Florida’s Constitution strictly prohibits gerrymandered district maps, but that didn’t stop Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday from releasing a proposed district map intended to boost his party anyway.
Of the Sunshine State’s 28 congressional districts, the GOP already controls 20, but under the governor’s plan, that total would grow to 24.
As this week got underway, there were some questions about whether the Republican-led state legislature would brush off state law, discount concerns about diluting GOP-held districts too much and follow DeSantis’ orders. Those questions received a prompt answer.
Just two days after the governor unveiled the partisan map — sharing the proposal with Fox News before he shared it with policymakers — Republican legislators scrambled to approve it with minimal scrutiny. The Miami Herald reported that the Florida House approved the gerrymandered map “with no Republican debate.”
Just 48 hours after Gov. Ron DeSantis unveiled his proposal for a new congressional map that could give the GOP four more seats, the Florida Legislature approved the plan. […]
No Republican spoke out in support of DeSantis’ plan during debate on Wednesday in the House or Senate.
Careful scrutiny of an important issue it was not. Indeed, the GOP-led state Senate followed suit just hours later, sending the map to the governor’s desk to be signed into law.
The remarkably fast developments come just one week after voters in Virginia approved a redistricting measure of their own intended to help Democrats, as part of the broader arms race the White House started in Texas last year.
While the results out of Virginia suggested the parties’ moves across multiple states would roughly cancel each other out, Florida’s gambit would further help tilt the scales in Republicans’ direction, to the tune of four additional GOP seats.
That is, if Florida’s map prevails.
The foundational problem facing DeSantis and his allies is that Florida’s Constitution bars policymakers from drawing district lines for partisan gain, and to state the painfully obvious, the governor and his team obviously drew district lines for partisan gain. In fact, Jason Poreda, who drew the map at DeSantis’ direction, has already admitted using partisan data as part of the initiative.
That said, as an NBC News report noted, DeSantis and his allies, who haven’t made much of an effort to defend their scheme based on the existing language of their state Constitution, “believe the state and U.S. Supreme Court rulings will eventually make the proposal constitutional.”
It’s worth noting for context that when Democrats in Virginia and California faced constitutional hurdles, they took the matter to the voters for statewide votes. When Florida Republicans faced a similar constitutional hurdle, they just bulldozed forward, expecting conservative courts to eventually let them do as they please. Watch this space.
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