Nate Monroe: Gerrymandering leaves Jacksonville with no voice in House Speaker chaos

COMMENTARY | U.S. Rep. John Rutherford has never been a champion for underdogs, but one has to admire his commitment to the welfare of the dispossessed Kevin McCarthy, the doofus ex-speaker from California who got outfoxed by goofus Matt Gaetz from West Florida.

Standing up for American democracy didn't tickle Rutherford's fancy, but standing up for the defrocked McCarthy roused the former Duval County sheriff into action and piqued his moral outrage. Rutherford, still stinging over the humiliation of his buddy, was among the 20 or so Republican holdouts who refused to back Jim Jordan to be the next speaker, as if anyone but the most MAGA-poisoned could even discern the difference among the whole lot of them.

It's this curious stand that has gotten Rutherford more attention than perhaps any other episode during his unremarkable run in Congress, save for a now-dismissed ethics investigation and of course his craven vote to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election — the true legacy he will leave behind. What an issue to grandstand over: Which sicko will next try to lead this pack of rabid dogs in the House?

There are already faint whispers this one minor act of independence might earn Rutherford a challenge from the right — though what could be to the right of attempting to overturn a free and fair election is anyone's guess. A Balrog, maybe? Poor John, toiling away for years in service to the darkest, weirdest corners of the Republican Party only to find himself a traitor to the cause. The disrespect! He can insurrect with the best of 'em.

Jacksonville's other congressional representative, Aaron Bean, is playing it safer. Bean — who, first in the Florida Legislature and now in Congress, regularly votes for awful and cruel things with the affability of Dudley Do-Right — is backing Jordan for House speaker. Bean, a professional auctioneer who credits himself with possessing a "quick wit," must be the pluckiest politician ever to find common cause with the humorless Jordan.

In characteristic fashion, Bean on Tuesday released a homey video of himself explaining the daunting math behind the speaker's race and why it has been so hard for anyone to garner the support of 217 members of the Republican conference.

"You have to understand, there's different versions of Republican," Bean said. "Many of these people that haven't voted for him yet, they won in Biden districts. So they think differently."

What are these different versions, exactly? Insurrection-curious and insurrection-forward? Dumb and dumber? It looks like differences in degrees while Planet Normal is about 12 parsecs away.

Bean notably didn't mention his Jacksonville colleague Rutherford in his video, perhaps because acknowledging Rutherford's resistance to Jordan might highlight the fact that Bean actually occupies a more competitive district than Rutherford does. Whatever his twisted reasons, Rutherford isn't bucking Jordan because he's fearful of Biden voters.

Bean, on the other hand, has simply elected to ignore the wishes of a sizable but less powerful portion of his own racially gerrymandered district — namely, the bulk of metropolitan Jacksonville, which contains many majority-Black, heavily Democratic neighborhoods.

Bean, as spirited as he may be, is actually the beneficiary of a racist scheme set into motion by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that ripped away a decades-old congressional seat that provided an opportunity for Black voters in Northeast Florida to elect the candidate of their choice and replaced it with a solidly Republican-performing one. DeSantis did this by lumping in large portions of Jacksonville proper with majority-white exurbs in Clay and Nassau counties, from which Bean hails.

Bean representing Northwest Jacksonville is like plopping liverwurst into a sundae, but the city is stuck with this so very nice huckster. And so Jacksonville, a purple city with a Democratic mayor, has only two far-right loons to speak for it while the U.S. House is in chaos — and given the incredibly divided and close margin between Democrats and Republicans in the House, this is not a statistically insignificant dilemma.

Historically, before Bean came around, Jacksonville could count on a bipartisan congressional coalition — one Democrat and one Republican — that appropriately reflected the city's purplish hue and ensured Jacksonville always had representation with the party in power. This arrangement was so uncontroversial the Florida Legislature sought to preserve it when it drew its own congressional maps. But DeSantis, embarking on a political project to nullify the federal Voting Rights Act and its voter-approved analogue in the Florida constitution, couldn't allow Jacksonville's Democratic-leaning seat to stand, so he folded the city's Black neighborhoods into a Frankenstein district controlled by conservative suburban voters.

That scheme prompted multiple lawsuits, and already one conservative judge slapped down the state's legal arguments. Should DeSantis lose before the ultra-conservative Florida Supreme Court — an otherwise inconceivable outcome made possible only because of the state's brazen incompetence — Bean would be ejected from his comfortable seat so Jacksonville voters could find actual representation instead of a fast-talking clodhopper from Nassau County.

For now, though, Jacksonville is as stuck as the Republican Party.

Nate Monroe is a metro columnist whose work regularly appears every Thursday and Sunday. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Nate Monroe: Map hijinks leave Jacksonville with no voice in House chaos