ProPublica, the journalistic voice of integrity, suggests that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may have broken the law when he took personal control of redistricting the state’s Congressional seats. The Miami Herald reported the story.
“May have broken the law” is an understatement.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was incensed. Late last year, the state’s Republican Legislature had drawn congressional maps that largely kept districts intact, leaving the GOP with only a modest electoral advantage. DeSantis threw out the Legislature’s work and redrew Florida’s congressional districts, making them far more favorable to Republicans. The plan was so aggressive that the Republican-controlled Legislature balked and fought DeSantis for months. The governor overruled lawmakers and pushed his map through.
DeSantis’ office has publicly stressed that partisan considerations played no role and that partisan operatives were not involved in the new map. A ProPublica examination of how that map was drawn — and who helped decide its new boundaries — reveals a much different origin story. The new details show that the governor’s office appears to have misled the public and the state Legislature and may also have violated Florida law. DeSantis aides worked behind the scenes with an attorney who serves as the national GOP’s top redistricting lawyer and other consultants tied to the national party apparatus, according to records and interviews.
Florida’s Constitution was amended in 2010 to prohibit partisan-driven redistricting, a landmark effort in the growing movement to end gerrymandering as an inescapable feature of American politics. Barbara Pariente, a former chief justice of the state Supreme Court who retired in 2019, told ProPublica that DeSantis’ collaboration with people connected to the national GOP would constitute “significant evidence of a violation of the constitutional amendment.” “If that evidence was offered in a trial, the fact that DeSantis was getting input from someone working with the Republican Party and who’s also working in other states — that would be very powerful,” said Pariente, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by Democrat Lawton Chiles.
A meeting invite obtained by ProPublica shows that on Jan. 5, top DeSantis aides had a “Florida Redistricting Kick-off Call” with out-of-state operatives. Those outsiders had also been working with states across the country to help the Republican Party create a favorable election map. In the days after the call, the key GOP law firm working for DeSantis logged dozens of hours on the effort, invoices show. The firm has since billed the state more than $450,000 for its work on redistricting. A week and a half after the call, DeSantis unveiled his new map.
No Florida governor had ever pushed their own district lines before. His plan wiped away half of the state’s Black-dominated congressional districts, dramatically curtailing Black voting power in America’s largest swing state.
One of the districts, held by Democrat Al Lawson, had been created by the Florida Supreme Court just seven years before. Stretching along a swath of North Florida once dominated by tobacco and cotton plantations, it had drawn together Black communities largely populated by the descendants of sharecroppers and slaves. DeSantis shattered it, breaking the district into four pieces. He then tucked each fragment away in a majority-white, heavily Republican district….
Analysts predict that DeSantis’ map will give the GOP four more members of Congress from Florida, the largest gain by either party in any state. If the forecasts hold, Republicans will win 20 of Florida’s 28 seats in the upcoming midterms — meaning that Republicans would control more than 70% of the House delegation in a state where Trump won just over half of the vote.
The reverberations of DeSantis’ effort could go beyond Florida in another way. His erasure of Lawson’s seat broke long-held norms and invited racial discrimination lawsuits, experts said. Six political scientists and law professors who study voting rights told ProPublica it’s the first instance they’re aware of where a state so thoroughly dismantled a Black-dominated district.
If the governor prevails against suits challenging his map, he will have forged a path for Republicans all over the country to take aim at Black-held districts. “To the extent that this is successful, it’s going to be replicated in other states. There’s no question,” said Michael Latner, a political science professor at California Polytechnic State University who studies redistricting. “The repercussions are so broad that it’s kind of terrifying.” Al Lawson’s district, now wiped away by DeSantis, had been created in response to an earlier episode of surreptitious gerrymandering in Florida.
Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article267118181.html#storylink=cpy
As if gerrymandering wasn’t bad enough now we have DeSantisizing. DeSantisizing is gerrymandering with added malignant maliciousness and putrid poltroonery.
It is time that Democrats held the radical right accountable for their illegal behavior. NBC News reported that DeSantis may have also committed a crime by flying the Venezuelan nationals to Martha’s Vineyard. The Venezuelans may also get to remain in this country since they are witnesses to the alleged crime. Moreover, there is an investigation into whether DeSantis misused federal Covid cash to pay for the trip.
Not “may have committed a crime”
Definitely did.
He violated bother the letter AnD the spirit of the Florida law.
But there is no way the Republican legislature is going to hold him accountable for breaking the very law that they were responsible for.
Not so much the party of law and order anymore, the GOP has turned into the party of lawlessness and disorder.
One caveat here: the only reason the legislature came up with a fair redistricting proposal in the first place is because FL, in 2010, became only the 7th (of 7) states to prohibit partisan redistricting. [The amendment was passed after lawsuits and appeals were finally lost in Jan 2012]. The Fair Districts Amendment resulted in the prior fair maps on which the legislature based their proposal.
Now it gets complicated. FL senate & house have to pass maps that meet fed & state reqts. Which they proposed. But the state can’t make it law without governor’s signature. DeSantis vetoed, & according to a K-FSU 4/11/22 article, “he’s since remained adamant that he won’t support a map that keeps an African American minority district in North Florida.” Meanwhile handed them the map he drummed up in consultation with partisan operatives who’ve left controversy everywhere RNC has sent them. [Note: VA’s SC rejected all 3 of these guys (Kincaid, Bryan & Folz) as redistricting consultants due to conflict of interest– & VA has hardly any gerrymander restrictions!] .
Legislature tried again, proposing one that eliminated Lawson’s district. Vetoed again! …So legislature caved & adopted DeSantis map as their own. Unprecedented, and to their shame.
Q #1. Doesn’t this let DeSantis off the hook re ‘breaking law’? The guilty party on that score is the legislature, adopting a map that was cooked up with partisans. And the map is being litigated (3 lawsuits). So now FL is at a standoff between courts & executive branch.
Q #2. How can appeals court set aside injunction that prevented challenged maps from being implemented? Due to that decision, they’ve already been used in primaries. Will court decide cases in the next 3 wks– or will they just let FL go ahead & vote in 4 new legislators based on maps that may well be in direct contradiction with their own Fair Districts Amendment? [First two lines: “Congressional districts or districting plans may not be drawn to favor or disfavor an incumbent or political party. Districts shall not be drawn to deny racial or language minorities the equal opportunity to participate in the political process and elect representatives of their choice.”]
BTW we can thank our dear SCOTUS for setting this table. Per an NPR 4/12/22 article, “Numerous state legislatures that have redrawn their district lines based on new census data have landed in state court battles over the new maps, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that partisan gerrymandering challenges couldn’t be heard by federal judges.”
If he’s broken the law why isn’t he being investigated? He needs to be in prison (for multiple laws broken). I’m so sick and tired of politicians abusing their power and not paying any consequences.
This is the United States. Politicians and wealthy people break laws with complete impunity. Will Matt Gaetz ever be arrested? Serial criminal Donald Trump? Don’t hold your breath.
DOJ has already indicated they won’t charge Gaetz because his alleged co-conspirator lied to DOJ about his own involvement and was therefore deemed to be an unreliable witness against Gaetz.
Of course, the DOJ often decides “they don’t have a strong enough case” even in cases that are open and shut, as in the cases of tge Wall Street bankers who committed fraud.
I have often contemplated the problem of fairness in voting. From the time when aging new dealers held on to their gerrymandered districts to modern times, when districts look like fractals, we have had a problem. The more fractious the population, the more difficult it is to make the process give some semblance of equality of representation. Naturally, I have some ideas.
The most important of these ideas is to increase the number of representatives by a factor of three. The founding fathers set up a government that increased in size as the population. Good idea. Build a bigger capital building or something.
Obviously, that is not enough. The structural integrity of the system is preserved only if the majority does not tyrannize the minority (or vice versa, of course). The house is supposed to do this, but it’s failure to do so now is glaring. Places that are sparsely populated feel their interests are ignored. Places where population is dense feel the same way. Thus, in addition to drawing lines geographically that do not tend to favor one group or another, the system needs to find a way to bake in fairness. This will bake in trust, a commodity on the wane.
A group should be established that has the job of doing all districts within an area. This group needs to be controlled by elected officials by appointment, but independent of them in some way. It will be necessary for them to be competent sociologists, so standards for their occupation must be considered. Their job would be to evaluate the different interests within society, and to attempt balance within the representation of all these interests. They would be like the census bureau on steroids. They would delineate districts in a process that needs to be done in plain sight.
After that, public communication needs to assure voters that their small voice will be of some influence, though not outsized.
Until we do this, we will continue to get radicalism, not statesmanship
DeSantis breaks the law as a matter of course.
He also broke Florida law when he trafficked the legal Venezuelan migrants from Texas to Florida, since the law specified that peop!e in Florida illegally could be moved out of state.
But the Republican controlled Florida legislature is certainly not going to hold him accountable because they are themselves hopelessly corrupt.
DeSantis learned his lessons well at Harvard: how to subvert the law and get away with it.
From Texas to Florida (very briefly) and then on to Martha’s Vineyard