TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Gov. Ron DeSantis made good on his promise to veto the GOP Legislature’s congressional redistricting map Tuesday because it doesn’t eliminate a “racially gerrymandered” Black district in North Florida.
DeSantis then called a special session for April 19-22 “for the sole purpose” of working out the issue of the congressional maps, giving lawmakers a seven-page legal analysis arguing that their plan is unconstitutional because it created an unlawful district using race as the sole basis for it.
The Legislature, “in their understandable zeal to conform to try to apply what the Florida Constitution required ... forgot to make sure what they were doing conformed to the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution as well,” DeSantis said at a press conference after the state Cabinet meeting in Tallahassee.
House Speaker Chris Sprowls, R-Palm Harbor, and Senate President Wilton Simpson, R-Trilby, immediately agreed to the special session, using language that implied a compromise instead of a potential override of DeSantis’ veto.
“It is incumbent upon us to exhaust every effort in pursuit of a legislative solution,” they wrote.
A failure to agree would push the issue to the courts on a tight timeline, with less than two months before candidate qualifying begins for this year’s elections.
DeSantis told reporters he “would love to have” property insurance, digital privacy and constitutional carry of guns that didn’t make it across the finish line during the regular session, but nothing in his call or legislative leaders’ message indicates anything other than redistricting will be considered.
Voting rights advocates and political consultants predicted it won’t be easy for the Senate, House and governor to agree on a map that will pass court scrutiny and that the chance it will wind up being litigated is high.
“They’re trying to thread three different needles,” said Cecile Scoon, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida, which was party to a legal challenge nearly a decade ago over the last round of redistricting and set the standard for this go-round.
The problem is that the law as it stands doesn’t line up with the change the governor wants to make, Scoon said, and the Legislature drew the map as it understood what the law required.
“He wants to kick everything sideways,” she said. “He wants to turn the 14th Amendment on its head.”
Elections data analyst Matt Isbell predicted, “I don’t see how they come to a deal without someone caving in a spectacular fashion.”
Democrats said the sole reason for the veto was to eliminate a Black congressional district under pressure to reduce the number of Democrats in Congress, and that they wouldn’t sit quietly as the GOP tried to meet that political goal.
“The law is clear: you cannot diminish the voting power of Black Floridians in the way the governor wants,” Rep. Joe Geller, D-Aventura, said in a release issued by the House Democratic Office. “The map Governor DeSantis wants to give us isn’t legal or appropriate, and it’s important that everyone understands that.”
District 5, represented by Democratic U.S. Rep. Al Lawson, was created as a Black access district under the federal Voting Rights Act and approved by the Florida Supreme Court to settle a lawsuit filed by Fair Districts and other voting rights advocates in 2015. But DeSantis has called the district, which stretches from Jacksonville to Tallahassee, “an unconstitutional gerrymandered district.”
The House and Senate’s approved map was itself a compromise after initially being at odds.
The Senate’s version mostly kept U.S. Reps. Stephanie Murphy’s and Val Demings’ seats intact, giving Republicans a 16-12 advantage in Congress. The House’s map turned Murphy’s seat more Republican and Demings’ seat more white, giving Republicans an 18-10 advantage. Both are retiring from Congress, with Demings running for U.S. Senate.
In the end, the Senate went along with the House’s map and radically changed Central Florida’s seats.
The final map approved by the Legislature included a redrawn District 5 in North Florida, this time entirely within Duval County.
Despite the district being drawn more compactly, it remained a narrowly Democratic-leaning district. And that was not good enough for DeSantis, who submitted a map of his own to the Legislature and threatened to veto anything else.
DeSantis has been under pressure from conservative media to give Republicans more seats in Congress, where the GOP needs just six of them in the November election to take back control of the House. DeSantis’ proposal would give Republicans a 20-8 advantage in seats in Florida.
The analysis by DeSantis’ general counsel, Ryan Newman, outlines what he believes to be the map’s legal deficiencies. He said that the Legislature was mistaken in believing it needed to draw a minority seat in North Florida and illegally assigned voters based primarily on race without making it narrowly tailored or showing a compelling state interest.
Instead, he said, the Legislature drew a bizarre, 200-mile long district that snaked through several counties to connect a Black neighborhood in Jacksonville with one in Gadsden County.
Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political science professor, said DeSantis was anticipating that the U.S. Supreme Court would deal a final blow to the Voting Rights Act in one of the many cases before it this year.
“He’s saying that he thinks that the Supreme Court’s going to say they can’t use race when you’re drawing districts,” McDonald said. “That’s basically it in a nutshell.”
But, McDonald added, if DeSantis’ view prevails, that means the Florida Constitution’s race protections, and some of the legislators’ own districts, would also be in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
“There are lots of them across the state that would also be unconstitutional,” McDonald said. “So what then?”
Already, a lawsuit has been filed in federal court by nonpartisan groups arguing that DeSantis overstepped his bounds by inserting himself into the process and that the maps passed by the Legislature were influenced by his interference.
But both the Florida and U.S. Supreme Courts have become more conservative in the last few years, with the U.S. Supreme Court allowing many controversial congressional maps elsewhere to go forward this year until a final decision could be made on their constitutionality.
DeSantis told reporters Tuesday that he spoke with legislative leaders and they all agreed they didn’t want a court to decide the new district boundaries for them again.
“We’re not going to have them drawn by the court,” he said. “We’ve all agreed we have to work through this. It is the responsibility of the Legislature to produce a map that can be signed into law.”
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