Florida Home Speaker Daniel Perez (R) mentioned on Thursday he’ll kind a redistricting committee as Republican-led states throughout the nation move to redraw their congressional lines forward of subsequent 12 months’s midterm elections.
“Exploring these questions now, on the middecade level, would doubtlessly enable us to hunt authorized steerage from our supreme courtroom with out the uncertainty related to deferring these questions till after the following decennial census and reapportionment,” Perez wrote in a memo to state Home members, referring to a latest Florida Supreme Court docket determination on the state’s congressional map.
“We’ll focus our inquiry on the congressional map, which was the topic of the latest Florida Supreme Court docket case, and any related authorized questions. To that finish, I’m making a Choose Committee on Redistricting,” he continued.
Perez added that the committee’s members can be introduced in September, however he didn’t present a particular timeline for finishing up the redistricting course of.
The Florida Democratic Social gathering known as Perez’s transfer “corruption, plain and easy” in an announcement following the memo’s launch.
“The Speaker is abusing his energy and breaking with a long time of precedent to rig the system in favor of Republicans. Congressional maps are drawn as soon as a decade, after a Federal census, not when a political get together is afraid of dropping energy,” the assertion mentioned.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has voiced his assist for redistricting in latest weeks. Numerous Democratic-held congressional seats could possibly be impacted if redistricting had been to happen, together with these held in South Florida by Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Jared Moskowitz and Lois Frankel. Rep. Kathy Castor (D) within the Tampa space and Rep. Darren Soto (D) exterior of Orlando have additionally been floated as potential targets.
The state’s Republicans noticed a victory final week when the state’s Supreme Court docket dominated to uphold a congressional map that blocked a problem to the elimination of a majority-Black congressional district within the north of the state that beforehand was represented by former Rep. Al Lawson (D). The realm that comprised the previous congressional district is now divided amongst three Republican lawmakers.
The event comes as pink states throughout the nation observe Texas’s lead in redistricting in an effort to assist Republicans maintain on to their majority in Congress in subsequent 12 months’s midterm elections. Different pink states anticipated to participate in redistricting embody Indiana and Ohio. Not like different states, lawmakers in Ohio are going through a deadline to redraw their maps.