With days until the 2024 Legislative Session starts, Ron DeSantis is letting the Senate and House know who’s the boss.
It’s the man with the veto pen.
DeSantis told a crowd in Laconia, New Hampshire, about what happened when the Legislative branch passed a congressional redistricting map he didn’t want, explaining how he got legislators to bend to his will in 2022.
“I saw them working on it. I said, ‘wait a minute,’ you know, and part of it involves like things that were unconstitutional, racial gerrymandering stuff,” DeSantis said, referring to a map that protected districts such as North Florida’s 5th Congressional District (historically represented by a Black member of Congress) and others that provided opportunities to minority candidates.
“And I said, look, I’m not going to sign that,” he said, noting that the Legislature “just kind of went through, they did it” despite him saying he was “going to veto that” and “not going to accept that.”
He noted then that the Legislature fell in line, which happened in a Special Session in Spring 2022. DeSantis’ office drew Florida’s congressional map, one approved by the Legislature on April 21, after DeSantis vetoed their previous product.
“All of a sudden, you know, we were able to, we were able to fix that problem and actually we got, the map got upheld in a court of appeals in Florida already. And I think our Supreme Court is going to hear it, but I mean, we’re going to end up winning on that. So I was right on the law as well,” he said.
Indeed, the 1st District Court of Appeals overturned a lower court decision that struck the map.
DeSantis has credited the map he pushed through with creating a Republican majority in the U.S. House.
“We helped elect four additional Republicans to the U.S. Congress and we probably wouldn’t have the majority if that hadn’t happened,” DeSantis said.
Florida now has 20 Republicans in Congress, up from 16 in the previous Congress. The state gained a seat in reapportionment, taking the state from a 15-12 split to a 20-8 GOP advantage.
Despite the Governor engineering a Republican-leaning map that did ultimately secure the congressional majority, more than half of Florida’s Republicans in the House have endorsed Donald Trump.
U.S. Reps. Gus Bilirakis, Vern Buchanan, Byron Donalds, Carlos Giménez, Matt Gaetz, Anna Paulina Luna, Brian Mast, Cory Mills, John Rutherford, Greg Steube and Michael Waltz have all endorsed Trump.
Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Laurel Lee, whom DeSantis appointed to be Secretary of State, is the only Republican in the delegation to back the Governor’s 2024 bid.
DeSantis has the vast majority of Tallahassee Republicans backing him, however, showing that if he hurt their feelings with their map veto, it was only a temporary thing.
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