House lawmakers approved a series of changes Monday for the Senate’s districting plan. The new draft borrows ideas from the Legislature’s opponents.
Wednesday last week the Florida Senate approved a new map of its district lines. Now, continuing a theme that’s marked major legislative undertakings all year, the House is moving forward with a different proposal.
“The Senate also spoke about the plaintiffs and their concerns on the map,” Rep. Jose Oliva (R-Hialeah) says. “They did not have the opportunity and the time to incorporate any of that into their map.
“We did,” he says, “and so we did incorporate that into our map.”
Oliva says the two chambers aren’t headed for a show down. But the tone from other committee members was a bit curt.
“So I watched the Senate the other day waiting to see if the Senate could get a base map out of the chamber, and instead of seeing that, we all watched history repeating itself,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Coral Springs) says, referring to a last minute floor amendment made when the Senate first started it’s districting process in 2012.
“Fast forward three years to where we are today,” he goes on, “millions of dollars being spent, embarrassment, what happens? What does the Senate do?”
“Yet another senator proposes an amendment—on the floor, and it just so happens to change the proposed Senate base map drawn by staff so that two incumbent senators don’t have to run against each other,” Moskowitz says.
But according to Oliva, that’s fine. Because in a nifty bit of legislative judo, he’s taking a middle path between the Senate and the plaintiffs’ proposals. Here’s how he responds to the amendment.
“And so with that amendment there was a numerical improvement,” Oliva allows, before going on, “The plaintiffs also had a numerical improvement.”
“It was significantly better to take the plaintiffs’ map regardless of what intent they had, and be able to use that as a numerical improvement, and incorporate it in our map and scrub it clean of any possible intent,” Oliva says.
With this new, “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” strategy, Oliva appears to be lining up a proposal aimed at sapping the plaintiffs’ arguments before the map heads to a judge. The differences between the Senate map and the one passed out of Oliva’s committee are slight in terms of space and distance, but many come in Miami—an area where Senators may be willing to fight.
But if Oliva’s right, and the House and Senate can avoid another crisis, the Legislature may be able to convince a judge to side with lawmakers.
