Revised complaint: DeSantis congressional redistricting plan targeted Black voters

Revised complaint: DeSantis congressional redistricting plan targeted Black voters

Fresh arguments filed in a federal legal challenge to Florida’s new congressional redistricting plan accuse Gov. Ron DeSantis of blatant racism in diminishing Black voters’ ability to elect candidates of their choice in North and Central Florida.

In an amended complaint filed Wednesday in Common Cause of Florida v. Lee, civil rights groups allege the governor bullied the Legislature into rubber stamping his congressional district map even though he understood it violated the Fourteenth and Fifteen Amendments.

“None of this was done in secret or in back rooms. Rather, the governor repeatedly made his intentions clear and employed extreme pressure tactics to fulfill those intentions,” the brief argues.

Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks at a press conference at The Villages in Sumter County on April 19, 2022, the day that the Legislature convenes in special session to consider congressional maps. Credit: Screenshot/Florida Channel

“After months of resistance throughout a legislative process unlike any ever seen before in Florida history, the Legislature finally acquiesced and attempted to wash its hands of the enacted plan by placing the blame for the new map squarely at the governor’s feet,” the document continues.

“But, in the end, by enacting the plan into law, the Legislature bears the same responsibility for it as the governor.”

The brief asks the court to order the Legislature to redraw the map to eliminate the discrimination or else draw its own map.

The lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, names DeSantis and Secretary of State Laurel Lee, who oversees elections. Also suing are Fair Districts Now, Florida NAACP, and five individual voters.

Separate litigation is pending in state Circuit Court in Leon County, where Judge Layne Smith said on Wednesday that he planned to rule that the congressional plan discriminates against Black voters.

He had not released a formal opinion as of Thursday afternoon, which would set the stage for a state appeal to the First District Court of Appeal or directly to the Florida Supreme Court. DeSantis has made clear that, should the federal case go against him, he will appeal to a higher court.

Judge Allen Winsor, presiding over a three-judge federal trial panel hearing the federal case, agreed to accept the amended complaint filed this week.

Black voter suppression

The Legislature approved the governor’s map on April 21 following a sit-in by members of the House Black caucus.

That complaint details Florida’s history of suppressing Black votes dating to the post-Reconstruction era, including recent unfair purging of Black people from the voting rolls and targeting of “souls to the polls” turnout drives centered in the Black church.

That analysis tracks the conclusions Chief Judge Mark Walker of the Northern District sketched in separate litigation targeting SB 90, the 2021 voting law restricting voting procedures traditionally used by Black people. Walker ruled portions of the law unconstitutional, but a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled last week that the state could enforce the restrictions pending further hearings into the merits of that case.

In the federal redistricting case, the new brief focuses mostly on three districts proposed during legislative debate over redistricting: CD 5 in North Florida, CD 10 in Central Florida, and CD 13 in Tampa Bay.

U.S. Rep. Al Lawson Jr. Credit: Wikipedia.

The first, similar to a district now held by Democrat Al Lawson, spans some 200 miles from Duval to Gadsden counties, including Black neighborhoods in Tallahassee, capturing the descendants of enslaved people in Florida’s former plantation belt.

Blacks don’t comprise a majority of the voting age population in the district but their strength is enough to return a Black candidate to Congress, according to an analysis cited in the brief.

The governor’s plan splits Black votes in CD 10 and 13, the brief argues.

“The enacted plan was adopted, at least in part, for the purpose of disadvantaging Black voters,” the it reads.

“It blatantly flouts the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment’s prohibition on laws enacted with an invidious purpose, i.e., intentional discrimination on the basis of race. It likewise blatantly ignores the Fifteenth Amendment’s promise that the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of race,” it continues.

“In proposing and signing the enacted plan into law, Gov. DeSantis acted with invidious intent to disadvantage Black Floridians.”

The post Revised complaint: DeSantis congressional redistricting plan targeted Black voters first appeared on Daily Florida Press.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Committee week in Florida’s Capitol: Welcome to the festival of ignorance

Image
Legislators came to town for the autumn ritual of political harlotry they call “committee week.” Tallahassee’s collective IQ dropped by a good 60 points. That’s bad, but what they propose doing to Florida is worse. Seems Sen. Joe Gruters, R-$ara$ota, who also is chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, was intimately involved with a plot to quash the Democratic vote. Remember that “ voting reform ” bill the governor signed on “Fox and Friends” last May? The one that restricts access to ballot drop-boxes, limits vote-by-mail applications, forbids giving people standing in long lines a bottle of water, and lets partisan poll watchers police canvassing boards? Even though Florida ran an immaculate election in 2020, Republicans goose-stepped in time with the Madman of Mar-a-Lago and claimed with straight faces they merely wanted to prevent election “fraud” — which is about as common as polar bears in Miami. (What fraud there was, was courtesy of the GOP .) Joe Gruters ...
Read more

U.S. House GOP would make it easier for feds to give public lands away to states

Image
U.S. House Republicans included in the new rules for the chamber they passed this month a provision meant to make it easier for Congress to give away public lands. The provision is a fairly technical piece of the 55-page  rules package . It affects internal House accounting and requires that anytime Congress were to give any federal lands to a state, municipality or tribe, it would not be counted as a loss to the federal budget. House Republicans had an identical rule when they controlled the chamber from 2017 to 2019. Advocates and critics agree the measure would be helpful to any effort by the House to transfer federal lands to states. But they disagree about the wisdom of such giveaways. Republicans and conservative groups see states as preferable stewards of most public lands. Those closest to the land are in a better position to make decisions on how to manage them than those in Washington bureaucracies, they say. Environmental groups and Democrats see federal divest...
Read more

Democratic governors press U.S. Senate to act on voting rights legislation

Image
WASHINGTON — Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and 16 other Democratic governors are urging the U.S. Senate to pass two bills that aim to protect voting rights. Both measures need 60 votes to advance under Senate rules but have been stalled by Republican opposition in the evenly divided Senate. “Without decisive action by the federal government this year to protect voters’ access to the ballot and ensure the integrity and transparency of our elections, the voices of Americans across the country, especially Americans of color, will be suppressed,” the governors wrote in a Monday  letter  to U.S. Senate leadership. Governors who signed the letter include Jared Polis of Colorado, Tim Walz of Minnesota, Steve Sisolak of Nevada, Phil Murphy of New Jersey, Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, Kate Brown of Oregon, Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania and Tony Evers of Wisconsin, among others. One bill, known as the  John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2...
Read more