A.G. Gancarski
Here’s what we know regarding Representative Corrine Brown and next week’s legislative session for House map redistricting.
She’s going to have a “breaking news announcement” on Thursday. And (since I asked) it does not involve her running for Senate.
Here’s what else we know.
She has read the ten pages in the Florida Supreme Court decision regarding the district many times.
As she told the assembled media at the Mary Singleton Center on Monday, she read it, went to bed, and then… “I got up at 3 a.m. and read it again because it was all about me.”
Hence, the breaking news announcement on Thursday.
Despite there being no shortage of opinions regarding her district being “visually not compact, bizarrely shaped” and paying no respect to what are traditionally called “traditional political boundaries,” Brown holds to her long-standing position that her district serves a higher purpose than a district with geographical integrity might.
“Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act still stands,” Brown said regarding the 1965 legislation that established the concept of “communities of interest.”
With that in mind, she asserts that downtown Jacksonville has more in common with downtown Orlando, for example, than with rural areas in North Florida.
Referring to previous discussions regarding district boundaries, Brown claimed that “people from North Florida [have told her that] they do not want to be with Jacksonville.”
For Brown, maintaining her current district is framed as a matter of social justice.
The Congresswoman discussed how, when baseball player Jackie Robinson played in Sanford, he had to stay every night in Daytona because if he had stayed in Sanford, he would have been killed.
Beyond the issue of sundown towns, Brown posed the rhetorical question of why we didn’t have a Baltimore or Ferguson type situation in North Florida after the Trayvon Martin verdict.
She attributes that to “representative government,” begotten by the linkage of “communities of interest.”
The Congresswoman went on to discuss children in Seminole County who are “living out of vans, waking up at WalMart, then going to school” as an example of who she fights for.
“Don’t tell me nothing about what the district looks like,” she said, adding that it’s “about having someone at the table looking out for you.”
Congresswoman Brown’s advocacy, she added, has taken her outside of her district boundaries. She described a conversation she had with then-Governor Jeb Bush about a raw sewage issue in St. Johns County.
The Governor told her, she said, that St. Johns County is “one of the richest in the state,” implying that they should be able to handle that issue on the local level.
Congresswoman Brown wasn’t having that.
“We live where you told us to live,” she said. “On the other side of the tracks.”
During this part of the press conference, the Congresswoman also signaled her support for Planned Parenthood, which she said “helps a lot of women all over the country.”
