Florida was never governed as badly as now, not even by the rural Democratic Pork Chop Gang that ran roughshod over the state until the late 1960s.
Back then, an obsolete constitutional formula enabled as few as 12% of the people to elect a majority of state senators. But a courageous governor, LeRoy Collins, fought his heart out for voting rights and fair apportionment. It did not go unnoticed at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Not even the pork choppers were as arrogant and scornful of voting rights as the current mob. It took them three days to enact the ugly gerrymander designed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, one of Florida’s worst governors, as ordered by President Donald Trump, one of the nation’s worst presidents.
They probably would have done it in three hours if rules allowed it.
Making Democrats disappear
The DeSantis scheme would give Republicans 24 of Florida’s 28 seats in Congress, leaving the Democrats with just four. With a 41% plurality of registered voters, the GOP would have an 85% supermajority in the delegation. The good ol’ boys from the 1950s would have loved it.
But it’s a flagrant violation, undenied by the perpetrators, of the Fair Districts amendments that nearly two-thirds of the voters wrote into Florida’s Constitution in 2010. They explicitly prohibit designing districts “with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or incumbent.”
Which is exactly what DeSantis and the Legislature have done, along with slicing and dicing existing county, city and district lines in ways Fair Districts also flatly forbid.
DeSantis and his stooges are proud of what they’ve done. Their pretext is that the Fair Districts amendments are themselves void under the U.S. Constitution.
Vote thieves in our midst
There it is. Elected leaders who swore to uphold the Florida Constitution are thumbing their noses at it and at three million voters who amended it to stop what the vote thieves in Tallahassee are doing.
Evidence abounds in three lawsuits filed by voting rights advocates challenging the new map. The plaintiffs include Common Cause and League of Women Voters of Florida, original sponsors of the Fair Districts amendments.
Each lawsuit features the color-coded state map, deep red except for four tiny pockets of blue, that the governor first publicly displayed on Fox News.
No court anywhere has overturned any part of the Fair Districts amendments — a fact emphasized by Sen. Jennifer Bradley of Fleming Island, one of the four Senate Republicans who honorably refused to vote for the DeSantis-Trump scheme.
“I can’t do it. It’s just unconstitutional,” Bradley said.
It is a clear and present danger to American democracy when two separate branches of government collaborate against voting rights.
The people’s last hope
Now as in the 1960s, the courts are the last hope for Floridians who want their votes to matter.
But the U.S. Supreme Court, which ousted the pork choppers by requiring numerical reapportionment, is long gone to the dark side.
DeSantis expects to control Florida courts on that score, too.
Six of the seven state Supreme Court justices are his appointees.
Four years ago, the court allowed him, on a different technicality, to erase the Democratic district held by a Black representative in North Florida, Al Lawson.
Now it’s worse.
“The 2026 plan has the largest pro-Republican skew of any similarly-sized state in history,” says the lawsuit by the Equal Ground Education Fund and others.
Perverse legal logic
The governor’s farcical pretext is that Florida voters wouldn’t have approved Fair Districts in 2010 without minority rights language similar to a provision in the U.S. Voting Rights Act that the U.S. Supreme Court just wiped out in a Louisiana case.
No responsible court would agree. The provisions are distinct.
As the Florida Supreme Court emphasized a decade ago: “The goal of minimizing opportunities for political favoritism was the driving force behind the passage of the Fair Districts Amendment.”
If this obscene gerrymander survives, the next one will purge what little remains of Democratic representation in the Legislature, where the GOP holds massive supermajorities far beyond its share of the electorate.
The Pork Choppers used to joke that Republicans could caucus in a phone booth. Their power was absolute and absolutely corrupting.
The principle of one man, one vote brought the two-party system to Florida. But it is a hollow shell if votes can be packed, diced and sliced as the new gang has done to marginalize the minority.
In another foul play, the governor’s office swiftly, successfully moved to remove one of the judges, Lee Marsh, who had ruled against the 2022 gerrymander. The surprising pretext: One of the state’s lawyers is publicly supporting the judge’s re-election.
The courts must block this third-world power play. The delayed deadline for qualifying for state and federal offices is June 12. County election supervisors must quickly notify affected voters, most of them in South Florida
It’s beyond any reasonable doubt. This plan is an atrocity deserving to be overturned — quickly.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
