Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, apparently stepping up his as-yet-unannounced plan to run for president, has proposed wiping registered Democrats off voter rolls in his state and the 27 others whose Electoral College count sent Joe Biden to the White House in 2020.
“There’s nothing in the Constitution that requires citizens to vote for one party or another,” DeSantis said, revealing his congressional map that quadruples Florida’s Republican districts and reduces Democratic districts to a YMCA in Lake Buena Vista and the Green Parrot Bar in Key West.
“Further, there’s nothing in the Constitution that says a ballot has to include certain parties,” he said. “I mean, how about the Federalist Party? Gone. The Whig Party? Gone. The Southern Rights Party, the White Citizens Parties, the National Socialist League. Regrettably, all gone. So why not the Democrat Party?
“I have no doubt that legislators in Arizona and Georgia and Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and all those other states whose votes were stolen will be more than happy to pass laws similar to my Keep the Voters’ Rights Far Right redistricting plan.”
DeSantis insisted his latest announcement, like those about mask mandates, school openings, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ issues and reviving the Second World War-era Florida State Guard, has nothing to do with the possibility that he might face a showdown with Donald Trump, who lost his re-election bid for the presidency to Biden despite winning Florida’s 29 electoral college votes.
But the governor would not address the section of his proposed congressional redistricting map in which Mar-a-Lago and surrounding portions of Palm Beach County would be traded to Cuba in exchange for Baracoa, Cuba’s fashionable tourist city.
“Who wants to visit a rundown resort that used to be a private social club whose owner violated agreements by turning it into his full-time residence? I mean, before the year’s over that owner could be arrested for I don’t know how many kinds of fraud and …”
DeSantis paused.
“Oh, wait,” he said. “People love to visit the New York steak house where John Gotti had a Gambino crime boss killed, and the Bonnie and Clyde Ambush Museum in Louisiana, and the Chicago movie theater where John Dillinger was gunned down by the FBI, and the Florida resorts where Al Capone stayed, and … Never mind.”
Ryan Newman, the DeSantis’ administration’s top consigliere and bag man, said the governor had “legal concerns” about the gerrymandered congressional maps being proposed by Florida’s heavily Republican legislature.
“They don’t go far enough. Not by a long shot,” Newman said. “We have submitted an alternative proposal, which we can support, that the (United States) Supreme Court will no doubt uphold regardless of any allegations that we are eliminating Negr … eliminating Black districts in northern Florida and squeezing Hispanic districts to prevent those people from electing their own … uh … people.”
Previous redistricting in the state has undergone legal challenges. One of them, in 2012, triggered a four-year battle in which liberal groups successfully sued under Florida’s Fair District amendments to its Constitution.
“The existing maps were written by an unelected, radical left-wing court seven years ago,” said Rep. Anthony Sabatini, R-Mafioso. “The governor’s map, written by an unelected, radical right-wing committee which has donated an ungodly amount of money to his campaign, resolves all the previous problems, like openness and fairness.”
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