Fair Districts a Good Idea. Hope It Works

There is no process I have ever witnessed in a decade of covering government which better demonstrates the old sausage-making metaphor that the outwardly corrupt reapportionment process. This is one of those exercises so painfully bureaucratic that few voters even realize it is going on, and then one day show up at a poll and say "but I thought I was in so-and-so's district."

That is why I support Amendments 5 and 6. Not because I think they will work. I fear they will do very little. But something needs to be done, and it needs to happen before the redistricting process begins in 2012.

The amendments basically say that when the state Legislature convenes to redraw district lines for themselves and for Florida's Congressional delegation, the lines cannot be drawn to favor an incumbent political party. Amendment 5 affects state House and Senate lines. Amendment 6 covers the Congress.

Now, I have my questions about the effectiveness of this. The full text of the amendments do not detail any enforcement of the law. Basically, that is up to the courts. Of course, judges already can, and have, called for district lines to be redrawn. The snake-like district which Corrine Brown holds was drawn one way by the Legislature in 1992 and then tossed by a judge later. It still is one of the most clearly racially-gerrymandered districts in the country, but at least you can drive from end to end.

That district and others were the product of an unholy alliance back then between state Republicans and the NAACP which helped create districts where black Congressman could reliably get elected and portion many Democratic voters out of districts which Republicans wanted to win. But the NAACP supports 5 and 6 now, probably because of some language intended to make sure minority voters are not disenfranchised.

At least the ends of racial gerrymandering in the past were noble, even if the means were unsettling. When I watched the 2002 redistricting process play out, it was amazing to me just how brazenly political the entire affair became. Tom Feeney, then the state Speaker of the House, had his members draw him a bizarre-shaped district which had an odd satellite poking out to the west in order to include his Oviedo power base. State Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, who headed up the redistricting committee in the House, created a Cuban-heavy district in South Florida that allowed him to move to Washington and hang out with his brother Lincoln. Katherine Harris, who was Secretary of State during a somewhat controversial vote recount, had a district hand-drawn for her as well.

The most atrocious example to me, though, was when state Sen. Ginny Brown-Waite, Diaz-Balart's counter-part in the Senate, redrew the seat of a sitting Congresswoman so that it leaned Republican. Rep. Karen Thurman ended up losing the election is hard-fought contest which I covered. Now, both Brown-Waite and Thurman are legislators for whom I hold respect, but that race came down to the lines being rigged against the incumbent. That isn't democracy at work. It is politicking at its worst. Brown-Waite's big defense was that the district had just been hand-drawn for Thurman was Thurman was in the state Senate 10 years prior. The only reason that defense isn't deplorable is that it is 100-percent true.

But then, that is just more evidence the process is riddled with problems. Historically, the legislators who chair the committees on reapportionment have ended up with hand-drawn seats in Congress. That is true whether Republicans are running Tallahassee or if the Democrats are in power.

So can these amendments make the reapportionment process apolitical? I doubt it, but it offers one more check against corruption, and that can't be a bad thing.