The Florida House and Senate on Monday urged the state Supreme Court to uphold a congressional redistricting plan in a long-running legal battle focused on the overhaul of a North Florida district.
Attorneys for the House and Senate filed a 65-page brief arguing that the Supreme Court should reject voting-rights groups' allegations that the plan violated part of a 2010 constitutional amendment, known as the Fair Districts amendment, that set standards for redistricting.
The groups went to the Supreme Court after the 1st District Court of Appeal in December upheld the plan, which Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed through the Legislature in 2022. The DeSantis administration filed a brief last week supporting the plan.
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The North Florida district, District 5, stretched in the past from Jacksonville to Gadsden County, west of Tallahassee, and elected Black Democrat Al Lawson. But the 2022 overhaul put the district in the Jacksonville area.
White Republicans won all North Florida congressional seats in the subsequent 2022 elections. The voting-rights groups contend the plan violates part of the 2010 constitutional amendment that prohibited drawing districts that would “diminish” the ability of minorities to “elect representatives of their choice.”
But DeSantis contended that keeping the sprawling shape of the former District 5 would be an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.
The House and Senate attorneys made a series of arguments in Monday’s brief, including equal-protection arguments.
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“Here, the non-diminishment standard, as petitioners (the voting-rights groups) interpret it, would require not only the elevation of racial over race-neutral considerations but also the adoption and perpetual preservation of a district so focused on race that it wholly abandons — and does not even minimally advance — traditional race-neutral districting principles,” the House and Senate brief said.
“Because the maintenance of former District 5 would have violated the Equal Protection Clause, the non-diminishment standard could not compel its preservation in the enacted plan.”
The Supreme Court has not scheduled arguments in the case.
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