STEAL ELECTIONS IS THE ONLY WAY FOR REPUBLITURDS
Busted: Congresswoman Caught On Tape Discussing Fiendish Plan To Redraw Democratic District
September 24, 2015 by Robby Berman 42 Comments
Janet-Adkins
It could be that if a politician finds herself saying something like this, she should just stop talking:
“Let me give you inside ball game. Are there any reporters in here? Any reporters? OK. So, inside ball game.
These were the words coming from the mouth of Rep. Janet Adkins as she was talking to a private gathering at August’s quarterly meeting of the Republican Party of Florida. She was about to reveal something really nasty about party strategy to a bunch of North Florida GOP operatives. And somebody recorded it. And then passed it on to Politico.
Adkins was talking most directly to Danny Norton, the Baker County state GOP committeeman: “You can actually, Danny, you — you can be the person that will help get rid of Corrine Brown,” she said. Corrine Brown is a liberal, Black Democrat from Jacksonville, and she’s held her seat in Congress for 23 years. Adkins was about to explain a ”perfect storm“ was gathering that would let them sweep the troublesome Brown out of office.
The perfect storm Adkins described has two parts. First, Florida’s prisons are packed with people who count in the census but can’t vote. Second, with control of both halves of the Florida legislature, Republicans have a rare opportunity to re-define Brown’s district without numerically shrinking it.
As Adkins said in reference to the resulting minority representation in the district:
“You draw [Brown’s seat] in such a fashion so perhaps, a majority, or maybe not a majority, but a number of them will live in the prisons, thereby not being able to vote.”
In fact, the Republican legislature redrew Brown’s district just this way in August, and the proposed redistricting is moving through the courts now.
So much is wrong with this picture.
The strategy’s assumption that only minorities would vote for Brown is so racist.
It also lays bare the nationwide strategy of the Republican party for stealing elections by gaming the rules. Re-districting, or ”gerrymandering,“ is a time-honored tradition of both parties, but it’s rarely been used as comprehensively as it has been recently.
It’s part of the reason Republicans got 57% of the seats in the House of Representatives with only 52% of the vote. (Just FYI: More people voted for Democratic Senators in the last election than Republicans, even though the Republicans hold the majority of seats there, too. It’s because sparsely populated states get the same number of Senators as the crowded ones.)
Rep. Adkins, of course, is feeling the heat now. ”I was having a private conversation,” she says, as if that meant it wasn’t the ugly truth. |
