The legal theory underpinning Florida’s new congressional map that favors Republicans will face its first test soon.
On Friday, a state circuit court in Tallahassee will hear arguments from plaintiffs asking to block the new map on the grounds that it violates the state constitution.
Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the new map into law last week. It gives Republicans advantages in all but four of the state’s 28 congressional districts — four more than under the previous map.
The new districts were immediately met with legal challenges from voting and civil rights groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, the League of Women Voters, the League of United Latin American Citizens and Equal Ground.
All three of those suits have been consolidated into one suit.
Constitutional questions
The central argument by the plaintiffs is the admission from the bill’s authors that they ignored the state’s voter-approved constitutional protections against gerrymandering.
In 2010, Floridians voted to adopt the Fair Districts Amendments to the state constitution to protect majority-minority districts, mimicking similar protections in the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The amendments also added protections against partisan gerrymandering.
Because the state ignored those protections, the plaintiffs argue, the new map must be thrown out.
“This is very straightforward, and it's just a matter of whether the Florida courts, including the Florida Supreme Court, will enforce the very clear language of the state constitution,” said Marina Jenkins, the executive director of the National Redistricting Foundation. It’s supporting the plaintiffs in the suits.
An untested defense
DeSantis is confident that the map will stand. He believes that a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling over another state’s map that gutted the Voting Rights Act negates Florida’s constitutional protections, too.
During debate on Louisiana’s proposed map last month, the court’s conservative majority ruled that the map that created a majority Black district was unconstitutional because it relied on race.
That opinion limits a key section in the Voting Rights Act — the same section from which the Florida amendments derived their own minority voting protection.
The governor is asserting that the ruling in Louisiana v. Callais not only negates the racial protections in the Fair Districts Amendments, it also nullifies their ban on partisan gerrymandering, an assumption built into the new map.
National Redistricting Foundation Executive Director Marina Jenkins rejected that theory during Tuesday’s press conference.
“The legal response is, that's absolute nonsense,” said Jenkins. “I realize that's not a particularly legal response, so I will certainly leave it to the lawyers who are arguing tomorrow to make that more artfully, but that is just not the way the law works.”
What’s next
If the court denies plaintiffs’s motion for a temporary injunction on Friday, Jenkins said they’ll appeal, hoping to resolve the question quickly.
If it’s appealed to the state Supreme Court, the suit is likely to face opposition, experts say. DeSantis has filled nearly every seat on the Florida Supreme Court with conservative justices who have been sympathetic to many of his highest-profile cases.
Last year, the court upheld a new congressional map that the governor backed in 2022. It was challenged for allegedly violating majority-minority protections in the Fair Districts Amendments.
Meanwhile, while the constitutionality question remains unsettled, local election officials are struggling to anticipate which map to use as filing deadlines draw near.
