Good afternoon! Amsterdam may have their red light district, but here in New York, we’re going all blue. 

New York legislators are supposed to have two months to debate and approve new laws before returning to their respective districts. This year, due to the prolonged state budget negotiations, that window was shrunk to a single week, creating a mad dash to move hundreds of bills through both chambers before today’s deadline. 

One of the most significant measures to come out of the week was the approval of Senate Bill S10637A, a constitutional amendment that allows lawmakers to redraw congressional maps in the middle of the decade in favor of a specific political party. In effect, it would enable Democrats in Albany to add up to four blue seats in Congress. 

“Democrats would be looking at a pickup on Long Island, a district where there are two Republicans, a district in New York City, another highly contested race in the lower Hudson Valley,” Jeff Wice, a redistricting expert at New York Law School, told Spectrum News.

As we reported in an earlier Brief, the amendment launches New York into a national redistricting showdown between Democrats and Republicans to squeeze every possible congressional seat from their respective states. The arms race began last July, when president Donald Trump told Gov. Greg Abbott to find him 5 congressional seats in Texas. Since then, 10 states, including California and Florida, have successfully redrawn their maps to favor the controlling party.

The New York amendment will need to pass both bodies of the State Legislature once again next year before moving onto a public vote in 2027. If approved on the ballot, democrats will be able to redraw New York’s congressional map just in time for the 2028 election.

“We want to be able to have as much flexibility in our districts as other states around the nation,” Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie told reporters on Tuesday. “This thing about asking New York to play fair while everybody else is playing ruthless, I think, is not right to ask us this.” 

State democrats are planning to launch an aggressive campaign to sell the measure to New York residents, many of whom voted to put districting power in the hands of an independent committee as recently as 2014. 

The argument is simple: when you’re in a race, you take the road that gets you to the finish line fastest, whether high or low.

For most of my life, being a Knicks fan wasn’t about basketball. Basketball was the excuse; the actual activity was suffering.

Every Knicks fan I know has a story — not about a championship, about a couch, a basement, a father, a friend who moved away or a guy at the bar who looked like he hadn’t smiled since 1999.

The Knicks were never our religion because they won. They were our religion because they didn’t. Anyone can root for a winner; that’s not interesting. For 25 years, Knicks fans prepared themselves for disappointment. Nobody prepared for success. That’s why this run feels bigger than basketball.

Read on to learn more.

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