DeSantis personally redrew congressional districts

To The Eagle:

After winning Florida’s gubernatorial election, Gov. Ron DeSantis crowed about Republican domination of previously solidly Democratic areas and said: “We not only won the election, we rewrote the political map!” He literally has. Illegally, and with malice aforethought.

Florida’s 2010 ‘Fair Districts’ constitutional amendment prohibits partisan-driven redistricting, a landmark accomplishment in the movement against partisan gerrymandering. The Republican legislature has since, drawn congressional maps that largely kept districts intact, leaving the GOP with only a modest electoral advantage.

Gov. DeSantis belligerently threw out that legislature’s work, and helped by the national GOP’s gerrymandering specialists, personally redrew congressional districts lopsidedly favorable to Republicans. The new districts were so outrageous that Florida’s Republican controlled legislature balked.

The governor overruled those lawmakers and pushed his maps through, wiping out half of the state’s Black-dominated congressional districts, dramatically curtailing Black voting power.

DeSantis is the exemplar of why Florida, under the 1970 Voting Rights Act, had required federal pre-clearance prior to passing any legislation negatively affecting minority voting rights, that is, until the federal Supreme Court eviscerated pre-clearance from the Act, in 2013.

DeSantis touts Florida as the state where “Woke goes to die” but there’s more than just social justice dying in Florida. DeSantis’ personal radical-right-wing political interference in the state’s educational policies, school boards, and libraries, is a glimpse of the Orwellian dystopia he has planned for this nation, should he succeed in a 2024 bid for its presidency.

JB Bouchard

Puget Island