Abuse of Power

“It’s really outrageous on a number of fronts,” said Beth Rotman, money in politics and ethics program director at Common Cause, a national group that promotes government accountability. “This ethics agency has a job to do for everyday Americans,” Rotman said. “They have a job to do for we the people who have these laws in place, and they have a job to do and if there has been any potential issue they need to investigate, they need to be able to start to do their jobs and go forward with this without potential retribution, which is what this looks like from here.”

Common Cause Florida, FairDistricts Now and five individual voters filed a motion late Tuesday asking 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Allen Winsor to recuse himself from the lawsuit the groups filed March 11, asking the federal court to set the new congressional districts. Winsor, who was appointed to the federal bench by former President Donald Trump, is one of three judges named by Chief Judge William Pryor to a panel to handle the case. Also on the panel is U.S. District Judge M. Casey Rodgers, a George W. Bush appointee, and U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan, a Barack Obama appointee. “Irrespective of his ability to remain evenhanded, Judge Winsor’s extensive advocacy and litigation efforts in Florida’s last redistricting cycle on behalf of the Florida House of Representatives ... raise legitimate questions about his role in deciding Florida’s congressional district plans in this redistricting cycle,’’ the motion states. ... “Judge Winsor’s work as the longstanding Florida House’s legal counsel, and his efforts to defeat those redistricting standards, would make it difficult for an informed lay observer to have confidence in his fair resolution of this matter,’’ they said.

“At the heart of the map that the governor is pushing, is to dismantle a district that has given Black communities in northern Florida the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice. The governor’s actions are an effort to bully the Legislature or the courts into adopting a map that takes away people’s voting rights and is unconstitutional,” said Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director for Common Cause, a nonpartisan pro-democracy watchdog group. “Florida voters overwhelmingly adopted some of the strongest anti-gerrymandering protections in the nation — both against racial and partisan gerrymandering. The governor is ready to shred the Florida Constitution and the will of the people to advance his hyper-partisan, anti-Black ideology,” said Feng.

In 2009, Ginni Thomas founded a “tea party” nonprofit called Liberty Central to help defeat President Barack Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act. She raised $550,000 from undisclosed donors to fund it. This prompted the nonprofit Common Cause to call on Clarence Thomas to recuse himself from the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case challenging limits on corporate political spending. He did not. Further investigation by Common Cause revealed that Clarence Thomas had failed to disclose the $686,589 salary his wife earned from the conservative Heritage Foundation, a major opponent of Obama’s health care law, from 2003-2007.

Advocates for redistricting reform already have their sights set on a better process, possibly an independent commission such as ones used in other states. Catherine Turcer, executive director of Common Cause Ohio, said they would not rush anything to the ballot, but something needed to change.  "They're drunk on power," Turcer said. "They need to be removed from the decision-making process." 

Getting people to look beyond congressional gerrymandering and at distortions for state legislative districts can be a challenge, said Suzanne Almedia, redistricting and representation counsel at Common Cause, a government watchdog group. “Particularly, given the polarized nature of the US Congress, it’s a lot more straightforward to tell a story of Democrats versus Republicans on the national level than it is to think through the nuances of what happens on the state level,” she said. The policies that most directly affect people’s lives, she added – school funding, public health policy and voting rights among them – are all decided by state legislatures. One recent survey found that Republicans are more likely to identify state legislatures as an important forum for driving policy decisions.