House Speaker Daniel Perez is distancing himself from the creation of the congressional reapportionment map passed last week, but says it wasn’t crafted with partisan intent.
“It was a map that was drawn by the Governor. I don’t want to speak on behalf of the Governor’s Office, but they were the ones that drew it, but I don’t think this was a map drawn on trying to give certain seats to certain parties or certain parts of the state,” the Miami Republican said on “Clay and Buck.”
“I just think that, you know, we believe based on the recent court rulings that we have an opportunity to have a conversation on redistricting, on a mid-decade redistricting, and so that’s exactly what we did.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis has said that the map was a response to a “massive population boom” and legally necessary due to the Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais, a decision that he believes invalidates minority-access districts.
Despite concerns that the 2022 map was malapportioned, DeSantis opted not to address population shifts between then and now, leaving seats north of the Interstate 4 corridor unchanged despite massive growth in a number of counties.
Ultimately, Perez said he can’t predict how the map will impact the partisan makeup of the congressional delegation.
“Where that ends up, I guess only the voters will be able to tell us how many seats may go one way or another. And we won’t know that until November,” Perez said. “I think that we did our job. I think the last redistricting cycle was under a census that may have potentially been flawed.”
House Speaker Pro Tempore Wyman Duggan presided over the vote and an abbreviated, one-sided debate on the map, where Democrats spoke at length while only the House sponsor spoke up in favor of the product passed by a supermajority along party lines.
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