Remember a couple of months ago when the Florida House and Senate couldn't agree over whether to expand Medicaid, and nearly put the state's budget in jeopardy?
Well, it's time to make way for Impasse 2: The Squeakquel.
That's because the two chambers are at odds over the two Congressional maps they drew, and they hit their noon deadline for reconciling the two maps today without doing so.
Things broke down earlier in the morning, according to the News Service of Florida, when Senate Reapportionment Chairman Bill Galvano (R-Bradenton), and House Redistricting Chairman Jose Oliva (R-Miami Lakes) met publicly to discuss their chambers' differences. When it was clear there wouldn't be agreement between the two sides, NSF reports Galvano "got up and abruptly left the meeting."
Then the State Senate voted to extend the deadline to Tuesday at 6 p.m.
It was then that we tuned in to the Florida Channel to catch a live stream of the Tallahassee drama.
Within minutes, the House denied the Senate's request, voting instead to get outta Dodge.
"This extension, if there was truly and avenue by which we could find any sort of middle ground, I would be in support of," Oliva said. "The chance that we could walk away without having produced the product would be a major disappointment."
The House vote to reject the extension passed 99-3.
"It's clear now why we're here. It's the Senate. That's why we're here," said Jared Moskowitz (D-Coral Springs). "They should be ashamed. But they're not."
With that, the chamber sent its own maps back to the Senate, and the Senate sent back a map that "merged" the two chambers' proposals, according to NSF, along with another request to extend session till Tuesday.
No dice, the House said in a 99-2 vote a few minutes before noon.
At 11:59, the Senate adjourned; exactly two minutes later, so did the House.
And with that, they were gone.
The legislature was in special session to re-draw Congressional districts after losing a voting rights group-led lawsuit charging that they gerrymandered despite a voter-approved constitutional amendment asking that they kindly not do that.
The Florida Supreme Court ordered them to hold a special session to remedy the Congressional map (and, later. the Senate one in October).
Shortly into the two-week special session that ended today, controversy emerged.
The issue with the maps revolves around lines drawn that split some cities and counties into multiple districts and, in some cases, eliminate congressional seats for sitting as well as aspiring Congressmen. Affected counties included Hillsborough, Sarasota, Orange, Broward and Palm Beach.
Perhaps at heart of the breakdown was Brandon Republican State Sen. Tom Lee's proposal to shift eastern Hillsborough into Congressman Vern Buchanan's District, cutting another GOP Congressman, Lakeland's Dennis Ross, out of his own district. Some lawmakers questioned his motives and surmised Lee may want to run for the seat himself, something he has denied.
This means the courts will likely be redrawing the maps, though it's unclear how that will be done.
"It could be a hybrid of something the House put forward. It could be a hybrid of something the Senate put forward but ultimately it will be the court's decision," Florida House Speaker Steve Crisafulli said. "They could take the map of the plaintiff and do the same thing. It's the prerogative of the court."
After the two chambers adjourned, House Democratic Leader Mark Pafford called the map fiasco a "colossal failure."
"You're asking a political body to produce maps that don't have politics embedded in them," he said. "Clearly that's an issue. And the way this thing went down also, I think, is symbolic of arrogance of power. There's been 17 years of domination by the Republican Party. And in the most important moment this week, let alone budget and those types of things, to get something done that the Supreme Court asked us to do, we failed miserably."
This article appears in Aug 20-26, 2015.