Martin Dyckman
Nothing so clearly shows the difference between theory and practice as the notion that Americans choose their elected representatives.
In reality, it’s more often the politicians who do the choosing. Evidence in the congressional gerrymandering — excuse me — redistricting trial at Tallahassee has reaffirmed it.
For the politicians to build and feather their own nests is akin to letting one’s children run the household — only more serious.
Florida voters thought they were taking the children in hand four years ago when they voted by nearly 63 percent for a pair of “fair districts” initiatives.
But the Republican legislative leadership took that to be telling the fox how to guard the henhouse. They outsourced the congressional district work to a consultant and then tried to veil it behind “trade secrets.”
Some of the so-called trade secrets appear to have involved passing off a politician’s map as a college student’s recommendation.
However the courts eventually rule, the case makes the point that politics — this aspect of it, anyway — is too important to be left to the politicians. Florida needs an independent redistricting commission. Iowa has one that works splendidly.
Florida has had four opportunities. All came to grief.
The Constitution Revision Commission of 1978 proposed a bipartisan redistricting commission that would be prohibited from using any politically useful data — such as voting patterns or the identities of incumbents — in drawing its maps. It came achingly close at the polls, failing by only 130,647 votes out of more than 2 million cast.
It was a collateral casualty of controversies over the Revision Commission’s proposal to abolish the elected Cabinet and a casino gambling initiative that was also on the ballot.
The next lost opportunity came in 1993. The 40-member Senate was evenly split between the parties. When neither could find a turncoat to break the tie, the Democrats and Republicans agreed to an alternating presidency.
Ander Crenshaw, the Republican leader then (a congressman now), took the rostrum first and got a unanimous vote for a constitutional amendment creating an independent redistricting commission. He deplored how legislators had dealt with redistricting the year before.
“It was the most gut-wrenching, stomach-turning, friendship-breaking process that I’ve ever seen,” he said.
But in the House, where Democrats were still the majority, Speaker-designate Peter Rudy Wallace resented how the courts had influenced redistricting in 1992 and didn’t want to cede that power any further. He and Republican Leader Sandra Mortham collaborated to modify Crenshaw’s reform beyond all recognition and no more was heard of it.
Mortham and Wallace were betting on which party would be in power before the next redistricting. She won. Wallace repented.
The third opportunity took shape in the Constitution Revision Commission of 1997-98. Member Marilyn Evans-Jones, a former Republican legislator from Brevard County, fought tirelessly for an independent districting commission. She had experience as a victim.
In 1982, she said, there had been a call from the House Democratic redistricting staff asking her, “Who do you want to run against? Which Republican do you choose?”
“None,” she said, and wound up having to move into a new district to win two more elections against Democrats.
There were just enough votes in the Revision Commission to approve her amendment the first time it came up, but by then the Republicans had won both houses of the Legislature and their leaders wanted no part of Evans-Jones’ idealism. Their pressure peeled off one supporter, dooming the proposal, leaving Evans-Jones in tears.
Among her opponents on the commission was the same Ander Crenshaw who had persuaded the Senate to pass something nearly identical when Republicans were not the majority.
What had changed?
“We won,” he said.
W. Dexter Douglass, the Revision Commission chairman, told me later that Republican members had threatened to abandon the commission if there was no other way to keep that proposal off the ballot.
The fourth lost opportunity came in 2006, when the Committee for Fair Elections made the ballot with 689,325 petition signatures only to see the Supreme Court dispose of it in a 6-1 ruling. The court defined legislative and congressional redistricting as separate subjects — not allowed in a citizen initiative — and said the ballot summary was misleading.
The sponsors were back in 2010 with separate initiatives to establish standards for congressional and legislative redistricting. This time, they left the process to the Florida Legislature, counting on the courts to enforce the standards.
The Florida Supreme Court will have the last word on that.
Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the St. Petersburg Times. He lives near Waynesville, N.C. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
