Florida’s GOP-led legislature: They lie, they cheat, they govern
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” In the seemingly endless and still unfinished business of reapportioning Florida’s legislature, Republicans have practiced all three types of lies with a vengeance.
This typology of lies was popularized in the nineteenth century by Mark Twain. However, in the passage in which the phrase appears, Twain was quoting British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Regardless, the sentiment still rings true today, nowhere as much as in the Sunshine State.
Politicians, advertisers, con men–among others–often employ such lies, but Florida’s Republicans have done them all one better by committing all three at the same time and turning statistics into a double-edged sword.
What I mean by that last statement is this: For internal purposes, to understand and act on political reality, specifically in order to figure out how to rig reapportionment in their favor, Republicans–or rather their political consultants–employed true stats that told them how to slice and dice the electoral map to for maximum political gain. Call this the use of honest stats for a dishonest end. However, for external purposes, in order to publicly defend their deliberately gerrymandered map, Republicans used statistics in the classical Twain/Disraeli sense, as another way of lying.
Let’s start with the Lie, the simple lie. That’s the GOP’s pretense that they would carry out a fair and constitutional reapportionment process. But that’s not all what they did or intended to do. The maps they presented were neither fair nor constitutional.
Just about everybody saw through this lie, not just the Democrats but also non-partisan groups such as the League of Women Voters. The courts didn’t buy what the Republicans were selling either, and sent them back to the drawing board. In July, in a 5-2 ruling, the Florida Supreme Court said legislators had run roughshod over the provisions in the state constitution that prohibit gerrymandering. The court said the whole exercise was “tainted with improper political intent” and ordered legislators to come up with a new map.
Subsequent revelations showed that the GOP was lying through its teeth from the very beginning. The Republicans never had any intention of playing fair or abiding by the constitution in the first place. Indeed, their intentions were quite the opposite. They did everything they could to tilt the playing field so the other side would always be running uphill.
Now for the damned lie. Critics of the GOP suspected the redistricting maps were the work of professional consultants working hand-in-hand with legislators. Republicans denied it up and down. They insisted consultants played no role in deciding the final maps. That was a damned lie.
In the absence of a smoking gun, Republicans thought they could get away with it. But the judge hearing the case challenging the reapportionment map threw them a curve. He ordered the Republicans to disclose a trove of emails, maps and other damning data that circulated among legislators involved in redistricting and their hired consultants.
It was demonstrated that what Republicans had claimed all along was a damned lie. Indeed, consultants secretly played a huge role in the whole process. Several of the maps proposed by legislators were identical to the ones consultants had drawn up. The fix was in but it didn’t stick because the damned lie was exposed through the painstaking analysis of University of Florida professor Daniel Smith.
Smith was able to detect that Republican consultants had carefully scoured through census-track level data to figure out how to move voters in or out of certain districts in order to maximize the chances of Republican victories.
It would have been the perfect crime. Republican consultants certainly thought so. But they didn’t count with Smith, who uncovered a map produced by Republican consultant Marc Reichelderfer titled “Perfect Pieces.” In Smith’s words, it “contained the fundamental structure for subsequent maps introduced by the Florida House.”
The Republicans tried to use their own crude form of statistical reasoning to defend their case that consultants did not play a role in redistricting. House lawyer George Meros cited Republican losses in the 2012 legislative elections as proof. Both the trial court and the Florida Supreme Court rejected the argument.
The good news in all this is that Republicans were not as clever as they thought and their conspiracy was blown. The bad news is that politics in this state continues to be thoroughly dominated by a bunch of cheaters with no respect for the constitution or the people.
The worst news of all, however, is the way Republicans have used the power obtained through such chicanery to mess with some of the neediest people among us while lavishing tax cuts and other gifts on the richest and greediest. As columnist Fred Grimm recently wrote in the Miami Herald, Scott administration bureaucrats have even figured out a way to deny children with serious and complex medical conditions the specialized care they desperately need.
Heartless, they are. Cheaters, they are. Liars, they are. Scofflaws, they are. Powerless, they are not. And, as the reapportionment scandal demonstrates, they are willing to use any means necessary to hold on to that power.
