Florida Supreme Court Justices raise prospect of tossing Fair Districts Amendment

Florida Supreme Court Justices are questioning whether the Fair Districts Amendment (FDA) to the state constitution impossibly handcuffs redistricting efforts.

Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz raised the prospect of tossing the amendment, passed by Florida voters in 2010, as the court heard arguments that Florida’s congressional map violates measures prohibiting the diminishment of Black communities voting power.

“We’re going to have to just decide, can the FDA work when it on its face requires nondiminishment,” Muñiz said.

Comments came during oral arguments in a challenge against a congressional map crafted by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Office and approved by the Florida Legislature in 2022. The case landed in front of Justices too late to have any impact on Florida’s congressional races this year.

The DeSantis map dismantled a congressional district previously represented by Democratic U.S. Rep. Al Lawson that stretched from west of Tallahassee to the Jacksonville area. DeSantis argued the district had been drawn based principally on racial motivations that ran counter to the equal protection clause in the U.S. Constitution.

But minority advocacy groups say tearing the district apart diminished the voting power of Black communities across North Florida. That Lawson, a longtime Black community leader, lost re-election after being drawn into a majority-White district already represented by a White Republican validates that concern, challengers argued in court.

Christina Ford, an attorney for groups challenging the map, argued that the Fair Districts Amendment clearly requires the state not to diminish the ability for minority communities to elect a Representative of their choice.

She pushed back on Muñiz’s suggestion that the constitutional amendment itself might be impossible to enforce, and noted attorneys defending the map in court have never asked for that remedy in a ruling.

“To the extent that the court has concern about one district in the map certainly does not suggest that the whole thing would need to be thrown out,” she said.

Justice John Couriel suggested that going to extraordinary lengths to develop a Black-performing seat in Florida flew in the face of the federal Voting Rights Act, including provisions written to discourage minority disenfranchisement.

“Being mindful of race and of the history of prejudice is very different from using race as a guiding predominant use or principle,” he said. He argued that if a congressional district was drawn to maximize White performance, “it would look like a district precisely of the kind that motivated the Voting Rights Act.”

The map under legal challenge notably doesn’t include the old Lawson district, and plaintiffs argue the new map left Florida with only White-majority districts. Every U.S. Representative currently serving North Florida is now White — and Republican.

“This map disproportionately impacts Black voters and threatens to silence communities that have fought long and hard for representation,” said Marcus McCoy Jr., Equal Ground Education Fund Faith Outreach State Director.

But attorneys for the Secretary of State’s Office and for the Legislature defended the map as a careful product that appropriately balanced all legal requirements.

Henry Whitaker, an attorney for the DeSantis administration, argued the map complies with state law, and that population distributions in Florida simply don’t justify the conscious creation of a Black-performing district.

“Plaintiffs in this case are seeking to dismantle the race-neutral map that the state drew in North Florida and to replace it with a racial gerrymander,” he argued.

The former Lawson district notably came about following the Florida Supreme Court in 2015 tossing out a map approved by the Legislature based on a failure to comply with the Fair Districts Amendment. When the Legislature failed to produce a replacement map, the courts ended up enacting cartography in place for elections in 2016, 2018 and 2020.

Of note, the Legislature this year initially set about largely preserving the Lawson district. After DeSantis threatened to reject any map that did so, the Legislature approved a map that tried to preserve a Jacksonville-centered district where Black voters still would most likely control the outcome, while offering a backup map preserving the Lawson seat if courts rejected that approach. But DeSantis vetoed that plan.

Ultimately, the Legislature followed DeSantis’ lead on redistricting and approved a map in a Special Session. Attorneys for the Legislature argued the final product didn’t violate Fair Districts requirement and noted the DeSantis map preserved minority-controlled seats in South Florida.

Dan Nordby, counsel for the Legislature, pointed to Florida’s 27th Congressional District, which is represented by U.S. Rep. María Elvia Salazar, a Coral Gables Republican.

“It’s about as close to a circle as you can get in a congressional map that requires exact equality of population,” he said. “It has an extraordinarily high compactness score. It’s also a district that’s 74% roughly Hispanic voting age population, and doesn’t diminish with respect to the benchmark district that preceded it.”

When the Florida Supreme Court rules on the map, it likely will deliver the final word on the cartography itself. Leon Circuit Judge J. Lee Marsh, an appointee of former Gov. Rick Scott, in September sided with plaintiffs and tossed out the state’s congressional map. But the Florida 1st District Court of Appeal reversed that in December and upheld the DeSantis map.

Federal Judges in March rejected a separate challenge to the maps.