TALLAHASSEE – Attorneys for voter groups and the state delivered closing arguments Tuesday in a federal trial to decide whether Gov. Ron DeSantis intentionally discriminated against Black voters by enacting a congressional map which erased a North Florida seat long held by a Black Democrat.
New district boundaries pushed by DeSantis scattered hundreds of thousands of Black voters across four North Florida districts where they appear to have little political impact. All four seats were won by GOP members of Congress.
Republicans captured 20 of Florida’s 28 districts, a four-seat gain last fall that helped the party gain command of the U.S. House. DeSantis has taken credit for the GOP’s success as he now campaigns for the party’s presidential nomination, in which he is trailing far behind former President Donald Trump.
“It is blatantly about race from Day 1,” said Gregory Diskant, attorney for plaintiffs including the NAACP, Common Cause, Fair Districts Now and individual voters who want the congressional boundaries thrown out by the court.
They charge that DeSantis violated the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection and voting rights protections with the Republican-heavy map that has left no Black member of Congress from North Florida for the first time in 30 years.
“Why did he care about this so much?” Diskant said, answering by claiming that “racial animus” was behind the governor’s actions.
“He did not want a Black performing district in North Florida,” he added.
Seat held by Black Democrat targeted
DeSantis singled out the district held by U.S. Rep. Al Lawson, a Black Democrat from Tallahassee, for elimination last year by labeling it racially gerrymandered – with the governor also claiming that it violated the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause.
Mohammad Jazil, attorney for the DeSantis administration, said racial discrimination was far from the governor’s intent. Instead, he said DeSantis was focused only on assuring that Florida lawmakers would not recreate what the governor alleged was an unconstitutional district linking Black communities in the Tallahassee-area to those in Jacksonville.
Jazil and witnesses for the state contend that DeSantis determined that the east-west district exposed a conflict between the state constitution’s Fair District amendments and federal equal protection standards.
Fair Districts prohibit diminishing the power of minority voters in a district to elect a candidate of their choice. But DeSantis came up with what even Republican lawmakers termed a “novel” legal theory that the amendments violated equal protection, although no courts have determined that.
“I think we’ve established that there is no intentional discrimination,” Jazil said in arguing before the three-judge panel presiding over the case.
DeSantis’ map-maker said court ‘got it wrong’
The governor’s interim chief-of-staff and chief map-maker, J. Alex Kelly, who Tuesday was recalled to testify and became the last witness in the case, had last week declared that the Supreme Court, “got it wrong,” when creating the Tallahassee-to-Jacksonville district.
It was represented by Lawson from 2016 until he lost last fall to U.S. Rep. Neal Dunn, R-Panama City, in a redrawn, Republican-favored seat.
Determining that DeSantis intentionally acted to discriminate against Black Floridians is a potent charge against the governor and likely difficult for plaintiffs to prove.
The judges – two appointed by Republican presidents and the third named by former President Barack Obama – said they expect to rule on the case by the end of the year.
DeSantis accused of discriminatingRedistricting trial: Voters’ groups say DeSantis ‘on mission’ to cut Black district
How DeSantis got his waySpecial session: Florida lawmakers heeding Gov. DeSantis’ demand for new congressional map, enraging opponents
The governor, though, has enraged many Black voters with his attacks on diversity programs, how Black history is taught and enacting tough penalties on demonstrations stemming from the Black Lives Matter movement.
The Lawson seat included a 46% Black voting age population. DeSantis vowed to create what he called a “race-neutral” map and got the Republican-controlled Legislature to go along with him, after vetoing maps approved by lawmakers.
One map approved by the Legislature created a Black-leaning district confined to the Jacksonville-area only and included a back-up map which retained Lawson’s east-west district, in case the DeSantis plan was struck down by a court.
DeSantis vetoed maps more favorable to Black voters
But DeSantis vetoed those maps and ordered lawmakers into a special session last year, where his plan was adopted. The North Florida districts won by Republicans include Black voting age populations ranging from 13% to 32%.
A Black Democrat had represented North Florida in Congress since 1993, but after last fall’s elections, there are none.
A state court last month ruled that the congressional plan is unconstitutional for violating the state constitution’s Fair Districts standards. The state has appealed and arguments are set for Oct. 31 in the 1st District Court of Appeal.
Over four days of testimony in federal court, the three judges heard presentations from several redistricting experts, House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell of Tampa and Kelly from DeSantis’ office.
Jazil, for the state, focused on testimony intended to show that the boundaries in place for last fall’s elections were not crafted with discrimination in mind.
He seized last week on statements by a witness for the voting groups – historian and voting expert J. Morgan Kousser – who contended that districts with at least a 30% Black voting age population could be capable of electing a Black lawmaker.
One of the North Florida seats, Congressional District 4, where U.S. Rep. Aaron Bean, R-Ponte Vedra Beach, was elected, has a 32% Black population.
“Someone looking to exclude Black voters from a district that had a district with 30% Black voters would be pretty bad if that’s what they drew, right?” Jazil asked Kousser.
The historian rejected Jazil’s implication, pointing out that the 30% was a general level and that a host of other voting patterns would have to be considered to determine whether Black voters had a true opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice, as earlier court rulings and the Florida Constitution have required in the region.
Another plaintiffs’ witness, Matt Barreto, a UCLA political scientist and pollster for President Joe Biden, was similarly grilled by Jazil.
Barreto, though, said that while some past election results showed Republicans winning by margins of less than 5% in these new North Florida congressional districts, the relative closeness of the outcomes fit with a pattern seen when political map-drawers intentionally “crack” Black voting strength.
“I would say some are close,” Barreto testified about the election results. “But they are consistently in the losing direction” for Black Democrats.
Map already declared unconstitutional in state court
DeSantis is looking to dodge a second defeat for his congressional map, after Leon County Circuit Judge J. Lee Marsh rejected the state’s contention that maintaining the Tallahassee to Jacksonville district would violate the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause, basically by hurting white voters.
Instead, Marsh upheld the state’s Fair Districts constitutional amendments, which prohibit creating boundaries that diminish a chance for minority voters to elect a candidate of their choice.
The 1st DCA surprisingly took control of the case on appeal from the DeSantis administration despite agreements from both the state and plaintiffs, which include Black Voters Matter and the League of Women Voters, that any appeal should go straight to the Florida Supreme Court.
Amid growing concerns about a potential delay in deciding the state case, the federal case possibly could lead to a swifter outcome on whether state lawmakers must redraw the congressional map and re-establish a North Florida district more favorable to electing a Black member of Congress before next year’s elections.
The 2024 legislative session begins in January and it’s during the two-month session that repairs to the congressional map could be made, based on court directions.
U.S. Supreme Court rulings last summer may have bolstered the claims of voters’ groups suing over Florida’s congressional map.
Even as the trial opened last week in Tallahassee’s U.S. District court, justices again acted, refusing Alabama’s request to reinstate a congressional map drawn by the Republican-held Legislature which had only one majority-Black district.
Instead, it’s likely that a new map will be in place before next year’s elections.
Justices in a 5-4 ruling in June said that Alabama lawmakers had denied Black voters a reasonable chance to elect a second U.S. representative of their choice.
While limited to Alabama, the latest decision will likely affect other states, including Florida, Louisiana, Georgia and Texas, with each embroiled in courtroom clashes over race and redistricting.
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
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