New York Governor Kathy Hochul wants to gerrymander NY State congressional districts to offset potential Republican gains in Texas gerrymandering. In Texas it’s legal. In NY not so much. So Hochul would have to amend the state constitution to do so, and it appears she will attempt to do that.
Hochul has been on the media warpath.
Writing in the Houston Chronicle, Hochul asserted (emphasis added):
We are also reviewing every legal and legislative option to redraw our own maps in New York. If Republicans are changing the rules, we’ll meet them on the same field, with strategy, with resolve and without apology.Some will say this is too aggressive. I say it’s necessary.What Texas Republicans are doing under Trump’s direction is nothing short of a legal insurrection on our Capitol. But using a legal system doesn’t make it legitimate. It’s a hijacking of democracy. And it must be stopped.
I laughed. Perhaps chortled would be a better term.
Okay, no longer a chortle. A guffaw.
Today on Fox News, Hochul repeated the claim (emphasis added):
Shannon Bream, FOX: Well, it is legal there in Texas, at least the way that they’re doing it for now. And there will be court challenges, I’m sure when they get done with their map if it ever gets voted on. But here’s a little bit more of what New York’s highest court said in ruling against those maps. They said the legislature created maps in a non-transparent manner controlled exclusively by the dominant political party doing exactly what they would’ve done had the 2014 constitutional reforms never been passed. They said the maps were no good.Governor Hochul: Well, we went back and redrew the maps. We followed the process and here we are, and we didn’t intend to do this again until the 2032 elections, but because we’re in a different situation altogether, that demands that leaders stand up and say, “I’m not going to let our democracy be eroded away because there’s a blatant power grab to maintain power in our nation’s capital.”This is what I call a legal insurrection. Legal insurrection. Just let the rules stay the way they are. We’ll do it the way we always have. But here we have Texas and now going to other states — JD Vance, why aren’t you looking out for how to lower the costs like he promised? Instead, he is going like a lapdog around the country in a different state saying, “Oh, can we pick up some here? Can we pick up here?” [Transcript]
Okay, no longer a guffaw. We’re into LMFAO territory.
I’ve told the story a million times how I came up with the name Legal Insurrection not long before our launch on October 12, 2008.
I had dinner in late August 2008 with a former client from when I was a plaintiffs’ securities contingent fee lawyer. At that point I already had joined Cornell Law School about 10 months earlier. Although we had been friendly for many years, we never talked politics. He probably assumed I was one of them.
So he asked who I was voting for, and when I said ‘John McCain and Sarah Palin’ we got into a long argument. At the end he said, I’ve never heard anyone explain your side as well as you do, you should start a blog. I didn’t know what a blog was, I wasn’t political and I didn’t read blogs. So I found Google Blogger, which was free and easy to use. I picked a basic template (yikes, it’s like looking at your middle school photos – awkward), but I needed a name.
So I did word association, and the word that came to mind was ‘insurrection’ because I was feeling so frustrated from the media bias in favor of Obama. I looked it up, and by definition an ‘insurrection’ is illegal. I thought maybe it’s not a great idea, since I just started as job as a law professor, to pick a blog name that means illegal.
So I came up with Legal Insurrection, which is a contradiction in terms. There is no such thing as a legal insurrection.
If you look on the banner of the website, I just took the dictionary definitions to explain this thing that cannot be:
“a rising up against established authority; rebellion; revolt” “in conformity with or as permitted by law”
The lettering of Legal Insurrection also was copied from the dictionary with the syllables separated by a dot.
We’ve maintained the punctuation and definition.
The name has confounded people ever since. What do you mean by that?
Is it an uprising using the legal system, or a non-legal uprising that is not criminal? It’s not only self-contradictory, it’s ambiguous.
I don’t mean anything by it. It is what it is. But it works.
Are you Mr. Legal Insurrection? That’s a question I’ve been asked many times. Yes, yes I am, I’m that self-contradictory ambiguous person.
It’s not without its problems. Establishment types are very leery of anything with the word “insurrection” in it, particularly after J6. I’m convinced that the name is why it’s hard for us to get insurance, or for me to get speaking appearances before mainstream groups. Multiple times “professionals” have suggested we change the name. NFW.
So we’ll keep being that thing that doesn’t and can’t exist.
Just like Kathy Hochul’s ‘legal insurrection’ bogeyman. Or should I say:
a person or thing that is widely regarded as an object of fear
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