Gaetz disses Wasserman Schultz redistricting comments as 'conspiracy theory' | Florida Politics on Astini News
By Anthony Man at Broward Politics
Like most Florida Democrats, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz is frustrated at the Republican go-slow approach to congressional redistricting. And she's offering a theory about the motive.
The Republican plan, she said this week, is to so delay the drawing of new congressional districts that the 2012 elections would be run in the existing districts that reflect the population and political priorities of 10 years ago. Under that scenario, she said, the two new congressional seats the state is getting because Florida's population increased in the last decade might be filled in statewide, at-large elections.
"What they're trying to do, mark my words, is try to push this map drawing all the way until next year … they finish right as federal qualifying begins. What they're risking is, trying to risk is, making sure that we have to run in the existing districts," the Weston Democrat told a questioner at a town hall meeting Monday at the Sunrise Senior Center.
"The Republicans are trying to serve their own interests rather than trying to implement the will of the voters," Wasserman Schultz said.
State Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Niceville, chairman of the Senate Reapportionment Committee, said the congresswoman is pushing a fanciful conspiracy theory.
"Debbie has spent too much time in Washington," he said in a telephone interview. "That is a partisan conspiracy theory that rings the malarkey meter buzzer. My friend Debbie needs to get out of Washington and spend a little bit more time breathing air that has oxygen in it.
"I've heard a lot of things, but I haven't heard anything that wild. There's absolutely no foundation [to what she said] in fact or in theory. That kind of conspiracy theory is the sort that comes in instructions from the mother ship," Gaetz said.
Congressional districts are redrawn every 10 years to reflect population changes uncovered in the Census. Under the one-person, one-vote principle handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court, congressional districts are supposed to have equal population.
Redistricting is intensely political. It can determine the life or death of a politician's career, and can influence which party controls the state's congressional delegation, as well as the makeup of the Florida Senate and Florida House.
And it involves top players. Wasserman Schultz is chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. Gaetz is in line to become Florida Senate president, assuming his party retains its majority, after the November 2012 elections.
Republicans control redistricting because they control the Florida House and Florida Senate. The party in power – whether Democrats or Republicans – typically attempts to maximize its advantages in redistricting.
Here's more of what Wasserman Schultz said in Sunrise:
"If you recall, the voters last November passed two constitutional amendments called Fair Districts Florida. Those two constitutional amendments were designed to make sure that voter could choose their representatives rather than representatives choosing the voters they wanted to include in their districts.
"For years and years it's been the latter. We needed to make sure that in the Constitution the Legislature was required to ignore incumbency when they drew a district so that you weren't gerrymandering a district to pick up some incumbent's house…. We had to make sure that we didn't allow the Legislature to think about political party, so that when a district is drawn it's not drawn to maximize a political party's chance."
Wasserman Schultz described her current Broward/Miami-Dade county district, drawn 10 years ago by Republicans:
"Imagine if I took a paint brush, jammed it in a bucket of paint and threw it up on the wall. That would be what the 20th District would look like. It looks like that because when the Legislature drew it in 2002, they drew a circuitous route through different areas of the county to pick up as many Democrats as possible to pack this district so that the district next door to mine that was represented by [Republican] Clay Shaw at the time had as many Republicans as you could put into it….
"That is why so many cities are chopped up and represented by three, four and sometimes five different members of Congress. The constitutional amendment also said that we have to respect municipal boundaries. And keep districts keep cities as much as possible whole."
"The Republicans are doing their darndest to try to basically ignore what the voters said and so they haven't drawn any maps. All they're doing is allowing people to speak at these bogus hearings that they're having. They're not answering any questions or making any comments and they're not showing any voters any maps at all."
The lack of maps and the nature of the hearings is a constant complaint from Democrats, something they emphasized when the series of hearings hit Davie and Boca Raton last month.
