As Florida legislators dissolved their two-week redistricting session Friday without agreement on a congressional map, they acknowledged they were ready to repeat something they had done only once before in state history -- turning over the complicated task of drawing maps to the courts.
The year was 1992, when Bill Clinton and Ross Perot dominated national politics, Florida voters imposed term limits on politicians and Hurricane Andrew devastated Miami-Dade County.
Then, as now, one party controlled government. Lawton Chiles was governor and the House and Senate were run by Democrats. And yet then, as now, political dominance was not enough to overcome the pressures of personal ambition and intra-party divides.
The 1992 redistricting session ended in stalemate over a congressional map and legislators turned the job over to a three-judge panel of federal judges. The court's signature change was the creation of a sprawling, wishbone-shaped minority-majority seat that linked black communities in 14 counties from Jacksonville to Orlando and back through Gainesville.
This time, judges specifically ordered that the district run east-west along the northern counties of the state and, because the legislature couldn't get the job done, the task will go to Leon County Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis. He has until Oct. 17 to get a plan complete and send it to the Florida Supreme Court for final review. The first hearing will be Tuesday.
"It's déj... vu all over again," said Miguel DeGrandy, a Miami attorney and former Republican state representative who successfully aligned with black Democrats in 1992 to challenge the congressional and legislative districts drawn by the Democrat-controlled legislature.
"The result of the 1992 redistricting was a gerrymandered Democrat plan that [the courts] transformed to a plan that became a Republican majority," said DeGrandy, who went on to lead the GOP redistricting team in 2002. "If the Democrats had known that then, they might not have let the courts take it over."
The outcome reshaped Florida's political landscape in a way that continues to reverberate. Republicans secured a majority of seats in the Senate in 1994 and in the House two years later. The last time a Democrat was elected speaker of the House -- St. Petersburg lawyer Peter Rudy Wallace -- would be 1994, and also the last time Democrats elected a majority to Congress.
"Reapportionment has redefined Florida a couple of times and, historically, the court has been the catalyst," said Jon Mills, a former House speaker who is now a law professor at the University of Florida and was one of the experts hired to draft the language for the Fair Districts amendment.
Mills believes that the shift this time could be "monumental." DeGrandy predicts it will lead to "near parity in Florida's congressional delegation" -- now dominated by 17 Republicans, compared to 10 Democrats.
Three times the courts ordered the Florida Legislature to redraw its maps and each time lawmakers continued to pack more voters into the South Florida districts than those allotted to the members of the controlling "Pork Chop Gang." The group of rural conservative Democrats represented less than a quarter of the state's voters but controlled nearly all of the legislature's power.
By the 1980s, Florida's population explosion led to four new seats in Congress, giving the state 19. After the successful push for the creation of majority-minority seats by black Democrats and Republicans, three of the new seats were won by African-American candidates -- Carrie Meek in Miami, Alcee Hastings in Fort Lauderdale and Corrine Brown in Jacksonville -- giving the state its first black voices in Congress since the post-Civil War Reconstruction period.
"It was a strategy of packing and cracking," DeGrandy recalled.
In the 1990s, gerrymandering was not prohibited by law unless it inhibited the ability of minority voters to elect candidates of their choice. Since then, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against districts whose shapes were "irrational" or "bizarre'' and it has concluded that race cannot be the predominant factor in creating legislative and congressional districts.
And the arguments DeGrandy and his colleagues made two decades ago are now being used by Democrats and redistricting reformers for why the legislature's maps are flawed because they pack minorities into districts to help Republicans get elected.
"We actually have Florida standards so it's different this time," Mills said. "And the Florida court will be the interpreter of the Florida Constitution."
"There is a fundamental difference this time,'' said Aubrey Jewett, a University of Central Florida political science professor who has written extensively on Florida's redistricting history. "The court said they would let the legislature redo the districts, but they gave them a very specific set of guidelines so that left very few choices."
DeGrandy believes the move to have the courts draw the maps is exactly as Mills and the authors of Fair Districts intended it. With court-drawn lines, the court can favor or disfavor incumbents or candidates but, he said. "the irony is, nobody can hold them them to that standard because they are the final arbiter."
"The Florida Supreme Court has the semifinal word, but it's likely the federal courts and will have the final, final say," he said.