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TALLAHASSEE - House Speaker Johnnie B. Byrd must have struggled to keep a straight face as he objected that an independent commission to draw Florida's voting districts wouldn't be accountable to voters.
Byrd is the reigning P.T. Barnum of Florida politics, but that was a stretch even for him. There is nothing the Legislature does - except, perhaps, when it is whoring for the telephone companies - for which it is less accountable to the voters.
Any other districting method would be an improvement. Even a roomful of chimpanzees with crayons. They, at least, would be innocent of malice and self-interest.
The Legislature gets only one part of it right: Districts are equal in population. But only because the courts demand it. In every other respect, the redistricting process is utterly cynical and morally corrupt. The only states where it does not reek are the handful that have independent redistricting commissions and objective standards.
In Florida, the nest is as foul as when rural legislators representing fewer than 15 percent of Florida's people held majorities of both houses and laughed up their sleeves at Gov. LeRoy Collins' earnest appeals for reform.
For all that it really matters these days, the Pork Chop Gang might as well be back. Voting is pointless more than half the time, and the people seem to know it. The sorry turnout at the polls is not passive acceptance. It is passive disgust.
These are the "choices" they gave you last November:
Nineteen of the 40 Senate seats were uncontested. Fifty-six House members, out of 120, faced only nuisance opposition from write-ins or Libertarians. In the entire Legislature, of 160 so-called "races," only 14 were decided by 10 percentage points or less. Eight of 25 congressional seats were uncontested, and only one of the other 17 was close.
You didn't choose your legislators. They chose you.
The Republican majority accomplished this by packing Democratic voters into as few districts as possible. Incumbency took care of the rest. Even where term limits opened a seat, it was preordained which party would win.
A particularly glaring example is how C.W. Bill Young's congressional district was rigged to remain Republican forever. Against anyone else, a Democrat would have had a fighting chance. So they took nearly 27,000 Democrats out of his Pinellas-based district and attached them, by way of the Sunshine Skyway, to Democratic Rep. Jim Davis' Tampa-based district. The link also needed a narrow slice of Manatee County bordering Tampa Bay, but not a square inch of dry land unites the district.
One effect was to make Davis' district as safe as Young's. Both were unopposed. Another was to ensure that none of those 27,000 Pinellas Democrats will ever have the opportunity to elect a neighbor to Congress. There are more than four times as many Democrats in the Tampa portion of the district. Meanwhile, it makes permanent political orphans of the 85,800 Republicans who live in the district, as they are outnumbered two to one. They were expendable.
Then-Sen. Jack Latvala, the sponsor of this grotesque gerrymander, based it on a similar stunt that Jim Hargrett, a Tampa Democrat serving in the state House, had pulled off to elect himself to the Florida Senate 10 years before. That district, nicknamed the Bug Splat, stretched tentacles so far into four counties that it was eventually trimmed somewhat to settle a federal court suit in which the real losers, the voters, were essentially unrepresented.
It happens to be a Democrat, state Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Dania Beach, who is organizing the initiative campaign that Byrd opposes. But it wasn't so many years ago that Republicans, the minority then, were seeking virtually the same thing. Power apparently corrupts memory as well as character.
Byrd had a second objection, seemingly more plausible: ". . . You're deluding yourself," he remarked to my colleague Steve Bousquet, "if you think you can take politics out of anything." But that cleverly misstated what Ryan is trying to do. He's proposing simply to make politicians play by reasonable rules.
Legislative leaders would appoint a politically balanced commission of 16 members, who would select a 17th person as chairman. However, any decision would have to be sufficiently bipartisan to attract a supermajority of 11 votes. Where the commission couldn't agree, the Supreme Court would take over.
Even more important than the membership is an accompanying proposal to set guidelines, including compactness and territorial integrity of districts. The most important would specify that "districts shall not be drawn to favor or disfavor any incumbent, political party or other person."
This should not be necessary. The courts should have seen to it, as they did for numerical equality four decades ago. The U.S. Supreme Court has, however, accepted a Pennsylvania case that presents the opportunity. This will be the subject of another column.