June Kronholz reports on the presidential campaign.

Florida doesn’t have any seats at the Democratic National Convention in August, but that hasn’t stopped the party from choosing the people who would fill those seats…if there are any seats to be filled.

Washington Wire readers well know that the Democratic National Committee stripped Florida of its 210 delegates as punishment for holding its primary out of turn in January. The national and state parties, the Obama and Clinton campaigns and the Florida congressional delegation have sparred ever since about how and whether to seat the Florida delegation.

Never mind–the state party has been moving ahead on delegate selection even while that argument has been going on. The state’s 24 pledged party-leader and elected-official delegates will be chosen at a party executive-committee meeting in Orlando on April 5. Sen. Hillary Clinton will be awarded 14 of those seats to Sen. Barack Obama’s 10.

The committee will select Florida’s three unpledged add-on delegates the same day.

The 41 pledged at-large delegates will be chosen at a party executive-committee meeting in Tampa on May 17. Clinton will get 24 seats to Obama’s 16 and one for former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards.

And the 120 Congressional-district level delegates were chosen on March 1, with Clinton receiving 67delegates to 41 for Obama and 12 for Edwards.

Karen Aronowitz, president of the Dade County teachers’ union and a Clinton delegate, says state Democrats never thought of not going ahead with the delegate-selection process. “We’re from Florida; we’re used to a revote turning into a street brawl,” she says.

She adds that she’s convinced she will be seated, but opposes any compromise that would “divyy the pie evenly” by giving half the state’s delegates to each candidate. “That’s not how the vote went.”

When the party stripped Florida of its seats in Denver, it also stripped it of its beds—or rather, its hotel reservations. Some of the state’s superdelegates, who also lost their seats, say they’re making their own hotel bookings in the event no deal is reached.

Aronowitz hasn’t gone that far. “I’m a camper,” she says, and “not too much scares me” about the Colorado woods.