos began because the commission at that point imploded and failed to agree on even proceeding to the point of submitting any maps in a second round to the legislature. When that happened in late January or early February of last year, the legislature then took it upon itself to draw the map instead, because the commission disappeared. It couldn't operate.

The court stepped in and said, because the commission failed to submit a second set of maps to the legislature, the legislature had no legal ability to pick up on its own and enact its own congressional map. That's where the court struck down the map as not having followed the constitutional rules, but also found that the map they produced was a partisan gerrymander.

Brian Lehrer: The court itself last year appointed a person to draw the maps and voila, the Democrats lost all these seats in the New York City suburbs, Mondaire Jones, Sean Patrick Maloney, Kathleen Rice, Tom Suozzi, all replaced by Republicans. As we've established, to be fair, it wasn't just redistricting, it was also crime. In other issues, Lee Zeldin came surprisingly close to Kathy Hochul in the statewide race where redistricting doesn't apply. I at least thought for good, bad, or mixed, these are the lines for the next 10 years till the 2030 census but now we get to yesterday. Why did the court throw out the current districts again?

Jeff Wice: When you talk about redistricting being a wonky subject, as Ronald Reagan would say, here I go again. The problem got down to the judge who wrote the decision last year putting the map that was used for last year in place, he ordered the plan to be used for 2022 elections. He didn't say anything about 2024, 2026, or '28. He limited the lines to 2022. Perhaps it was an oversight, but in the law, dotting your Is, crossing your Ts matters. An intermediate appellate court yesterday held that the map was drawn in an emergency circumstance in 2022 to let the primary and general election move forward as the clock was ticking and ordered a map into place for use in last year's election. Yesterday, the Appellate Division court said that the map needs to be drawn and to let the constitutional process play itself out that the commission should go back to work, do its job. It must send maps to the legislature to complete round 2 so the legislature itself can then fulfill its own obligation to draw a map for the rest of the decade. Now judges often say when they draw maps after legislatures fail or other conditions develop where maps aren't in place that this map shall be used for the decade, but the court last year didn't say that.

Brian Lehrer: If yesterday's ruling stands, and we know the Republicans are going to appeal it because they want the current districts to stand, but if yesterday's ruling stands, the redistricting process goes back to the independent redistricting commission that failed to agree on new lines last year. Why would they wind up any less deadlocked this time?

Jeff Wice: Well, last year, this was a new process. It was untested for everybody. What the commission didn't do, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans was to send something to the legislature in round 2 to vote on. I think what the court did yesterday, means that the commission has to pick up for round 2. If the Democrats can't agree with the Republicans, then the Democrats can most likely submit to the legislature, the Democratic map, the Republicans could submit a Republican map, and then see what the legislature does at that point. If the legislature accepts either of those plans, and the governor approves it, then the process is over. If the legislature rejects what the commission does in round 2, it then has the ability to draw a map of its own to send to the governor. That would really be the last step of the process.

Brian Lehrer: Wait, that's exactly what happened last year, isn't it? The Commission ended in stalemate, the Democratic legislature got the ball and drew a district map that the courts then threw out as too pro-democratic, and we go round and round on the same spin.

Jeff Wice: No. Because round 1-- See, the Constitution permits the commission to submit one set of maps for the legislature to accept or reject. If rejected, the Commission gets to submit a second round of maps for the legislature to accept or reject. If the second round is rejected, then the legislature can draw its own maps. What we're doing now is picking up at stage 2, that the Commission will know better, and that rather than do nothing, the Commission knows we better send a map to the legislature, whether it's a Democratic map, and a Republican map or several maps, they've got to send something to the legislature.

Once they fulfill that obligation, that mandatory obligation, then it's in the legislature's court, and the legislature can adopt one of those plans or reject it. If rejected, then the legislature can draw its own map to send to the governor, and then pending her approval, it's over but never say never. That map itself could again be rejected, it could be challenged on totally separate grounds and a whole new lawsuit depending on what that map looks like.

Brian Lehrer: I'm exhausted. Even I am exhausted now by this exercise in democracy. Maybe Mary Ellen in Westchester isn't. Mary Ellen is going to be our last caller. Hi, Mary Ellen, you're on WNYC.

Mary Ellen: Hi, thank you for taking my call. Professor Wice, thank you. As always, I remember I was involved just as a citizen in this redistricting process. When I saw the case in the news yesterday, my head almost exploded. I could not believe that this thing has come alive again.

My question relates to democracy. You alluded to two parts. When you alluded to the first part, which is that you said within a state, the districts have equal population. That means that from state to state, the populations of each district vary a lot. I guess my question on that one is, why don't we and is there any possibility legally, if not realistically, that the law could be changed so that the entire United States we add up the whole population divide by however many districts they're going to be and make them equal and perhaps with a minimum number? Each state has at least one district but otherwise, the districts are equal. That was one question.

The other which I don't think you've mentioned. I think most people don't realize. I didn't until I really got into the widths in the aftermath of the last census, is that by federal law, apparently and I think it was a federal court case, not an actual statute, the total population of each district within a state has to be exactly equal. There's no plus or minus 1% to give redistrictors, those drawing the lines, some wiggle room, which seems absolutely crazy.

I believe, and I'm looking at the redistricting, a new New York website, which is not official, but I've found to be very, very useful. It's showing that after the 2020 redistricting, the total population of each of New York's congressional districts is 776,971. The thought that the commission, any commission, even one that was much better equipped to actually solve the problem has to make every single congressional district within the state absolutely equal in terms of population seems crazy. You practically have to run a line through someone's living room.

Brian Lehrer: Let me get your response. That was a pretty wonky question and may have lost some people, but it does come down to a sort of one person one vote as reflected by their representatives, and how many people get to choose each representative. Give us your last answer on that theory of democracy and possible solutions to it, and then we're out of time.

Jeff Wice: The answers are really, really simple. In 1941 or 1942, Congress enacted the law called The Method of Equal Proportions that created the algorithm that assigned congressional districts to the states based on excess population based on the census count. That's been in place now for 70 plus nearly 80 years. To change that, Congress could do that, but you'd have to look at the states now. By running the formula that you talk about, by dividing the country equally, by 435, you're going to find states again, winning and losing, and states that are losing are not going to support legislation to let that happen. The politics right now would probably make that impossible. It is legally doable should Congress decide to do so.

On your second question on the exact one-person difference between the size of the districts, that's because, in the 1980s, the US Supreme Court ruled that congressional districts based on Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution and their reading of it must be precisely accurate down to one person. It may be crazy. Back in the '90s, we had to go from a 1% or 2% or 3% deviation down to that crazy number, but to avoid lawsuits and challenges, because in Pennsylvania, just give the example, they drew a plan after 2000 that differed by 19 people. The US Supreme Court said, "That's too high." The state put it down to seven people and they said, "Okay, that's better, we'll let you do it." If New York had a deviation of a dozen people that could bring a whole lawsuit by itself. As crazy as it is, maybe, that's where the Supreme Court has placed the requirement.

Brian Lehrer: That is where we will have to leave it. Bottom line, we will see after yesterday's court ruling if New York's congressional map needs to get redrawn again before next year's elections, and then how candidates choose to run foreign campaign in whatever those new district lines are, if there really are new district lines because the whole idea of this could yet be challenged in court again. Yes, control of Congress is at stake, because we saw how pivotal New York was to that last year. We thank Jeff Wice, Director of the New York Census and Redistricting Institute at New York Law School. Thank you so much for getting in with us.

Jeff Wice: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.

 

 

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