DeSantis taunts Jeffries with Florida invite — Dem leader responds with $20M warning shot

There's no let up in the verbal fireworks between House Democratic Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in their war of words over congressional redistricting.

One day after DeSantis on Wednesday taunted Jeffries, saying "there’s nothing that could be better for Republicans in Florida than to see Jeffries … everywhere around this state," the top Democrat in the House fired back.

Pointing to the announcement Thursday morning from a top super PAC aligned with House Democrats that it will shell out $20 million to target potentially vulnerable Florida Republican members of Congress, Jeffries said the move is "making it clear that we're on offense. That's our Democratic gift to Ron DeSantis and the Florida Republicans, who he is putting in jeopardy."

The trading of trash talk between the congressman from New York and the two-term Sunshine State governor comes ahead of next week's special session of the Florida legislature that DeSantis called to enact congressional redistricting to create additional right-leaning U.S. House seats.

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Florida is the latest battleground between President Donald Trump and Republicans versus Democrats in the high-stakes showdown over congressional redistricting. Both parties have been redrawing the House district lines in states they control to gain partisan advantages heading into this year's midterm elections, when the GOP will be defending its razor-thin congressional majority.

Pressure from fellow Republicans is mounting on DeSantis to take action after the passage earlier this week in Virginia of a congressional redistricting referendum, which if it clears legal hurdles, will give the Democrat-controlled legislature — rather than the current nonpartisan commission — temporary redistricting power through the 2030 election.

It could result in a 10-1 advantage for Democrats in Virginia's congressional delegation, up from their current 6-5 edge.

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DeSantis called next week's special session to create more GOP-friendly congressional seats in a state where Republicans currently control 20 of 28 congressional districts.

But the road ahead for Florida Republicans isn't easy: they already changed the House district lines four years ago, and it's illegal under the state constitution to draw maps for partisan gain, which is known as gerrymandering.

Jeffries on Wednesday took aim at what he's dubbed "dummymander," which is a play on gerrymander, and argued that redrawing the maps in a state where the GOP suffered setbacks earlier this year in special legislative elections would harm Republican members of Congress.

"Our message to Florida Republicans is, ‘F around and find out,’" Jeffries told reporters as he referenced next week's redistricting legislative session. Jeffries said the redistricting move would lead Democrats to increase their target list of vulnerable Florida House Republicans.

He warned DeSantis and Republicans that "the electoral tide is turning in Florida,"

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Pushing back, DeSantis said "Please. Be my guest. I will pay for you to come down to Florida to campaign."

"I’ll put you up in the Florida governor’s mansion. We will take you fishing," the governor added.

Aiming to prevent what happened during his first term in the White House when Democrats reclaimed the House majority in the 2018 midterms, Trump last spring first floated the idea of rare, but not unheard of, mid-decade congressional redistricting.

The mission was simple: redraw congressional district maps in red states to pad the GOP's fragile House majority to keep control of the chamber in the midterms, when the party in power traditionally faces political headwinds and loses seats.

When asked by reporters last summer about his plan to add Republican-leaning House seats across the country, the president said, "Texas will be the biggest one. And that’ll be five."

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas called a special session of the GOP-dominated state legislature to pass the new map.

But Democratic state lawmakers, who broke quorum for two weeks as they fled Texas in a bid to delay the passage of the redistricting bill, energized Democrats across the country.

Among those leading the fight against Trump's redistricting was Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.

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California voters in November overwhelmingly passed Proposition 50, a ballot initiative that temporarily sidetracked the left-leaning state's nonpartisan redistricting commission and returned the power to draw the congressional maps to the Democratic-dominated legislature.

That is expected to result in five more Democratic-leaning congressional districts in California, which aimed to counter the move by Texas to redraw their maps.

The fight quickly spread beyond Texas and California.

Republican-controlled Missouri and Ohio and swing state North Carolina, where the GOP dominates the legislature, have drawn new maps as part of the president's push.

In blows to Republicans, a Utah district judge late last year rejected a congressional district map drawn by the state's GOP-dominated legislature and instead approved an alternate that will create a Democratic-leaning district ahead of the midterms.

Republicans in Indiana's Senate in December defied Trump, shooting down a redistricting bill that had passed the state House. The showdown in the Indiana statehouse grabbed plenty of national attention.

Virginia was in the redistricting spotlight the past month, leading up to this week's election, where the Democrat-supported referendum passed by a narrow three-point margin.

Now, the fight moves to Florida, where the special legislative session gets underway Tuesday.

But no proposed maps have been circulated yet to state lawmakers, and DeSantis and Republicans in the legislature have had strained relations.

Regardless, there's pressure coming from Washington, in wake of the Virginia vote, for Florida to take action.

"Florida has the right and the intention to do it. And my view is that they should," House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters on Wednesday when asked if Florida's maps should be redrawn in time for the midterms.