Jim Rosica
Florida legislators were offered a chance to fix the state’s congressional district map – and they blew it.
That’s the message sent Thursday by the plaintiffs in the 3-year-old congressional redistricting lawsuit, according to a filing with the Florida Supreme Court.
Indeed, the parties said that “faced with the Legislature’s disregard of its mandate,” the court should draw the map itself.
A 2-week special session called earlier this month ended without an agreed-upon new map that redraws Florida’s 27 congressional districts.
“This Court should reject the Senate’s invitation to take a ‘wait-and-see’ approach to whether the Legislature will suddenly resolve its differences, call another special session, and adopt a remedial plan at some unknown time in the future,” said the document filed by the League of Women Voters of Florida and Common Cause.
The House did not escape criticism, with the plaintiffs asking the court to also “reject the House’s invitation to characterize any remedial (map) as an expressly … interim or provisional plan that will remain in place only until superseded by subsequent legislation.”
“A cynic might view the House’s request as an attempt to lure this Court into agreeing in advance to legislative efforts to unwind any remedial plan after direct judicial oversight has ceased,” the filing said.
The Supreme Court had agreed with plaintiffs that the congressional districts, redrawn after the 2010 census, were “gerrymandered” to favor Republicans, the same party that controls both sides of the Capitol.
The filing noted that the court has “acknowledged that state courts are empowered to enact constitutional redistricting plans for the United States Congress when the legislature fails to do so.”
“The House has been clear that it does not anticipate that the Legislature will enact a remedial plan in advance of the 2016 elections … and the trial court likewise recognized that it appears unlikely that a Legislative plan will be provided to (it) for review, in a timely fashion,” the filing said.
“Nearly two months have been lost already, and the remaining time before the 2016 elections is far too limited— and the stakes far too high—to delay a remedy based on unjustified and speculative optimism.”
