Only a sick city like Miami would hire a tainted figure to redraw its voting map
This is a perfect example of why Miamians don’t trust City Hall. City of Miami politics are sick, sick, sick — and there’s no vaccine, no hope in sight for a cure.
We don’t have commissioners who lead.
We don’t have a city manager with the wherewithal to act outside of politics.
We have people in government, elected and otherwise, who manipulate the system to get the political results they want at every twist and turn.
And that’s what Commissioner Alex Diaz de la Portilla was doing when he recommended the city hire as a consultant on the
2020 Census redistricting his friend, former Florida Senate President Bill Galvano — one of the people involved in Florida’s fraudulent gerrymandering of districts to benefit the election of Republicans.
Diaz de la Portilla wants to manipulate the voting map of Miami-Dade’s most populous city — and he has seen to it that the city recruit a master ringleader.
Voters, after all, have short memories and attention spans. Politicians count on it.
ILLEGAL MAP-DRAWING
But Galvano led the Republican Senate’s yearslong efforts to draw new state and congressional boundaries all over Florida. He and other leading Republican lawmakers intentionally created, in violation of the law, districts that favored incumbents and political parties.
Thanks to champions of democracy, voter rights groups like the League of Women Voters who pursued legal action and challenged the results, the Supreme Court issued eight rulings throwing out some districts, including in Miami, and sent the lawmakers back to the drawing board.
The process and ensuing legal battles cost taxpayers more than $11 million.
All this because they refused to honorably draw congressional districts to reflect and represent Florida’s growing and changing population.
That was the task, but the process was a sham from the start.
Galvano and other Senate Republicans staged hearings around the state, as required by law, but if you sat through them — as I did at one held in Miami — you could tell the lawmakers were hardly making an attempt to listen to the concerns and calls to be representative and inclusive.
The disinterest in their words and body language spoke volumes. They were just filling in the time to comply with a prescription in the law. They weren’t interested in really learning about Miami or Jacksonville or Orlando.
There was one criteria when creating voting districts: Stacking as many as possible with majority Republican voters.
A city government with good intentions wouldn’t hire the man who led this history.
Galvano isn’t an expert at redistricting, as Diaz de la Portilla peddles.
He’s an expert at unconstitutional gerrymandering, the practice of manipulating the boundaries of an electoral body to favor one party, and so achieve the desired political results.
Galvano has barely started and he’s already ripping off the taxpayers, thanks to his enablers at City Hall.
He’s charging a fee of $10,000 a month, plus expenses, this month for the job of driving around and getting to know the city.
It’s not only an outrageous amount — but Galvano is an outsider, a Bradenton lawyer whose ties to Miami are possible thanks to the harmful political atmosphere in Tallahassee that has engendered a pact among Republican lawmakers North, South, East and West to work for one boss: the GOP, not the voters.
His hiring is one more bad move by a Miami walking backwards, one election at a time.
The city glistens on the outside, but on the inside it can’t get rid of the corruption. It brings back to powerful positions people like the one-man wrecking ball named Joe Carrollo, who presided over the city’s bankrupt years.
Diaz de la Portilla is all in with Carollo; both are Republicans who are supposed to be in non-partisan roles, although that seldom happens.
Between the two, they’ve ensured City Commission meetings are again a circus.
And now here comes suave carpetbagger Galvano.
Things like this happen when politicians can count on an uninformed, clueless electorate that’s quick to believe rumors, to accept untruth as the word of the divine as long as they come from the party.
You are hereby warned, Miamians.
Don’t let Diaz de la Portilla and Carollo get away with doing to Miami with the results of the 2020 Census what they did in Florida in 2012-15.
Be present during the process, be vigilant — and speak up.