Florida congressional redistricting hearing heats up
Attorneys for the Legislature hotly denied Thursday that Republican legislative leaders plotted to protect GOP members of Congress and accused plaintiffs in Florida’s marathon redistricting suit of being in cahoots with Democrats to rig the political boundaries.
But lawyers for the League of Women Voters, Common Cause and a coalition of citizens whose lawsuit got the state’s congressional maps tossed out by the Florida Supreme Court said House and Senate leaders were covertly protecting a Cuban-American member in South Florida.
As Circuit Judge Terry P. Lewis began a planned three-day trial on seven alternative maps for the state’s 27 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, Congresswoman Corrine Brown renewed her attack on a proposed district that would stretch a minority-access district from Chattahoochee to Jacksonville. Brown cited recent remarks by a GOP state legislator who was secretly recorded telling other party officers that the key to defeating Brown lies in the district’s number of state prison inmates, who are disproportionately black but are unable to vote.
http://www.wtsp.com/story/news/local/florida/2015/09/25/florida-congressional-redistricting-hearing-heats-up/72790000/