New Roosevelt Initiative founder Bill Samuels made good on his pledge to target GOP senators (well, one anyway) in their home districts in hopes of pressuring them into submission on the issue of redistricting reform.

Samuels and a host of reform-minded Democrats traveled by bus out to the Nassau County district of freshman Sen. Jack Martins to protest outside his district office and highlight his renegging on the NY Uprising reform pledge promise that called for creation of an independent redistricting commission in time for the 2012 elections.

(Recall that the Senate GOP passed a constitutional amendment bill that would change the way lines are drawn in the long term, but only if two independently elected Legislatures vote “yes” on that measure and it then passes in a public referendum. All that cannot possibly happen by 2012).

Among the speakers at the protest was Brooklyn District Leader Lincoln Restler, of the New Kings Democrats, who started out with a joke.

“We from Brooklyn, we know a little something about corrupt leadership,” Restler said. “We thought Jack Martins was going to be different.”

“He signed a pledge. He made a promise to you and to me and the people in Nassau County that things were going to be different. That he was going to support a fair redistricting process, an independent redistricting process. But in just three months he has demonstrated loud and clear that this is a man who cannot keep his word.”

Martins told Long Island Business News: “I fully and unequivocally support redistricting reform and voted in favor of the most recent constitutional amendment that was passed by the Senate…Unfortunately, there are still those who would have the very process of reform turned on its head to become a bitter, partisan one.”

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