It isn't often that I read a serious legal story, sit back and chuckle to myself, but I found myself doing so twice in recent days - first as I read Courthouse News coverage of a gerrymandering case currently working its way through a federal court in New York, then a second time after hearing about the citizen redistricting of California.
"So this is what it comes to," I thought to myself with a slow, self-confirming nod. "Some things never change."
You see, as a young journalist plying my trade at a weekly newspaper, I had a front row seat for the original drawing of the legislative district lines that are now a point contention in a pair of lawsuits in Nassau County, a suburb of New York City.
It all started with federal lawsuit that few but political junkies paid much attention to; a group of minority voters sued Nassau County and its Board of Supervisors, claiming that the political system that had been in place since the county was formed in late 19th century effectively preventing them from voting for and having a reasonable expectation of being represented by the elected official of their choice.
At the time, the Board of Supervisors was comprised of six members representing the county's primary political subdivisions -the supervisors of the Towns of North Hempstead and Oyster Bay, the mayors of its two nominal cities, Glen Cove and Long Beach, and because it was so populous, the supervisor and deputy supervisor of the Town of Hempstead.
In due course, Judge Arthur D. Spatt found the Board of Supervisors unconstitutional on the grounds that its configuration and the weighted-voting system it employed to make decisions violated the principal of "One Person-One Vote" and significant portions of the Federal Voting Rights Act of 1964.
That fateful decision was only the beginning of an extraordinary - and eye-opening remediation process, one that began in the Fall of 1993 with the formation of the Nassau County Commission on Government Revision, and culminated a year later with voter approval of a referendum that established the current 19-member legislature and putting in place several significant governmental reforms.
It was about mid-way through this process, in March 1994, that I received a call from a neighbor whose home was diagonally adjacent to mine.
"We're issuing our report tomorrow night," Francis X. Moroney, executive director of the commission said. "You might find it interesting. Why don't you come down?"
The meeting was held in a conference room adjacent to a popular county golf course, and around a long conference table sat the commission that would rewrite the county's rules - the primary subject of the report - and create the legislative districts themselves.
Strangely, I thought, given the fact the group was about to issue "its" work product, tension remained in the room. Several of those at the table were attorneys, but beyond, it quickly became clear that they represented different "factions".
There were those, of course, to make sure the minority plaintiffs - all of them African-American - were done right by the process, there was at least one hardcore independent, and then there were clearly the Republicans and Democrats, who seemed to eye each other warily regardless of what was being said.
But it was the drawing of the legislative district map itself that was to prove the most fascinating aspect of all.