Ron DeSantis Is Carving Up Florida’s Congressional Map in the Worst Way Possible

Image Courtesy of the Miami Herald

For months, the GOP-controlled legislature in Florida has been doing improbable battle with its own party leader in the state, Gov. Ron DeSantis, over congressional map redistricting. The legislature had already put forth a map that was heavily tilted to Republicans, with a likely outcome of 18 GOP House seats and 10 for the Democrats. But that math wasn’t good enough for DeSantis, who wants to gut the very idea of representative districts for minorities. Two weeks ago he vetoed his own party’s maps, and then yesterday he proposed maps that would squeeze the Democrats down to just eight seats, with a whopping 20 drawn in favor of the GOP.

“If this 20R-8D FL map passes and withstands court challenges, it could net Republicans four additional seats, entirely wiping out Dems’ national redistricting gains thus far,” tweeted Dave Wasserman, who analyzes House races for The Cook Political Report.

Disturbingly, DeSantis would achieve this gerrymander at the direct expense of Black congressional representation. His map carves up a district currently held by Rep. Al Lawson in North Florida into several GOP-controlled districts, essentially dissolving the seat. It also cracks another heavily African American district currently represented by Rep. Val Demings, who is running for Senate against Marco Rubio, leaving only a single district in the state that is majority African American—this in a state with nearly 17 percent Black residents.

Florida voters passed the Fair Districts Amendments to the state constitution in 2010. Those Amendments, like the one the GOP is currently trying to get around in Ohio, were supposed to prohibit the drawing of districts that intentionally favor or disfavor incumbents or parties. Because of that Amendment, districts drawn after the 2010 census were challenged in court and eventually redrawn to comply in 2015, but not before several election cycles had passed. 

DeSantis is hoping the current state supreme court, comprised of only Republican governor nominees (including three by DeSantis), will take a jaundiced view of the Fair Districts Amendments and perhaps even find that any intentional use of race to create opportunity districts is entirely disallowed under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution—a legal stretch, certainly, but one that might find a receptive audience with the current U.S. Supreme Court’s make-up.

Even if his own state supreme court doesn’t like or agree with what he has done, DeSantis may also be banking on the current U.S. Supreme Court remaining unreceptive to late-stage state court intervention and to any court-ordered redrawing of a legislatively approved map so close to the primary and the mid-terms. Civil rights advocates note that we are at this point as a direct result of the gutting of the protections of the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby County case in 2013, which eliminated the need for Justice Department pre-approval of any changes to voting rights within jurisdictions that have historically discriminated against minorities, such as Florida. 

The whole point of pre-approval was that new illegal maps couldn’t be put in play without first passing legal muster. Instead, now they are proposed and fought over to the last moment until there simply isn’t enough time to fix them. Recent decisions on the “shadow docket” of the Supreme Court have indicated that the conservatives there will leverage the lack of time to punt the question until later, leaving very possibly illegal maps in use for one if not more election cycles—just long enough for the damage to be done. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would have restored pre-approval and prevented this ploy, but the Act could not get past the Senate filibuster, and two Democratic senators refused to agree to a rule change to push it through.

The task of drawing district lines is normally the province of the legislature. It is highly unusual and worrying that the governor’s office is proposing the maps instead. That the legislature in Florida abdicated this responsibility, especially after the governor’s office issued primary threats against recalcitrant members, moves us closer to rule by a single individual rather than by democratically elected representatives. 

“Whatever happened to the separation of powers?” said state Rep. Anna Eskamani, a Democrat representing Orlando, when the legislature ultimately deferred to the governor on the maps. “The fact that the Florida Legislature is just bending over backward to do what the governor wants. I mean, why are we elected? At this point, we might as well give the governor a pen and paper and he will just redraw the maps himself.” That is, of course, precisely what DeSantis did next.

That the Florida state supreme court might actually give legal weight to DeSantis’s blatant violations of the Fair Districts Amendments would be even more damaging to the separation of powers and the fundamental right to vote. And Congressional Republicans who would hold their seats only thanks to DeSantis’s outrageous maps might feel they owe allegiance to him for literally having drawn them into their office. This power grab by DeSantis is especially disturbing considering he also has national political office aspirations. It could just be a taste of what he would do if ever elected to the Oval Office.