DeSantis and GOP Legislature win key round in redistricting fight

TALLAHASSEE – Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Republican-controlled Legislature won a key victory Monday in their defense of Florida’s new congressional district lines, with a judge ruling that lawmakers can argue in trial that the state’s Fair Districts standards violate the U.S. constitution. 

DeSantis, now a Republican presidential contender, pushed the redistricting plan through the Legislature last year.  

When voters went to the polls a few months later, U.S. Rep. Al Lawson, a Black North Florida Democrat was among the new map’s first victims, losing his re-election bid while Republicans added four seats from Florida, helping the GOP win control of the U.S. House. 

Opponents say the new boundaries dramatically reduced the influence of Black voters and violated the state’s Fair Districts requirements, approved by voters in 2010 and which prohibit districts that diminish the ability of minorities to elect representatives of their choice. 

But DeSantis and his GOP allies say their self-described “race-neutral” approach complies with the federal constitution’s equal protection clause. Fair Districts violates that provision with its “no diminishment” requirement, the governor’s side is ready to argue in a trial set for August. 

“I don’t believe a state court can ever disregard the import of the federal constitution,” Leon County Circuit Judge J. Lee Marsh said in issuing his ruling following an hourlong hearing. 

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The Florida League of Women Voters and a coalition of Black voting rights organizations and citizens have sued claiming the congressional plan violates the Florida Constitution.  

Along with redistributing Black voters in North Florida, the DeSantis congressional map created 20 districts that last fall elected Republicans, leaving eight won by Democrats. The four-seat gain by Florida Republicans was the largest of any state in last year’s midterms. 

While the state is maintaining that the congressional map already meets all legal standards, Marsh’s ruling gives the House and Senate the ability to argue that at least some of the Fair Districts standards should not even be considered, because they violate federal law. 

DeSantis made similar claims last year, when he took the unusual step of introducing his own proposed congressional maps, which included districts with voting histories that would give Republicans complete command of all North Florida seats. 

When the Legislature initially balked and approved its own congressional map, DeSantis vetoed it and called lawmakers back into a special session where he accomplished his goal. The session ended chaotically, with several Black Democrats in the House attempting unsuccessfully to stop the vote with shouting and an impromptu sit-in, protesting what they called a discriminatory map. 

The governor’s side has argued that the federal constitution supersedes the state Fair Districts standards. The amendments to the state constitution were intended to prevent legislators from drawing lines favoring political parties or incumbents, but now could face their stiffest test in this summer’s trial. 

'Darn close to the most egregiously partisan map in the country'

In helping Republicans win more seats, the DeSantis congressional map eliminated a Jacksonville-to-Tallahassee seat held by Lawson since 2017 – which the governor called a racially gerrymandered district. 

Lawson’s old district had contained Gadsden County, the state’s only majority Black county, which now is included in the district represented by Panama City Republican U.S. Rep. Neal Dunn. 

Lawson challenged Dunn last year but lost in the recontoured, Republican-heavy district. Dunn captured 60% of the vote. 

The new map scatters more than 370,000 Black voters who had been in Lawson’s heavily Black, Democratic-leaning district across four North Florida districts, all Republican leaning and without large Black voting populations. 

For a state that sent its first three Black members to Congress only 30 years ago for the first time since shortly after the Civil War, DeSantis’ approach has been condemned by Black leaders as designed to turn back the political clock. 

The news and data analysis site, FiveThirtyEight, which closely followed redistricting across the nation, last year called Florida’s congressional map “darn close to the most egregiously partisan map in the country.” 

DeSantis, though, is relying on a 2017 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a North Carolina case that found it unconstitutional to racially gerrymander a seat, except in narrow instances that the governor’s side contends, Lawson’s old Jacksonville-to-Tallahassee district failed to meet. 

That North Carolina ruling came two years after Lawon’s old district was created by the Florida Supreme Court, which had taken over the map-making in the last round of once-every-decade redistricting because of constitutional violations by Republican lawmakers drawing the state’s initial maps. 

But just as redistricting case law has evolved, the Florida Supreme Court also has changed. The seven-member court now has five conservative justices appointed by DeSantis and is seen as likely to accept the governor’s arguments if the redistricting case eventually makes it way to them. 

John Kennedy is a reporter in the USA TODAY Network’s Florida Capital Bureau. He can be reached at jkennedy2@gannett.com, or on Twitter at @JKennedyReport