Challenge to New York City's Only Republican House Seat

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2:50But Democratic states led by California are fighting back or trying to because redistricting in many blue states is hampered by independent redistricting commissions or state bans on mid-decade redistricting. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries went to Illinois this week to try to convince Democrats there to redraw their maps. Donald Trump and Republicans have decided that they were going to try to gerrymander congressional maps all across the country as part of their effort to rig the midterm elections and deny the American people the ability to decide who should hold the gavels in the aftermath of the elections that will take place in November of 2026.

3:40Democrats have made clear that we are going to respond, as is being done in California right now, appropriately, immediately, and forcefully. The latest salvo in the national gerrymandering battle comes from New York City in a lawsuit by a group of New York voters against the New York State Board of Elections and top state officials. It claims that the congressional district held by New York City's only Republican representative is impermissibly drawn to shut out black and Latino voters. My guest is Jeffrey Weiss, a professor at New York Law School who directs the school's New York Election Census and Redistricting Institute.

4:27Jeff, tell us about this lawsuit that's challenging New York's 11th congressional district. Well, we have a new lawsuit filed earlier this week by a group of New York voters who are arguing that the current congressional district that includes Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn dilutes minority voting strength, that the Black and Hispanic voters' power is diminished by the way the district is drawn now, and that they would have a much more effective voice in the ability to elect a preferred candidate if parts of Manhattan were appended to the district instead of Brooklyn. That, in essence, is what the lawsuit is looking for.

5:13Is this an unusual lawsuit? It's unusual in the sense that it's being brought mid-decade. Obviously, it's got political connotations that it would change the dynamic of who's running for re-election in New York. That current Republican Congress member, Nicole Maliutakis, would find herself no longer in conservative white areas in Brooklyn, but rather parts of lower Manhattan. That it would be a district where the Democrats are expected to do a lot better. It's also a district where Dan Goldman, who is the incumbent now in a district that includes Manhattan and Brooklyn, would probably find himself in better territory and also probably stave off a primary challenge within the Democratic Party from several Brooklyn elected officials who have indicated their intent to run against him in a primary.

6:07Is the Democratic Party behind this lawsuit? Well, the case is being brought by two law firms. The lead firm is the Elias Law Group based in Washington, D.C., and that firm has been in existence for about a decade or less. But their work is primarily on behalf of Democrats and the National Democratic Party committees. There's also a New York law firm involved as local counsel, and they've been involved with political campaign litigation for quite some time as well. Is this lawsuit different because it's based on the New York state constitution? So we'll test how protective the state constitution is of minority voting rights rather than the U.S.

6:51constitution. Well, this claim is based on the state constitutional protections that redistricting maps have to honor minority voting strength, that you cannot dilute minority voters from their ability to elect preferred candidates. And the state constitution uses very similar language to the Federal Voting Rights Act, which happens to be subject to a challenge now from the Louisiana congressional redistricting before the U.S. Supreme Court. The validity, the future of the Federal Voting Rights Act was heard in a case two weeks ago, and we expect any time from the end of this year, but more likely by the end of June, for the Supreme Court to hand down a decision where most of us think they're going to do something to change the dynamic of the Voting Rights Act, but not eliminate it entirely.

7:45But, you know, that's reading the tea leaves too much. Well, your prediction there fits in with the predictions of other election law experts. So let's say the Supreme Court does change the Voting Rights Act in some way. Will that affect the New York Constitution? Well, it could affect the state constitution to the extent of what the Supreme Court might limit. Right now, the gold standard in minority vote dilution is Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, And the Supreme Court adopted a test in the mid-1980s in a North Carolina case called Thornburg v. Jingles, where a challenging minority group has to demonstrate to a court that if it claims it should have an effective minority district, you've got to have 50 % or more of a district being comprised of minority voters.

8:42Second, you have to show that the minority voters vote cohesively, pretty much the same way for similar candidates. And third, most importantly, you've got to show that there is a high level of racially polarized voting where white voters constantly outvote minority voters' abilities to elect preferred candidates in primaries or general elections. So if you meet those three prongs, size, cohesiveness, and polarized voting, then you have a Voting Rights Act violation situation. And the Supreme Court is now being asked whether that test is still a cogent one to use now in the 21st century. So in this case, the Black and Latino voters constitute nearly a quarter of the voting population in that congressional district.

9:35Is that enough then? Well, what the plaintiffs are doing here, they're challenging the map based on the state constitution, but they're trying to incorporate the New York State Voting Rights Act, which was enacted by the legislature in 2022. The State Voting Rights Act does not apply to congressional districts, but it does lay out different kinds of criteria and standards that courts should look to when looking at vote dilution claims in counties, towns, cities, and villages. So they're saying that there is similar preamble language in both the state constitution and the state voting rights act that it makes a lot of sense to also incorporate the state statute standards into the state constitutional situation.

10:25And that will probably be one of the first arguments that I think intervening Republicans will make to dismiss this case is that the State Voting Rights Act doesn't apply. What the plaintiffs are doing here is using the state Voting Rights Act criteria that, unlike federal law, where you need to have a district of at least 50 % plus minority voter population, that you can combine, let's say, 15 or 20 % of combined voters, let's say Black and Hispanic. The Federal Voting Rights Act requires the 50 % pretty much of one racial group, either Black or Hispanic or Asian, but the state law permits you to aggregate or put together smaller communities of, let's say, Black and Hispanic populations.

11:13And that, in essence, is what they're looking to do by adding a part of Manhattan to the Staten Island-based district. And I'll just mention also that the Hispanic population in lower Manhattan is not adjacent to South Ferry, right at the foot of Manhattan Island by the New York Harbor. It's considerably north there, so you'd have to take Staten Island, take the Staten Island Ferry over to Manhattan and drive up a ways, basically up to the Brooklyn Bridge, where you have a Hispanic population in the Lower East Side, up to about 14th Street. And that raises the question of whether race is the predominant factor in creating this district, because that runs against what the Supreme Court has said about racial gerrymandering, which is subject to strict scrutiny and has to be narrowly tailored to remedy a specific problem.

12:10So the plaintiffs are going to have to demonstrate to the court why a district that constitutes Staten Island and parts of lower Manhattan makes sense. As if a lot of these new districts make sense. So Meliotakis said it's a frivolous lawsuit trying to upend our congressional district. And she noted that the current map was approved by New York's Democratic-controlled state legislature and Democratic governor. Does she have the advantage here? In other words, is this an uphill battle for the Democrats? Yeah, the clock is ticking. The state Supreme Court only has two months to render a decision, which would take us to mid to late December.

12:54Petitioning for the 2026 election cycle right now gets underway in late February. So that leaves very little time for New York's mid-level appeals court, the appellate division, and then finally the state court of appeals in Albany to hear this case. And you can pretty much be sure that whoever objects to this case, and I'm anticipating Republican interveners, will strenuously try to slow this case down and prevent it from impacting the 2026 elections. Coming up next on the Bloomberg Law Show, I'll continue this conversation with New York law professor Jeffrey Weiss. We'll take a look at the national redistricting picture.

13:35I'm June Grosso, and you're listening to Bloomberg.

13:58Subscribe to Bloomberg Daybreak for a precise, thoughtful take on the stories that matter. Listen to Bloomberg Daybreak each morning on Apple, Spotify or anywhere you listen. Democrats have made clear that we are going to respond as is being done in California right now, appropriately, immediately and forcefully to ensure that the national congressional map is as fair as it can possibly be. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was in Illinois this week to try to convince Democratic lawmakers there to redraw the state's maps. This comes as Democratic states led by California are fighting against President Trump's push for Republicans to redraw U.S.

14:50House districts ahead of next year's midterm elections. But the latest salvo in the national gerrymandering battle comes from New York City in a lawsuit by a group of voters claiming that the congressional district held by New York City's only Republican representative is impermissibly drawn to shut out black and Latino voters. I've been talking to Jeffrey Weiss, a professor at New York Law School. Jeff, there was litigation around the New York map for years. Tell us how we got to this point. Well, I think by 2024, you know, after a failed process in 2022, where a state commission that was approved by the voters in 2014 basically imploded and subject to a court order, went back to work and finished the job.

15:40And by January 2024, you know, the legislature wanted to end this process, have a new map for 2024, actually a bipartisan map with Republican support. So the map that was agreed to took some strenuous effort early last year. And the case that's been brought now, you can consider somewhat Democrats challenging Democrats. I mean, is there any other effort underway in New York State to redistrict? Well, there is another approach. Earlier in the summer, the Senate Deputy Majority Leader and a member of the Assembly introduced a resolution in the legislature that would permit New York to redraw the district lines mid-decade if and only after any other state does the same thing in mid-decade.

16:30So since Texas already went ahead and mid-decade redistricted, this amendment would let New York also redistrict mid-decade. The state constitution right now prohibits that. But the barrier to that is that since the state constitution now currently does bar mid-decade redistricting, you have to change the constitution. And to do that, you need to have an amendment go through two separately elected legislatures. So the plan now is to pass something, whether it's the amendment that was introduced earlier this summer or possibly a more expansive amendment, but to do that next year and then pass it again with the new legislature in 2027 so that the voters can then approve the question and then enable the legislature to redraw a new map for 2028.

17:21This is similar to the process that's getting underway this week in Virginia. The New York situation is complicated in that we've got politics, personalities, competing lawsuits, and the calendar all running against each other at the same time. How many seats has Trump already gotten through the redistricting? Well, I mean, the ballpark claims are that there are five Democrats who were targeted in Texas, that there was one Democrat targeted in Missouri, that there are up to two Democrats targeted in Indiana. This is one Democrat in Kansas. So that, you know, they're really fighting a state by state trench warfare, picking off one district here or one district there.

18:06So it's really getting down to a micro-targeting that when you have a two, three, four-seat Republican majority that you're trying to overcome, every single seat matters. In California, you've got another situation where Democrats can possibly pick up five districts by weakening or eliminating districts of five current Republicans. But that has to go through two votes by the public this year. One is to amend the state constitution to get around the state's own ban on mid-decade districting and using a commission to draw the maps. And secondly, requesting that voters actually approve a map that the legislature itself voted on over the summer.

18:51Is the redistricting done in Texas? Is it being challenged? There are court cases challenging the Texas maps. There were challenges filed almost the next day. But they may not settle out before the election? Texas and North Carolina have been in court over redistricting for almost 30 years consistently, always in court over this. It's not one map, it's another. Got to be a better way. So you mentioned Virginia. What's happening in Virginia? Well, in Virginia, the Democrats control the state legislature with a Republican governor. But what's happening there is that Virginia, like New York and like California, have bans on mid-decade redistricting.

19:36So Virginia is beginning today to consider a state constitutional amendment to do the same thing I talked about in New York, to allow the legislature itself to draw a new map subject to approval by the voters. That amendment also has to go through two separately elected legislatures. So, you know, it's going to take at least two years or three years in Virginia to do the same thing that Democrats are trying to do in New York. So that's not going to help the midterms. What happens in Virginia? That's why the lawsuit that was filed earlier this week, you know, it was aimed to impact the 2026 elections.

20:13But there's no guarantee if the case survives through all the trial levels that it will get resolved before the 2026 elections and may stretch towards 2028. But, you know, it looks now as if this battle isn't going to end until 2030. Why is it that the blue states have all these restrictions like no mid-decade redistricting and the red states don't seem to have it? Well, two reasons. First is that there simply are more states under Republican control than Democratic. And the second is that a number of states passed new laws in the last 10, 20 years to create a more independent, transparent, and open voter-involved redistricting process through commissions.

21:00New York, California, Michigan, Colorado, Virginia, just to name a few. The Republican states where we've seen mid-decade districting, such as Texas, Missouri, Indiana, Kansas, they don't have commissions or processes like the blue states have. And Democrats are now realizing that some of the reforms they enacted over the years to make redistricting more transparent haven't worked the way they should have, especially when you've got a president who is looking at his victories in states as a mandate to control their congressional delegations and demand that the delegations represent his victory last year.

21:42This is unprecedented in American history for presidents to get involved in this minute power-picking grab. I use the word unprecedented nearly every day in this show. So you have, you know, Republicans pushing and then you have like Democrats, the leader of the Maryland Senate is rejecting the effort to redistrict there. Well, you also have Republicans in the Indiana Senate pushing back. So in some states, you've got Democrats who are fighting back. In states, you've got Republicans who want to do what Donald Trump tells them to do and believe this is in his best interest. And then you have some Democrats and Republicans in other states who just say, this is going too far.

22:26This is not what we were elected to do. And we're not going to go along with this. Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries went to Illinois to try to convince them there to redistrict. Well, that's a state where Democrats do control the governorship in both chambers of the legislature. But the map that they enacted there after the 2020 census, you know, arguably maxes out Democratic strength that you really can't draw more Democratic districts. But I don't think the ballgame is over there yet. We have to wait and see. Yeah, because you think that you can't do it until they find some strange way of redoing it, like in Texas.

23:07In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court held in a case called Rucho v. Common Cause that federal courts are not the place to bring partisan gerrymandering, redistricting allegations, that there's no judicially manageable standard by which to determine how much is too much and that it's best left to the states or Congress to deal with it. So you've got states now, in particular, we've seen the North Carolina and Pennsylvania state courts reject partisan gerrymanders. Ironically, in North Carolina, after the state Supreme Court went from a Democratic court to a Republican court, they flipped there and now said that redistricting is gerrymandering, you know, is permissible in that state.

23:52So a lot of this is determined, sadly, by politics, not by law or precedent. The North Carolina Supreme Court just did a total flip on rejecting a congressional map and now accepting it all in the last several years. Is Colorado coming into the picture as well? Colorado also has a commission in bars on mid-decade districting, and I just haven't seen any action in Colorado yet. But I think with national pressure on states one by one, we just have to wait and see what happens as 2026 approaches. After the midterms, what are these states going to look like? It's going to be all Republican states and all Democratic states, it seems.

24:34And that's why I think this will continue till 2030, 2028. Then we have 2030 ahead of us, where the White House is already trying to manipulate the way the census is conducted to base the numbers on citizens and not on the whole number of persons as the Constitution requires. So this is a multifaceted battle. We'll find out more about the situation in California after Election Day. Voting concludes on Proposition 50, which would create partisan U.S. House maps outside of normal once-a-decade redistricting handled by an independent commission. Jeff, thanks so much for bringing to light all the different concerns and permutations with redistricting.

25:25That's Professor Jeffrey Weiss of New York Law School. Coming up next on the Bloomberg Law Show, we'll tell you what's in Donald Trump's appeal of his New York hush money conviction. I'm June Grosso, and you're listening to Bloomberg.

25:42President Donald Trump formally appealed his conviction in New York State's so-called hush money case this week, arguing that the verdict was the result of a flawed trial and a politically charged prosecution that sought to derail his 2024 presidential campaign. Trump's attorney said the felony charges by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in April of 2023 were manufactured under a convoluted legal theory. A jury of 12 New Yorkers found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to a porn star on the eve of the 2016 election. Joining me is Bloomberg legal reporter Eric Larson.

26:30Eric, before we get to the appeal, just remind us about the trial itself. Right. So this was the so-called hush money case that was brought against Trump in 2023 by the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. It accused him of falsifying business records dozens of times to essentially conceal a payment that was made to a porn star before the 2016 election in order to keep her quiet and keep voters in the dark about that alleged conduct. And at a trial, a jury of New Yorkers found Trump guilty on all 34 counts last year. That was just about six months or so before the election. There are several grounds in the appeal.

27:21Let's start with the claim that the charges were manufactured under a convoluted legal theory. Right. So this is one of the arguments that Trump's lawyers sort of have been making all along, which is that they didn't think that the alleged conduct, well, first of all, that they denied that any law had been broken, but they argued that the business record violations were just misdemeanors under New York law, and that the district attorney had gone out of his way to sort of create a felony by stacking all these violations in a way that then tied them to the furtherance of violating another law, an election law.

28:05So they argue that that sort of transformation of misdemeanors into a felony through that legal theory was never done before, that they were really stretching their arguments to try to find a way to make it a felony. And according to this appeal brief that they filed this week, they said that all along the district attorney's office had struggled to find a case in initially couldn't build one that was a felony and that they really sort of, you know, worked their way backwards to try to create a felony case, according to Trump's lawyers. Well, another arc. The Bloomberg Sustainable Business Summit returns to Singapore on July 22nd.

28:44Our fifth annual Asia Pacific Summit will explore how business and finance leaders are shaping the next phase of globalization by strengthening resilience and driving a multi-speed energy transition across Asia's diverse markets. Join us for solutions-driven discussions and networking opportunities. Thank you to our summit advisor, Bangkok Bank. Learn more at BloombergLive.com slash SBS dash Singapore. ... which is about the jury hearing improper evidence uses a new term, I think, presidential evidentiary immunity. I've never heard it before. Well, that's because they're attributing that to the Supreme Court ruling that had come out regarding presidential immunity.

29:28We all remember this big ruling that said that presidents are immune from criminal charges related to conduct in office. So they pointed to that precedent and said that because Trump has immunity from official acts in office, that all of his conduct around that is evidence that also can't be used against him in court. So they argue that the jury improperly heard as evidence in the Hosh Money case about some things he did while he was in office, which he argues were official presidential acts related to how back in 2017, he responded to the porn star's allegations, Stormy Daniels, and denied those allegations and rather how he worked with his lawyer, one of his lawyers at the time, Michael Cohen, who went on to be one of the witnesses against him.