Mark Lane: DeSantis' House maps slapped down, then appealed

Remember that congressional district map Gov. Ron DeSantis strong-armed through the Legislature last year? Well, a Circuit Court judge invalidated it, at least for now. The unsurprising ruling upheld Florida's Fair Districts amendments, measures voters overwhelmingly put in the state constitution back in 2010 and have been reaffirmed in numerous court decisions ever since.

Every 10 years, the Legislature draws district maps for U.S. House and legislative seats. The previous time around, legislators did such a good job of gerrymandering congressional lines for maximum party advantage that the courts threw out the maps. It was a long, drawn-out, expensive legal fight that unearthed some embarrassing, too-clever-by-half practices like having ringers, supposedly members of the public, suggest maps that were actually drawn by shadowy Republican political consultants.

The maps that determined who would represent which part of the state weren't finalized until the 2016 elections.

Legislative leaders pledged this time would be different. And to the surprise of many ― certainly to me ― both the Florida House and Senate in 2022 came up with pretty reasonable congressional district maps. Maps that complied with past court orders. Maps that were tolerably compact even while favoring Republicans.

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Naturally, those maps were rejected by the governor, who, contrary to past practice, came up with his own maps that favored Republicans more heartily. The go-along Legislature waved those through in an April 2022 special session.

The governor's maps diminished some minority access districts and wiped out one. Minority access districts are districts where minority voters are not a majority yet still have enough numbers to elect someone to represent them.

The minority access district the governor eliminated was the North Florida district ably represented by a Black congressman, Rep. Al Lawson, D-Tallahassee. The court case focused only on that district. As expected, after the governor's map was in place, Lawson had to run in a district dominated by White, rural Republican voters, who unsurprisingly voted him out in 2022. As the court noted, this is the first time since 1990 that North Florida did not have a Black representative.

The governor argued that Lawson's district was unconstitutional, even though it was court-drawn and court-imposed after legislators couldn't agree on district lines.

But Circuit Court Judge J. Lee Marsh ruled that the governor's maps ran afoul of the Fair Districts amendments. "By dismantling a congressional district that enabled Black voters to elect their candidates of choice under the previous plan, the enacted plan violates . . . the Florida Constitution," the court order concluded and told the Legislature to go back and draw new boundaries.

Hardly a surprising outcome since it follows the well-trodden path of past rounds of redistricting cases.

The Fair Districts amendments mandate that political district boundaries can't be drawn to help or hurt a political party or incumbent and that they can't diminish the ability of minorities to elect the representatives they want. DeSantis' attorneys want the court to invalidate the Fair Districts amendments, arguing that the so-called "non-diminishment" section is unconstitutional because it forces the Legislature to create impermissible racial gerrymanders.

By extension, the state also wants to invalidate part of the federal Voting Rights Act since it has similar non-diminishment language.

The court did not find this persuasive. Such arguments, the judge said, "have no basis under either federal precedent or Florida Supreme Court precedent."

And now, this case enters the next step in what's likely to be its long judicial journey. Both the state and parties challenging the law are asking the 1st District Court of Appeal to skip the case ahead to the Florida Supreme Court.

The state high court is usually sympathetic to the governor and has lately shown a flexible attitude toward established judicial precedent. DeSantis has every reason to expect to be happy with the result. But beyond that, there are the federal courts and what happens there is anyone's guess.

Florida's Fair Districts amendments haven't been a cure for party-based gerrymandering. Yet they have successfully erected guardrails to prevent the bizarre and unfair kinds of maps we've seen in the past while guaranteeing that minority voters aren't gerrymandered into irrelevance. Courts have upheld the amendments in the past and that precedent demands to be respected.

Mark Lane is a News-Journal columnist. His email is mlanewrites@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Mark Lane: DeSantis' House maps slapped down, then appealed