Congresswoman Corrine Brown has filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to prevent Florida lawmakers from redrawing her district. District 5, which snakes from Jacksonville to Orlando to help Democrat Corinne Brown, would run west to Tallahassee.
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The Florida Legislature will start its 12-day redistricting special session next week with a “base” congressional map that would make the Democrats more competitive in a delegation now dominated by the Republicans.
“The district that they(State Senate) put on the table will not elect an African-American”, said Brown.
District 13 is now represented by Republican David Jolly, who is running for U.S. Senate. In this case, she’s taking the side of the Republican lawmakers who drew up Congressional maps that the state’s highest court ruled unconstitutional. The Supreme Court ruling last month was based on the finding that Republican political consultants played a major role in designing the 2012 districts.
In a July 9 ruling finding that lawmakers had violated one of the anti-gerrymandering “Fair Districts” amendments approved by voters in 2010, the Florida Supreme Court ordered Brown’s district and seven others redrawn. But the proposed change for the 2nd District would make it almost impossible for U.S. Rep. Gwen Graham, D-Tallahassee, to hold onto her seat, experts say. Because each congressional district must have almost precisely the same population, any change to one seat often ripples through the seats surrounding it.
Brown said that the Supreme Court is in violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was passed 50 years ago Thursday.
That proposed map, drafted by legislative staff members, essentially copied a proposal from voting-rights organizations that sued to overturn the congressional districts approved by the Legislature in 2012. “She’s gone through three other prior redistricting’s and her district was made more secure for her two wins, so even that argument falls flat on its face”.
“The Legislature is constrained because if they take overtly political actions here in drawing the new districts, the Florida Supreme Court has already said it won’t tolerate that”, he said.
“Finally, while every citizen of Florida has a guaranteed constitutional right to petition their government, we encourage senators to be circumspect and to avoid all communications that reflect or might be construed to reflect an intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent”, Senate President Andy Gardiner, R-Orlando, told his members in a memo on Wednesday. “We’re just going to have to see if it works out that way”.
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“Plaintiffs wish to exercise their First Amendment rights and speak with legislators and the Legislature as a whole about their concerns with redistricting maps for Congress and the state Senate”. “But the plaintiffs are chilled in their speech because their intended speech risks embroilment in the inevitable legal process to follow this remedial round of redistricting”.
