The original draft of the letter to the editor below was submitted to the Wall Street Journal in response to an editorial that noted New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s intention, as revealed in a New York Times interview, to ignore the majority of her constituents who voted for an amendment to the state constitution that created a bipartisan commission to take the lead on redistricting. The governor says ignoring the will of voters and gerrymandering as many Democrat-friendly congressional districts is necessary to help her party expand its House majority in next year’s midterm elections.
To the Editor:
If newly sworn New York Gov. Kathy Hochul really believes that her Democrats have even the slightest chance of expanding their hair-thin congressional majorities in next year’s midterm elections, she’s as delusional about the Crumbling Former Empire State’s waning political influence as her predecessor was about his charm with the ladies (“Here Comes the New York Gerrymander,” editorial, A16, Aug.26).
With homicide rates climbing as a result of Democrats’ post-George Floyd castration of police, government-caused inflation driving food and gasoline prices steadily higher, the Biden administration’s unconstitutional “eviction ban” effectively taking property from small landlords without Fifth Amendment-required “just compensation,” the Education Department playing footsie with radicals who want to teach grade schoolers that all white people are racists and biology has nothing to do with gender, a strategic and humanitarian disaster of incompetence playing out in Afghanistan, thousands of illegal migrants — some with criminal or terrorist intentions and many infected with Covid — pouring over our wholly theoretical southern border every day, and Democrats otherwise ignoring all that tedious Old White Man noise about the “consent of the governed,” no one in their right mind can possibly believe Gov. Hochul’s party won’t suffer historic midterm losses at federal, state and local levels in 2022.
And putting her shamelessly partisan thumb on corrupt and shrinking New York’s redistricting process will only serve to alienate voters all the more.
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.
The writer is a once proud native of Upstate New York who left 33 years ago and never looked back.