Redistricting in recent years has on the balance been at the expense of representative democracy, if one zooms out and takes the long view.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve seen that play out here in Florida in recent years, culminating with the congressional reapportionment approved last month that appears, unless Democrats really benefit from a mid-term \u2018wave\u2019 election, poised to give the GOP 24 of the state\u2019s 28 congressional seats.<\/p>\n
Not bad for a state that is 41% Republican<\/a>.<\/p>\n Gov. DeSantis alternated various justifications for the map. He correctly anticipated the SCOTUS ruling in Louisiana v. Callais<\/a> that kneecapped the concept of minority-access seats.<\/p>\n According to the governor\u2019s interpretive approach, that ruling affirms the preeminence of the Equal Protection Clause over the Voting Rights Act nationally (except in the case of what Justice Alito called \u201cintentional discrimination,\u201d which is impossible to prove in this case).<\/p>\n By that same approach, it also kneecaps Florida\u2019s popularly approved Fair Districts Amendments<\/a> as it renders unconstitutional the provision that \u201cdistricts shall not be drawn with the result or intent of denying or abridging the equal opportunity of racial or language minorities to participate in the political process or to diminish their ability to elect representatives of their choice.\u201d<\/p>\n In the end, it\u2019s all a matter of literary interpretation on the part of the conservative super-majority High Court, which jibes with centuries of American jurisprudence. There is every incentive for judges to craft an opinion to meet a desired outcome. And the desired outcome in this case by DeSantis, most Florida Republicans, and the Supreme Court is to turn back the clock on minority-access seats.<\/p>\n Conservatives will argue that the idea of a minority-access seat<\/a> was itself a judicial construct. But it was one that they embraced. Florida\u2019s seats, like the former one occupied by Corrine Brown from 1993 to 2016, had advocacy via an alliance of Black Democrats and Republicans in a Tallahassee, where Democrats had a lot more sway than they do today.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ultimately, federal judges enacted a plan that created a few districts designed to be won by Black Democrats, and versions of that plan were affirmed until the last decade brought reversals that we saw locally.<\/p>\n 2015\u2019s League of Women Voters v. Detzner case spurred a change from the Jacksonville-to-Orlando configuration of the old Corrine Brown district to a district that ran west and suited Rep. Al Lawson in 2016.<\/p>\n Lawson, who local Republicans liked, was helped by Brown\u2019s legal troubles keeping her from fundraising, and by a second Jacksonville Democrat, L.J. Holloway, in that primary.<\/p>\n Fast forward six years and Jacksonville\u2019s minority-access seat would be gone for good. Legislators considered an option that would have been a Duval-only seat, but it was a non-starter for DeSantis, who rejected it and split Jacksonville into two seats that were safe Republican holds.\u00a0<\/p>\n Despite DeSantis saying a reason to redraw the seats was because of population growth making them malapportioned, his team\u2019s effort mysteriously didn\u2019t go north of the I-4 Corridor.<\/p>\n This meant that growth in Flagler, St. Johns, Clay and Nassau, which could have been in play to bring another seat to the area in a true attempt to square representation with population, simply was ignored.\u00a0<\/p>\n While there was no effort to deal with state legislative seats in this just-completed Special Session, noise is being made even more locally about a \u201crace-neutral\u201d map.<\/p>\n Term-limited Republican City Council member Rory Diamond is not ruling out running for mayor despite much of the establishment liking House Speaker Pro Tempore Wyman Duggan (who presided over the House passing the map last month). Diamond says he wants local redistricting and that there is time to do just that before the 2027 elections.<\/p>\n He\u2019s right, of course, at least when it comes to the time element. Legal wrangling over Jacksonville\u2019s attempt at local redistricting led to a judicially imposed map just weeks before qualifying in 2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n But his proposal is a poison pill for other reasons, one that plays to a political base at the expense of other considerations.<\/p>\n