>>Welcome back, it's the responsibility of the legislature
to redraw congressional maps every 10 years.
And this year they did that.
But Governor Ron DeSantis vetoed their maps
and came up with his own and is forcing legislators
back to Tallahassee next week to approve his maps.
Later, I'll speak to Democratic state
Senator Annette Taddeo, who is calling on Democrats
to boycott the special session next week.
But first I spoke to Steve Bousquet,
the editorial page editor
for the south Florida Sun Sentinel.
>>Well, the significance is twofold, way I see it.
You've got a legislature that is totally capitulated
to a governor who wants to diminish black voting power
in the state of Florida in the year 2022.
So whatever they do is going straight to the courts.
But to me, the larger institutional problem here
is DeSantis is running roughshod over redistricting
and no one will stand up to him.
>>The net effect is sort of twofold.
We can talk about the minority representation in a second.
But even more important I think in some ways for Republicans
is that they may be able to pick up four additional seats
that under the old maps they wouldn't have necessarily
got their hands on.
So that could be the difference of who controls Congress,
the House, next session.
>>No question about it.
I mean, four seats in this state in one cycle
to flip like that is really astonishing.
And I know what happened in Miami-Dade in 2020
where the Democrats lost two seats but still.
This scenario, one way of looking at it is that the seat
now held by Charlie Crist in St. Petersburg
could go Republican and one of the seats in Orlando
held by a Democrat could also go Republican.
>>So when you look at this, why is the legislature,
you use the word capitulating, why is the legislature
capitulating to the governor on this?
>>I think they're intimidated by him.
I think that you cannot overlook the fact
that DeSantis is enjoying immense popularity
with the Republican base at the moment.
But that should not change the fact that within this state,
you have a separation of powers and the legislature
is a co-equal branch of government with the executive.
Through the years, Jim, those of us in the media,
me included, I'll certainly own up to my share
of the responsibility, we played up conflicts
between governors and legislatures.
But looking back on it, it's not only necessary.
It's healthy for the system for legislators
of the same party as the governor
to stand up to that governor.
You need that because the system works better
when there are checks and balances against each branch.
And we completely lost that here.
>>Well, one of the things I think is, you know,
from a political standpoint is genius on the governor's part
but it sort of shows the raw politics of all this,
he has not signed the budget, which means he holds
every member in the Senate and the House,
projects in their districts.
He could line item veto those projects.
And he made it clear he was not gonna sign a budget.
He was gonna wait till after this session,
this special session, to see how people did.
And then he would decide what to keep
and what to remove from his budget.
>>A good point but here again, Jim,
that should not be DeSantis's call alone to make.
Let me explain.
Every year they bounce it back and forth in Tallahassee
between the presiding officers.
And this year it happens to be the House Speaker,
Chris Sprowls, who's controlling the flow of legislation.
Behind the scenes, they work it out privately,
staff to staff, so that the governor's office
isn't overwhelmed with too many bills at one time.
And once he gets a bill, the governor has 15 calendar days
in which he must act, 15 days.
Sprowls should have given the governor the budget
15 days ago and taken this weapon out of his hand.
They didn't do that. So you're absolutely right.
We're going into a special session where he has that budget
to use as leverage because members
really want these projects to take home.
>>You know, the governor hasn't hidden
his agenda here at all.
He says that he wants to draw maps that are race-neutral.
We're gonna potentially lose, likely lose
at least two African American representatives
as a result of this.
>>That's right and just within the past couple of hours,
before speaking to you here, I went out into the hinterlands
of north Florida and covered a local event
with Congressman Al Lawson.
Al Lawson is in the crosshairs here
and is the one most likely to lose his seat in Congress.
Lawson is an African American Democrat.
He's been in politics in north Florida for four decades.
He represents the little tiny town of Midway,
a majority black community just west of Tallahassee.
He brought home some money for a community recreation center
and his constituents were enthralled,
you know, to get that money.
It's a poor, downtrodden little place.
And but for the past six years, they've had a voice
in Washington and they've had someone
looking out for them who looks like them.
And that's now imperiled by what's gonna happen
with DeSantis and the legislature next week.
>>How much of this do you think also is part
of DeSantis's drive to potentially run for president,
to establish himself as a national figure
in doing these types of of maneuvers here in Florida
to ingratiate himself with the national Republican party?
>>I think it's central to that whole strategy,
even though it is dividing Floridians and dividing us
along racial lines in a new way.
But I think that if Ron DeSantis can raise his hand and say,
"Hey, you know what? Remember me?
"I'm the guy who hung tough and insisted
"on quote race-neutral congressional districts.
"And as a result, Kevin McCarthy is Speaker
"of the House of Representatives."
He's gonna look like a hero again to the Republican base.
>>Democratic state Senator Annette Taddeo
says she will boycott next week's session.
I asked her why.
>>Because frankly, I cannot believe that we are experiencing
what we're experiences.
We are literally seeing the governor interject himself
into a process that's supposed to be done by the legislature
and drawing his own maps.
And at that, unconstitutional maps.
So I believe that if we do not in some way,
and all of us can do it in different ways but in some way
object to the fact that we are no longer having a balance
of powers to really divide out the branches
and that we are simply rubber stamping anything
the governor sends our way, including something
so important such as the maps where the voters
already spoke loud and clear.
They said they don't want politicians doing the maps.
They want them to be fair.
>>I've spoken to a number of other senators
and I don't get the sense that there's a groundswell
of support for your idea.
Did you really think that there would be a large group
of Democrats that would join you in not showing up
in Tallahassee next week?
>>No, I did not think there would be a large group.
I actually know that that is a difficult ask.
But I really believe that we as Democrats,
if we are not gonna fight for something as substantial
as having representation, taking politics out of the drawing
of the maps, if we are not going to stand up for the erasing
of black and brown seats, literally, I don't know
what we'll stand for.
And we need to, in whatever way each senator
and representative wants to, stand up
and fight this tooth and nail.
>>Do you not think there is value in being on the floor,
being in the committees where this is heard,
establishing a record, asking tough questions,
putting things into the public domain
that can be used by the courts?
Couldn't you be the one asking those sorts of questions
that might elicit a response that could be pivotal
in a court case?
>>I know that that is indeed the case in many cases.
And as a matter of fact, some of the reasons
why we have SB 90 now being appealed
because a judge decided many of the parts
were actually not constitutional
or were suppressing minorities' rights.
Definitely, there are things that we put on the record
throughout the entire process.
But guess what? We had a process.
We had a process of drawing maps. We had a committee.
We had an entire time during the session to do this.
And we did this. And guess what?
This Democrat voted for that map that the Senate proposed
for the congressional districts.
Why? Because it went through a process.
Is it perfect? No.
But it is what the voters asked us to do,
which is to go through a process and do it properly.
What I'm saying is we are no longer having a process.
We are throwing it out.
And literally the House Speaker, the Senate President,
are just simply saying, "Whatever you want, governor,
"we're just gonna turn around and do it."
What deal happened? They're not gonna tell us on the floor.
The deal happened on their own in the dark of night
or on the phone where there is no record.
And the point is we must stand up,
whatever way each senator and person in the House
decides to do this, we must stand up and fight
and call out the wrong of this process that is just a farce.
>>So do you believe Democrats are entirely irrelevant?
>>No, I do not. And that's my point.
Democrats are not irrelevant but we must stand up strong
and show that and I know we are united
in disagreeing with what's going on.
We have to fight this because we do have federal laws.
I think the ultimate goal is to go all the way
to the Supreme Court and undo the rights
that for so many years minority communities
have had in order for us to have a voice
in the halls of the state legislatures and the Congress.
>>There is a process and it will very likely
end up in the courts.
So I guess the hardest question I would ask you is this.
If you're not willing to go to Tallahassee next week
and fulfill your duties as an elected representative
of the people of your district, why not just resign
and have somebody else go up instead?
>>I am fulfilling my duty.
My duty is to ensure that we do things legally
and through the process.
When the process is thrown out by the institutions,
January 6th is actually a coup and an insurrection example
but all it takes is for us to not say anything,
to not actually fight when you are usurping the process
of checks and balances and the legislative process
we are supposed to do.
To go there is to actually, to me, is to say that I am okay
with usurping our duty, which is our duty to do the job
we were there to do.
It's not just to press a button.
It is actually to make sure that it's done properly
and not just to rubber stamp
what the governor sends our way.