Florida Trend | Florida's Business Authority

Drawing New Lines

With the 2001 legislative session barely cold, state legislators' thoughts are already turning toward redrawing Florida's congressional and state legislative districts. The exercise in pure politics known as redistricting is required every 10 years to account for population changes reflected in new Census data and will begin in January after public hearings starting in August.

The process is all but certain to end in a legal fight that will stop only at the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court -- and could come to resemble Act II of last fall's presidential election drama. The same justices who determined the outcome of that saga could set the legal standards for the boundaries that determine which party controls Florida's Legislature and its congressional delegation for the next decade. Meanwhile, many of the same players will be angling for their hour on the stage:

- Katherine Harris, Florida's secretary of state who drew national attention for her interpretation of the state's election laws, is considering a run for Congress if Bradenton Republican Dan Miller retires, as expected.

- Tom Feeney, the feisty House Speaker who used the weight of his office to force a special session to name electors for George W. Bush, wants a central Florida congressional seat carved out for him.

- And Jeb Bush may be inclined to help his brother by encouraging map makers to draw more Republican seats for Florida and thus widen the GOP margin in Congress.

Much has changed since 1992, when redistricting brought huge gains for blacks and Republicans in Florida. Democrats lost ground because they were preoccupied with preserving districts held by conservative Democrats in areas that had become increasingly Republican. They also were focused on creating districts for politically ambitious members, such as then-Senate President Gwen Margolis, who wanted to go to Congress.

Meanwhile, the Republicans, then a minority in both the House and Senate, formed a coalition with black lawmakers to create districts that packed blacks into minority-controlled districts, leaving the surrounding areas more uniformly Republican.

When the Democrats' plan was challenged in court for underrepresenting Hispanics, they were forced to settle, recalls Sen. Dan Webster, R-Winter Garden, chairman of the Senate Reapportionment Committee. "They had a chance of drawing seats with 65-55 majority, but they cut six so close that either of us could win. Later, we won," he says.

He should know. He was one of several Republicans drawn out of their districts by the Democrats in power -- and had to move his family down the road, literally, to run in the new district that included part of his old district. Four years later, Webster was elected the first Florida Republican House Speaker in a century.

Webster notes the composition of the Legislature, with more blacks and Hispanics than ever before and with the state's first Haitian legislator, "reflects the diversity of the state more than in '92." But the Legislature of the mid-to-late 1990s, he adds, most truly reflected Florida's electorate. The 63-57 Republican majority in 1998, rather than the current Republican majority of 77-43, is probably the most accurate, Webster says. "The mid-1990s was the picture of where we really are," he says. "It's going to be a balanced plan. You can't do it any other way."

Webster also makes one point sure to please Democrats. The last election proved, "either side could control the House and Senate," he says.

Protecting minorities
The most contentious issue in next year's redistricting will be how to protect minority voting rights. Dozens of court decisions since 1992 have helped clarify how far the Legislature must go to protect the right of minorities to elect minority representatives. In an April decision, the U.S. Supreme Court said that race may be considered as only one of the factors in drawing a district. Other factors, such as geography, history and incumbency, may also be weighed.

Republicans, who control the House and Senate, will try to leave solidly Republican districts alone, while moving lines to keep more Democrats out of districts where voter registrations are split more or less equally between the parties.

The Democrats' strategy, by contrast, will be to keep as many minorities as possible in white, moderate-to-liberal Democrat districts. The argument is that these districts still allow minorities to elect Democrats without packing them into mostly-minority districts that leave surrounding areas dominated by conservative Republican voters.

Jim Krog, a Tallahassee lobbyist who was chief of staff to Gov. Lawton Chiles in 1992, says Democrats can learn from Republicans by drawing districts that anticipate demographic growth in Democrat-friendly neighborhoods, such as the Puerto Rican and non-Cuban Hispanic population in Orange and Osceola counties. Adds Bob Poe, chairman of the Florida Democratic Party: "The good news is, the Republicans have it about as good as they can get it and for us, I don't think it can get much worse."

But the flurry of court cases that followed the last redistricting taught lawmakers that the legislative process establishes the crucial foundation for the inevitable legal challenges.

As a result, both Webster and his counterparts in the House are wary of what they say to the media. In a court case involving redistricting in North Carolina, the e-mails and statements of North Carolina's redistricting chairmen became part of the court record and influenced the outcome of the U.S. Supreme Court's April opinion.

While Democrats don't have the votes to stop the Republican plans, their strength lies in trying to come up with better, more balanced maps that can be introduced in court, says Krog. "The key to redistricting is to maximize your strength, protect yourself on future growth and meet the court test," he says. "If you're the majority party, you control all those things but the court test."

In addition to Feeney and Harris, other aspirants for 2002 include Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Miami, chairman of the House Congressional Redistricting Committee, and Sen. Ginny Brown-Waite, R-Brooksville.

Diaz-Balart says that with 10 senators and 14 House members leaving because of term limits, they have more flexibility to reconfigure districts than Democrats had in 1992. But, in spite of his interest in moving to Congress, he says the '92 redistricting convinced him of one thing: "You've got to put personal agendas aside."