Stacking The Deck.

Now DeSantis has created a new way to gerrymander… the court districts! Dividing them up so that they will always have a conservative DA and judges! Scary!

The Florida GOP Has a New, Devious Way to Thwart Liberal Judges and Prosecutors
Slate
By John Pfaff
September 19, 2023

This summer, Republicans in Florida launched an under-the-radar, yet incredibly effective, attack on criminal justice reformers in the state. In mid-June, the Republican speaker of Florida’s House of Representatives asked the state Supreme Court to create a commission to look into redrawing judicial circuit borders. By the end of the month, the Florida Supreme Court had created a commission to review its judicial circuits, moving toward a devastating judicial gerrymander. The effort was a seemingly technocratic act, but it’s actually one of the most direct assaults on the politics of criminal justice reform after years of attacks by state-level Republican officials on reforms adopted in their more Democratic cities.

How is able to do this devious thing?

In most states, prosecutors and judges are elected or appointed by county. The borders of counties are fairly fixed. But Florida is one of about 14 states that defines the jurisdictions—and thus the electorate in them—for prosecutors and judges as multi-county circuits. The state’s 67 counties are consolidated into 20 judicial circuits. In theory, the request from Florida House Speaker Paul Renner was made in the name of cost savings and the demographic and population changes since 1969, when the circuit maps were last drawn. But these borders are easy to change in politically motivated ways, and create a lot of opportunities for opportunistic map-drawing.

So they are going to pack the courts! Just like the way that they did with the Supreme Court!

Our little would be dictator DeSantis wants to create a fascist state where he controls every facet in the state. The test is going to come in 2026, DeSantis will have to sit out the election cycle, Ballotpedia says…

The Governor of the State of Florida is an elected constitutional officer, the head of the executive branch, and the highest state office in Florida. The governor is elected by popular election every four years. There is no lifetime limit on the number of times he or she may be elected, but a governor who has been elected to two consecutive terms must be out of office for at least one election cycle before being eligible for re-election.

So it will be interesting to see if DeSantis steps down or changes the Constitution.