Want a guaranteed job for life? Good pay? Steady raises? Get elected to the New York state Legislature.
It’s a perverse system — and one former New York City Mayor Ed Koch is determined to do something about.
The big reason we have such awful governance in New York is that a seat in the Legislature is about as safe as you can get this side of the Supreme Court.
Consider the dysfunctional state Senate. In 2008, a year of political upheaval across the nation, only 4 of 62 incumbents lost re-election, two in the primary and two more in the general election. Three others retired. So 55 of the 62 incumbents returned. In fact, so safe were their districts that 46 of the 62 received more than 60 percent of the vote.
The Assembly is, if possible, worse. Of its 150 members, 145 were returning incumbents. Of the five new faces, two came from vacancies, two from primary defeats and only one from a general-election loss; 138 of the 150 incumbents won with more than 60 percent of the vote.
It’s not that the incumbents are so good but that the districts are stacked through bipartisan gerrymandering. Both parties collaborate to draw safe districts for one another, the lines bending and winding their way across county, town and city lines to find every last Democrat for a Democratic district and every last Republican to keep the GOP incumbent safe.
Knowing that they’re invulnerable, these state legislators are immune to pressure from their voters and have no reason even to work hard. Corruption seeps in, but it doesn’t take over completely because the incumbents know they’re more likely to be indicted than defeated.
Ed Koch has stepped into the mess and is determined to force fair reapportionment in 2011-2012, when the new Legislature will draw lines in the aftermath of the 2010 census. “I finally said to myself, somebody’s got to do something,” Koch said. “And if no one else does anything, notwithstanding the fact I’m 85 years old, I’m going to throw myself into it.”
Koch hits it on the head when he says of our legislators, “I don’t believe the good ones are good enough. And the bad ones are evil.”
Initially, Koch is taking aim at particularly bad incumbents in the 2010 election. His efforts, devoid of either partisanship or political ideology, are to oust the incompetent, senile, dysfunctional or corrupt among these two august bodies.
But his most important effort is to try to force a fair and non-partisan reapportionment after the census. “The most jealously guarded prerogative of the Legislature is its power to gerrymander districts to keep incumbents in office,” Koch notes.
The Legislature needs to follow the example of Iowa, which adopted a nonpartisan re-apportionment commission after the 2000 Census. The law establishing this body requires that it take no account either of incumbency or party in drawing the lines but requires it to pay attention to county and community borders and to maintaining natural and contiguous district lines. As a result of its efforts, Iowa has genuinely competitive congressional and state legislative districts.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California fought for a ballot proposition to set up a similar system in his state, where bipartisan gerrymandering has not only created safe state legislative districts but has drawn congressional lines that make 53 of its 54 seats in the House safe for one or the other party. Unfortunately, Schwarzenegger lost his ballot proposition, and the gerrymanderers won.
But in New York, where the government has run the state into a ditch, there has been no serious effort to reapportion fairly until Koch stepped in.
Good government hangs in the balance. The duopoly of the party bosses in Albany is such that we can’t really call it a democracy. The Berlin Wall may have come down, but not in Albany. The only way to assure better government is to force competitive elections in districts where the electoral defeat of an incumbent looms as a real possibility, not just as his own personal nightmare.
Viva Koch!