Nate Monroe: Court ruling lays bare Gov. Ron DeSantis' lawless behavior

COMMENTARY | A Florida judge last week struck down a congressional map backed by Gov. Ron DeSantis that, in defiance of the Florida constitution, stripped away the ability of Black North Florida voters to elect the candidate of their choice, a rejection not just of the map but also of an imperial view of the governor's powers that the maps' defenders sought to advance in court.

DeSantis cast himself not just as a governor but as a judge: He unilaterally decided a popular voter-approved amendment to the Florida constitution, called the Fair Districts Amendment, violated the U.S. Constitution and thus did not need to be followed. And so he took it upon himself to, against the wishes of the Legislature, advance a map that deleted a North Florida district that provided an opportunity for Black voters to elect the candidate of their choice and replaced it with a whiter, conservative district whose power is concentrated in the exurban Nassau and Clay county neighborhoods surrounding Jacksonville. In doing so, DeSantis set himself directly at odds with the state constitution and with a previous decision by the Florida Supreme Court — a recalcitrant posture the state's lawyers acknowledged was deliberately struck — and he wiped away nearly 30 years of congressional representation even his conservative legislative allies tried to preserve.

It was a brazen ploy from a governor who has now twice suspended elected state prosecutors for, in his words, "effectively nullif(ying) certain laws in the state of Florida," the very sin his lawyers attempted to defend to disastrous results in state court.

"The judicial branch alone has the power to declare what the law is, including whether the Florida Constitution’s provisions are themselves unconstitutional," Second Judicial Circuit Judge J. Lee Marsh wrote in his order last week.

Once a lawyer under Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and appointed to the bench by former Gov. Rick Scott, Marsh is hardly a liberal squish or a predictable ally to voting-rights advocates, but his 55-page ruling was a thorough debunking of DeSantis' dubious legal theories about his own powers and about the laws of Florida and the United States. Much of Marsh's order is technical, but his contempt for the bunk arguments from the state's lawyers oozes throughout: their argument "fails at every level, for multiple, independent reasons," he writes in one section; their "arguments have no basis under either federal precedent or Florida Supreme Court precedent," he writes in another; the state "erroneously conflates" one portion of the Fair Districts Amendment with another; yet another meritless argument "underscores the bizarre posture in which Defendants’ arguments place the Court," Marsh lamented.

Perhaps most twisted of all, DeSantis' justification for nullifying the Florida constitution is his mistaken belief that its ban on diminishing minority voting power — the ban he ignored when advancing his preferred congressional map — is unlawful because it violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment in the U.S. Constitution. Marsh succinctly ripped that distorted view. "The Court finds no reason, and the Defendants have failed to provide one, to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment, adopted to advance racial equality, to render constitutionally suspect popular efforts to protect it."

"Floridians expressed their belief that Florida was home to the sort of the racial discrimination that justified and required the (Voting Rights Act) in the national context and that a similar civil rights structure was required to stamp it out at home," Marsh wrote.

"Florida’s history of voting related discrimination—as told through Florida case law over the years—bears out this need."

Indeed, all the state's dissembling lawyers accomplished was prompting a rather conservative judge to pen an eloquent defense of the very law they're seeking to upend. "Florida has been a state home to discrimination in voting and the people of this state demanded a Florida analogue to the (Voting Rights Act) to finally rid the state of its presence," he wrote.

It has been clear from the beginning that DeSantis is banking on the far-right Florida Supreme Court to save him. That he appointed five of the court's seven justices is the only reason to assume Florida's authoritarian-curious governor has any chance, though the strength and breadth of Marsh's ruling will require maximum creativity if DeSantis' most committed allies on that court are hoping to throw him a lifeline.

For nearly 30 years, Jacksonville benefitted from bipartisan representation that was emblematic of the city's purplish political hue. That structure ensured the city always had at least one representative with the party in power, and it provided an incentive for both of Jacksonville's congressional leaders to work across the aisle with one another — a fading tradition that nonetheless endured locally until the very moment DeSantis erased the city's Democratic-leaning district.

This political balance was so uncontroversial the state House and Senate sought to preserve it when drawing the initial congressional maps; the House even drew a backup version that was more compact but still would have allowed Jacksonville's Black voters to elect the candidate of their choice. That back up district was, in fact, more compact than the unlawful map DeSantis ultimately muscled through the Legislature. But compactness was never DeSantis' concern — ripping away Black political power was, and only one map did that: his.

The mass shooting at a Dollar General last week by a racist 21-year-old brandishing a swastika-covered AR-15-style rifle took place in this former district, near the heart of Jacksonville's historic Black neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods have now been lumped into a congressional district where bedroom communities in Clay and Nassau counties call the shots, and they picked one of their own — an affable reactionary named Aaron Bean — to represent them.

State Rep. Angie Nixon staged a sit-in last year to protest DeSantis' redistricting power move on the Jacksonville district she represents. After that protest, DeSantis vetoed all of her requested budget appropriations, and legislative leaders assigned her an office in a dank basement. "I was placed in a basement with rats because I stood up for my communities," Nixon recently told an interviewer, recalling the episode.

DeSantis' appearance at the vigil last week for the shooting victims attracted attention because many attendees booed him — a slight the governor's allies found unfair. But those attendees were, quite literally, exercising the only political voice he'd left them, and less than a week later, those voices were vindicated by Marsh's ruling.

Nate Monroe is a metro columnist whose work regularly appears every Thursday and Sunday. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Nate Monroe: Judge demolishes DeSantis' North Florida redistricting ploy