Guest AuthorWhat’s good for U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown is not necessarily good for Florida voters, black or white.
That much is clear from Circuit Judge Terry Lewis’ recent ruling that the redrawn district maps were flawed, unconstitutional and benefitted the Republican Party and incumbents.
In his 41-page ruling issued last week, Lewis also found that political consultants “managed to taint the redistricting process and the resulting map with improper partisan intent.”
Take Brown’s District 5, which winds from Jacksonville to Orlando and at one point “its width is confined to Highway 17.” The district has a narrow appendage jutting from the district into Seminole County and was designed as a black majority-voting district, ostensibly to comply with the federal Voting Rights Act.
To accomplish that, “the district connects two far flung urban populations in a winding district that picks up rural black population centers along the way.”
This looks like gerrymandering, the ghettoization of the black vote, but it works for the Jacksonville Democrat.
“I firmly believe that I, as an African American legislator, can understand and empathize with the issues my constituents confront on a profound level since I share the same racial and cultural background as they do, and have had to battle many of the same challenges and prejudices as they have,” Brown said in a statement in response to Lewis’ ruling.
Brown’s words reek of entitlement, as if she has the God-given right to represent the people of the 5th District. That’s the arrogance of incumbency. In 1992, Brown was one of the first three African Americans elected to represent Florida in Congress since Reconstruction. She had to fight in the courts before she could win at the ballot box. Still, we can neither ignore her legacy nor minimize Lewis’ findings.
Lewis found that after one GOP political consultant tweaked the maps, four districts — 5, 7, 9, and10 — went from leaning Democratic to two leaning Democratic and two leaning Republican. We know how Brown’s district stood.
This is part of a pattern. Years ago, Brown partnered with Republicans to create a funny shaped district that would keep her in Congress for as long as she wants. This time around, Republicans tried to create a map that would keep Brown happy while bolstering the GOP’s election-day prospects. Thankfully, Lewis has applied the brakes.
Even her staunchest supporters must question why Brown has continued to laud the “bi-partisan fashion” of the several dozen public hearings about redistricting, even though Lewis found that political consultants conspired to influence the process by writing scripts for people who spoke at those hearings and organized groups of people to attend those hearings to advocate for the adoption of certain components.
They rigged the game. They made a mockery of Florida voters’ intent for transparency by doing their work in the “shadow,” Lewis wrote.
Lewis wonders whether the legislators and staff knowingly participated in this plan or were duped, just like the public. We’ll never know given that some potentially incriminating emails were deleted.
But what about Rep. Brown, was she duped or was she a player?
Andrew J. Skerritt is author of Ashamed to Die: Silence, Denial and the AIDS Epidemic in the South. He lives in Tallahassee. Follow him on Twitter @andrewjskerritt. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
