Ruling on Louisiana map delivers fresh blow to Gov. DeSantis’ congressional plan

Florida’s hopes that the U.S. Supreme Court will validate a congressional map halving the state’s Black-controlled districts just took a blow.

The U.S. Supreme Court said Louisiana must redraw its congressional map because it lacks minority representation. The decision follows a similar ruling regarding a map in Alabama. In both cases, the states must remake congressional maps with one more minority seat.

Minority advocates legally challenging Florida’s congressional map have argued the cartography, drawn by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ staff and approved by the Florida Legislature, diminishes Black voting power in Florida.

Justices in the Alabama and Louisiana decisions agreed with arguments that state officials violated protections in the Voting Rights Act for minority voting access. Challenges to Florida’s map argue the same and also say that Florida voters imposed additional protections through the Fair Districts amendment, approved in 2010, that prohibited lawmakers from denying racial and language minorities the opportunity to elect a Representative of their choice.

The Florida congressional map reduced the number of minority-controlled seats from four to two.

DeSantis vetoed congressional maps approved by the Florida Legislature, criticizing the preservation of a North Florida congressional district. Created by the Florida Supreme Court, that district spanned from Tallahassee to Jacksonville, allowing Black voters to determine the election winner.

DeSantis’ staff drew a map that replaced the Democratic-leaning seat, formerly represented by Black U.S. Rep. Al Lawson, a Tallahassee Democrat, with a White-majority seat in Northeast Florida. This forced Lawson to run in another Republican-leaning district in the Panhandle, where he lost to U.S. Rep. Neal Dunn, a Florida Republican.

Meanwhile, Republican Aaron Bean won election to the new congressional district.

But in addition to nixing that district, plaintiffs challenging the Florida map argue DeSantis redrew a Central Florida map so that Black voters no longer control the outcome. The district is represented now by U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost, an Afro-Cuban Democrat. While the seat remains a Democratic-leaning district, Black voters no longer make up the majority of the Primary electorate.

The map left two Black-controlled seats in South Florida and several Hispanic-controlled seats.

The congressional map was put in place for the 2022 Midterms. Florida elected 20 congressional Republicans, compared to 16 in the 2020 election cycle; Florida also had one more congressional seat thanks to decennial reapportionment.

DeSantis has argued the Legislature’s initial desire to preserve the number of minority-controlled seats effectively served as racially motivated gerrymandering and violated the U.S. Constitution.

But the recent rulings suggest the high court may not be as accepting of that argument as Florida officials hoped.

Earlier this month, Chief Justice John Roberts, an appointee of Republican President George W. Bush, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, appointed by Republican President Donald Trump, sided with three Democratic-appointed justices on the Alabama case. The 5-4 majority affirmed a lower-court ruling that Alabama wrongly created only one minority-controlled seat in Alabama out of seven congressional districts in the state, despite one in four Alabama residents being Black.

In Louisiana, lawmakers approved a map over Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards’ veto, where one of six districts was majority Black. A third of the state’s population is Black.

DeSantis has argued that Lawson’s former seat was never a majority Black district. Black voters controlled the Primary, effectively determining the election winner in the Democrat-leaning seat.