State appeals judges throw a wrench into North Florida Black district litigation

[In It to Win It]

State appeals judges throw a wrench into North Florida Black district litigation

Judges of a state appeals court steered arguments over the future of a sprawling Black-dominated North Florida congressional district in a whole new direction Tuesday, raising legal arguments never even uttered by any of the parties in the case.

Lawyers for the state, at the behest of Gov. Ron DeSantis, have argued in court filings with the Florida First District Court of Appeal in Tallahassee that the district, CD 5, amounted to an illegal racial gerrymander. They say its boundaries were distorted to assemble enough Black voters to send a Black representative to Congress.

But during an unusual hearing before 10 members of the 13-judge court, several judges suggested the district was never a racial gerrymander. It instead was a political gerrymander, they offered, because the Florida Supreme Court drew it after concluding an earlier map unduly favored Republicans.

If CD 5 was a partisan gerrymander, this thinking would imply, invalidating CD 5 wouldn’t count as diminishment of Black voting strength in the area. And that would mean DeSantis didn’t violate the federal Voting Rights Act or Florida’s Fair Districts Amendment — which forbid diminishment of Black voting strength — by forcing the Legislature to do so and signing the measure into law.

That it sent a Black man — Democrat Al Lawson — to Congress would have been accidental, then.