DeSantis likely to sign new congressional map that hands Florida a 71% advantage in the House
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Like his political doppelganger, former President Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis is making all the moves to ensure his state becomes as Republican as possible. The latest is a gerrymandered map of the state as red as a broken blood vessel.
DeSantis, a predicted GOP presidential candidate, presented his congressional map Thursday. The Florida House voted 68-38 in favor and sent it to DeSantis’ desk for his signature. The state Senate signed off on the map Wednesday; both voted along party lines.
Though the map will likely be challenged in court, it offers four more GOP-leaning districts and virtually erases Democrats’ gains in redistricting.
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DeSantis’ new map would create 20 Republican seats total and leave just eight Democratic ones, giving the GOP 71% control of Florida. The Times reports that in 2020 Trump carried the state with a 51.2% in Florida.
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The map also splits Florida’s 10th Congressional district held by Rep. Val Demings, a Black Democrat who’s currently running for Senate. And if the map is upheld, it would all but end Rep. Al Lawson’s congressional role by slicing up a district that extends through North Florida and merges Black neighborhoods in Jacksonville and Tallahassee, The New York Times reports.
“It’s so blatantly partisan,” Matthew Isbell, a leading Florida-based Democratic data consultant, told NBC News. “The only way you can create a 20-and-8 map … was to basically say, ‘Screw Black representation.’”
Kelly Burton, the president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee told theTimes, “Governor DeSantis is bullying the Legislature into drawing Republicans an illegitimate and illegal partisan advantage in the congressional map, and he’s doing it at the expense of Black voters in Florida. … This blatant gerrymander will not go unchallenged.”
Here’s a little gerrymandering background from the History Channel:
“In March 1812, the Boston Gazette ran a political cartoon depicting ‘a new species of monster’: ‘The Gerry-mander.’ The forked-tongue creature was shaped like a contorted Massachusetts voting district that the state’s Jeffersonian Republicans had drawn to benefit their own party. Governor (and future vice president) Elbridge Gerry signed off on his party’s redistricting plan in February, unwittingly cementing his place in the United States lexicon of underhanded political tricks.”
CNN reports that several Black members of the Florida House protested the debate Thursday prior to the vote that ultimately approved the map—many of them wearing shirts that read “Stop the Black Attack.”
State Rep. Angie Nixon said from the floor, “I am occupying the Florida House chamber floors to ensure that Black people will not be forgotten about. We are here to stay. We are occupying the floor; we’re doing good trouble. Ron DeSantis is a bully; Ron DeSantis does not care about Black people.”
State Sen. Rosalind Osgood of Broward County, the second-most populous county in Florida, told the Times, “It does appear to be politically motivated, and it does not take seriously the hard-working Black people in the state.”
The Florida GOP presently holds a 16-11 upper hand in the U.S. House.
Rep. John Lewis must be turning in his grave.