Florida’s redistricting process was moving along. Then DeSantis jumped in with a threat | Editorial

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ surprise move this week to submit his own aggressively partisan proposal for redrawing congressional district lines in Florida, one that goes farther to protect GOP interests than any map the Legislature was considering, is an indication of just how far he’ll go to tighten his grip on the state’s Republicans and secure a possible White House bid.

How far? Egregiously far.

The governor’s map would dilute Black and Hispanic voting strength, according to redistricting experts. He submitted it to lawmakers — which, by itself, was a huge break with tradition — just as the Senate was about to vote on its own, more moderate maps, injecting a harsh new note into the once-a-decade process.

And the governor’s proposal came with a warning to lawmakers, delivered by his general counsel, Ryan Newman.

“Because the governor must approve any congressional map passed by the Legislature, we wanted to provide our proposal as soon as possible and in a transparent manner,” Newman said in a statement to Florida Politics.

Veto threat

Subtle it isn’t. DeSantis holds the veto pen on congressional redistricting maps. (That’s not the case in the legislative redistricting process.) He’s threatening to use it if he doesn’t think legislators have come up with maps that gain enough ground for Republicans.

His national profile is at play here, too. Any congressional seats the GOP can add in Florida could help the party in its push to regain control of the U.S. House in November.

But the governor’s political future is far less important than the future of the state. And any effort to pass a map that reduces minority voting power also will make it harder to elect Black and Hispanic members of Congress. Less minority representation means we are risking sliding back to our white, male past, the one that bred Jim Crow laws, which, in some ways, current voter-suppression laws are mimicking. That must be resisted in every way possible. This is not a go-along-to-get-along issue. Every member of the Florida Legislature needs to recognize that.

Redistricting experts and Democrats were quick to say that the governor’s map would surely run afoul of both the federal Voting Rights Act and the Fair Districts amendment of the Florida Constitution. The proposal would definitely be challenged in court, they said.

We would certainly hope so.

The governor’s office told the Editorial Board that DeSantis’ proposed map “is within constitutional requirements” and that it actually increases the number of minority districts. Meanwhile, Ellen Freidin, president of the advocacy group Fair Districts Now, told the Miami Herald that, “Whoever drew these maps seems to have totally disregarded the Fair Districts provisions of the Florida Constitution and federal law.’’

We can see where this is going.

Years of lawsuits

Protracted litigation over the fairness of the maps, of course, is not in the best interests of the state. That’s what happened last time, and the resolution took years to reach. DeSantis is a Harvard-trained lawyer with all the tools of a governor at his disposal, though. He may want to take his chances in court, especially as courts have grown more conservative. That would be bad for Florida. That’s never stopped power-hungry politicians in the past.

But more than any clever legal strategy, this was a flex. It was aimed partly at the MAGA crowd that DeSantis is trying to court — without provoking former President Trump, who may see him as a rival for a 2024 White House run. DeSantis also has had to contend with the far-right portion of his party agitating for an audit of the 2020 election, one he called a model for other states. This move gives him new tough-guy cred to keep those forces at bay for a while longer.

It was also aimed at lawmakers, who until now had been proceeding with the difficult process of redistricting minus high levels of acrimony.

Now, thanks to the governor and his new map, they face a choice. Knuckle under or show some backbone on behalf of Floridians? Given Republicans’ track record on rolling over to Trump and his Big Lie, we don’t have a lot of hope. But if the Republican-dominated Legislature lets the governor use high-pressure tactics to hijack a process so critical to representative government — decisions we have to live with for a decade to come — the state of Florida may as well be called the State of DeSantis.