When he was a congressman representing portions of Tallahassee, Al Lawson steered through Congress a measure renaming the city’s main post office after Edwina Stephens, the “mother of the Southside,” the predominantly Black area where the building is located.

By the time the naming ceremony transpired this June 10, Lawson, a Black Democrat, had lost his re-election in a rejiggered congressional district now represented by Neal Dunn, a white man from Panama City. That was in last year’s midterm elections.

“He was not familiar at all with the important work of Ms. Stephens,” former Tallahassee City Commissioner Dorothy Inman-Johnson testified in federal court Wednesday of Dunn, in a lawsuit challenging Gov. Ron DeSantis’ dismantling of the district that had sent Lawson to Congress for a decade.

The episode represented only one way in which the governor’s redistricting maneuvering, which also gave his Republican Party control of 10 of Florida’s 28 congressional districts, has harmed Black voters like herself, Inman-Johnson said.

Inman-Johnson took the stand on Day Two of a lawsuit filed by Common Cause Florida, Fair Districts Now, the Florida State Conference of the NAACP, and individual voters (including Inman-Johnson, a self-described longtime member of the NAACP) seeking to overturn the DeSantis map and reinstate a version of Lawson’s old district, which ran 200 miles between Jacksonville and Gadsden County in North Florida.

Federal, state challenges

A panel consisting of judges Adalberto Jordan, Casey Rogers, and Alan Windsor of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida is hearing the case, which is expected to extend through next week — and will continue even if D.C. Republicans force a federal government shutdown, Windsor said.

In a separate challenge in state court, a trial judge ruled the DeSantis plan violated the Florida and U.S. Constitution. The appeal is now before the First District Court of Appeal.

In the federal case, the plaintiffs assert that DeSantis insisted a reluctant Legislature dismantle the district specifically to deny Democrats a Black seat.

Lawyers representing the state, meanwhile, insist the governor opposed the use of race as a predominant factor in drawing congressional districts, even though the federal Voting Rights Act allows it and so does Florida’s Fair Districts Amendment, sometimes referred to as the FDA.

Harm to Blacks

As for Inman-Johnson, even though she didn’t live within Lawson’s old District 5 — the boundary divided Tallahassee and Leon County between Lawson and Dunn in District 2 before the 2022 reapportionment — Inman could call upon him or his aides at any time and get results, she said.

“He was accessible. He didn’t draw a line through Leon County and say, ‘You can’t have access to me because you are in 2 not 5,” Inman-Johnson continued.

“Because Al Lawson was a minority, he understood issues impacting us and it was important to have somebody in Congress from our region who had interests in common, had an understanding of our community.”

Dunn’s staff when she called his office were “very pleasant,” but “nothing was done about the issues I had contacted them about,” Inman-Johnson said. Neither is the conservative Republican sensitive to the problems of Blacks in Tallahassee, including poverty and substandard housing, she added.

The voters adopted the amendment, modeled on the VRA, in 2010 and it specifically forbids diminishment of minority voting power (it also forbids political gerrymandering, but no one yet has sued over the advantage DeSantis’ plan gives to Republicans).

In cross examining Inman-Johnson, Joshua Pratt, a former deputy general counsel to Gov. DeSantis now in private practice, focused on her involvement in Democratic Party politics and lack of involvement when the Legislature was debating the new districts. She recently filed papers to run again for the Tallahassee City Commission.

History lesson

Wednesday’s proceedings included a lesson from Morgan Kousser, a professor of history and political science at California Institute of Technology who has extensively studied race relations in the United States.

Kousser sketched over a video feed the history of North Florida’s slave economy, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. North Florida especially has a “long tradition of Black people living there being discriminated against,” he noted.

They’re reminders of the antebellum slave economy, and they continued to live in the region as small farmers and sharecroppers, Kousser said. Whites kept them down through all-white Democratic primaries, poll taxes, and “violence and intimidation,” including the election-related 1920 Ocoee Massacre and bombing assassination of NAACP President Harry T. Moore and his wife Harriet Moore on Christmas Day 1951.

Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act required specified electoral jurisdictions to preclear any voting changes with the U.S. Department of Justice. Florida (except for a few jurisdictions) escaped inclusion because it lacked an explicit literacy test — the law’s drafters wanted to focus on the worst of the worst, Kousser said.

It was still pretty bad here. “It wasn’t that it was less discriminatory in general,” he said.

“They were basically shut out of most of the Twentieth Century because of discriminatory actions,” Kousser said of Blacks and political power.

Florida sent its first Black member to Congress since Reconstruction only in 1993, after the courts forced Black-accessible districts upon the state. The one in North Florida stretched down to Orlando, but the Florida Supreme Court eventually reoriented the district from east-to-west.

The FDA drew strong opposition from Republican political elites before and after it passed, Kousser testified, and tried to undermine it after 62% of the voters approved it, including rank-and-file Republicans.

‘Could not accept yes for an answer’

Sponsors proposed the amendment to the Florida Constitution because of a legal case then working its way to the U.S. Supreme Court trying to undo Section 5 of the VRA, Kousser said. In 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, the justices gutted Section 5 preclearance, ruling that it no longer was necessary to protect voting rights.

Alex Kelly, a senior aide to DeSantis, made a similar argument while testifying in the case on Tuesday.

But by then, the principle was enshrined in the Florida Constitution.

Kousser tied DeSantis’ stand on the Black district to his administration’s clampdown on Black history books and instruction and allowance of lessons designed by the right-wing PragerU, including “awful distortions of Black history.”

He described how DeSantis inserted himself into the 2022 redistricting process against precedent — no one could remember a governor getting that involved before. Legislative GOP leaders were intent on avoiding the protracted litigation that finally ended when the Florida Supreme Court drew its own map, including the east-west CD 5.

The Legislature ended up approving a version of the old district as a backup to an alternative map situating a Black district within Duval County. DeSantis balked at both. “The governor could not accept ‘yes’ for an answer,” Kousser said.

“Above all, he wanted to eliminate the possibility that Black voters in North Florida could elect a candidate of their choice,” Kousser added.

In one memo, DeSantis’ General Counsel Ryan Newman argued there was no evidence of “pervasive, flagrant, widespread, or rampant discrimination.”

The FDA voters knew better, Kousser said.

“Voters had before them a general recognition that there had been discrimination and it continued enough for them to add the racial components of the FDA to the anti-gerrymandering components of the FDA,” he said.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and Twitter.

Gov. Ron DeSantis knew more than the Florida Supreme Court about the constitutionality of a congressional redistricting plan that eliminated a Black-held seat in North Florida, a top aide to the governor testified Tuesday in federal court in Tallahassee.

Alex Kelly — DeSantis’ acting chief of staff, who was waist-deep in redistricting negotiations with the Legislature last year, was the first witness called in a legal challenge to the redistricting plan the governor forced on the Legislature.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers repeatedly emphasized that the Florida Supreme Court itself drew an earlier version of the district following the extended litigation that marked the last redistricting process during the early 2010s.

“The Florida Supreme Court got it wrong,” Kelly declared. DeSantis, by contrast — “He knows better.”

Common Cause Florida, Fair Districts Now, the Florida State Conference of the NAACP, and individual voters are suing to overturn the DeSantis map and reinstate the district at issue, which would run 200 miles between Jacksonville and Gadsden County in North Florida.

It includes sufficient Black voters to ensure them the ability to pick the representative of their choice, as required under Florida’s Fair Districts constitutional amendment, itself modeled on the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and which forbids political gerrymandering or diminishment of minority voting strength. Black Democrat Al Lawson held the seat for a decade.

Parallel legal challenges

A three judge panel consisting of Adalberto Jordan, Casey Rogers, and Alan Windsor is hearing the case, which is expected to extend through next week. In a separate challenge in state court, a trial judge ruled the DeSantis plan violated the Florida and U.S. Constitution. The appeal is now before the First District Court of Appeal.

DeSantis has argued that the district amounted to a racial gerrymander in violation of the equal protection language in the Fourteenth Amendment. He has evinced eagerness to give the U.S. Supreme Court a chance to bar any consideration of race in redistricting, notwithstanding that the amendment was one of three adopted following the Civil War to protect the right of the liberated enslaved people.

That was pretext, plaintiffs’ attorney Greg Baker said during opening arguments. “His real concern was not having any Black districts in North Florida,” he said.

For now, the map distributes Black voters in the area between four separate white-dominated congressional districts.

“This case is purely a racial discrimination case,” Baker said.

“That is what we have alleged here and that is what we will prove at this trial,” he said.

Burden of proof

Baker acknowledged that proving racial animus would be difficult but said the court should look to the history of discrimination in Florida’s voting laws; the harm to Black voters; departure from political norms including substantial breaches of precedent; and the legislative history, referring to what lawmakers said in debate.

He argued the facts here fit the bill.

“Gov. DeSantis inserted himself into the redistricting process in a manner unprecedented in Florida history,” Baker said. The Legislature resisted his efforts, “but the governor pushed and pushed and pushed until at last, its back against the wall, the Legislature folded.”

Previously, Republicans in control of the House and Senate didn’t want to pick this fight, but DeSantis was intent on having his way. The final map gave Republicans 20 of the state’s 28 representatives, contributing to the party’s narrow control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

DeSantis’ stated objection to the district was that it was too sprawled out, having been designed to capture Black voters in Duval, Leon, and Gadsden counties but lacked a community of shared interests.

Mohammad Jazil, representing the state, described the governor’s map as a compromise that produced a compact district lacking “tentacles” spiraling out to capture voters on the basis of their race.

“Every step of the way, the governor and Legislature were acting within the confines of the power given to them under the Florida Constitution,” Jazil insisted.

‘Taint’

He denied any lingering “taint” from Florida’s history of slavery and Jim Crow. Since 1992, the state has made “great strides” and the governor’s map still has sent four Black people to Congress, he said. Moreover, the governor and Legislature are entitled to a presumption of good faith, Jazil added.

“We don’t presume that our decisionmakers are acting improperly. We presume the opposite,” he said.

Plaintiff’s co-attorney Gregory Diskant pressed Kelly repeatedly about Florida’s racist history. Did he realize the area affected is sometimes called the “slave belt,” containing former plantations?”

“I am not familiar with it,” Kelly replied.

That the area is younger, less educated than the rest of the state?

“I don’t know it,” Kelly answered. In any case, he indicated, that’s all in the past. “Florida has solved all the problems,” he said.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and Twitter.

The full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has refused to take a second look at a voter suppression law passed in Florida three years ago, over a dissent complaining that the court majority was breaking promises made in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments.

The effect is to let stand a split ruling by a three-judge panel of the same court in spring last year to allow enforcement of the law, SB 90, that will interfere with the right to vote using drop boxes and provide food and water to people waiting in line to vote, and that erects barriers in front of organizations seeking to register voters.

Gov. Ron DeSantis pressed the Republican-dominated Legislature to enact SB 90 following the 2020 elections to combat alleged voting fraud, even though negligible evidence of fraud emerged during what the governor himself praised as a well-run election.

Plaintiffs including the League of Women Voters of Florida filed suit, protesting that the new law would severely disadvantage minority voters. U.S. District Judge Mark Walker agreed following a two-week trial, citing “a decades-long pattern of voting legislation discriminating against Black people.”

Walker went further, ordering the state to submit any election-law revisions to the U.S. Department of Justice for preclearance under Section 3 of the VRA for 10 years.

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office welcomed the outcome.

“Today, the full United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit rightly voted against rehearing the reversal of an activist judge and affirmed, yet again, Florida’s common-sense elections provisions signed into law by Governor DeSantis in 2021. We will continue to fight to make Florida’s elections secure, efficient, and transparent,” press secretary Jeremy Redfern said in a written statement.

“The order from the Eleventh Circuit shows again that Judge Mark Walker’s ruling was clearly wrong. The printing costs of Judge Walker’s rulings far exceed the value of the rulings themselves,” Redfern added.

Friendly reading

In Thursday’s outcome, Chief Judge William Pryor wrote an opinion explaining his reasons for voting against a rehearing in which he viewed the facts as favorably as possible for the Legislature — noting, for example, that solid majorities in the House and Senate voted in favor of SB 90 without also observing that they were party-line votes.

Similarly, Pryor described language barring solicitation of voters waiting in line as benign, not mentioning that it bars provision of food and water. As for new restrictions on third-party voter registration organizations, Pryor didn’t mention evidence that the provision threatens large fines that could drive these groups out of business for reasonable mistakes.

“This case demonstrates that nearly 60 years later [following passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act], despite the promise of the Reconstruction Amendments and the successes of the Voting Rights Act, the struggle to purge our democracy of discrimination on the basis of race continues,” Judge Charles Wilson wrote in an opinion joined by Judge Jill Pryor. Judge Adalberto Jordan joined part of the dissent involving deference to trial judges’ findings of fact.

Wilson wrote in his dissent that the court was ignoring U.S. Supreme Court precedents governing whether a law has been passed with discriminatory intent. He noted Florida’s “history of discriminatory law working hand-in-hand with mob violence to suppress Black Floridians’ right to vote.”

Only recently, the high court reaffirmed the validity of considering a state’s history of discrimination in ordering Alabama to devise a congressional redistricting plan adding a second Black-dominated seat, he said.

But Pryor described Wilson’s dissent as “histrionic,” and swept aside Judge Walker’s description of discrimination against Black voters extending to the post-Reconstruction period and particularly “that, in the past 20 years, Florida has repeatedly sought to make voting tougher for Black voters because of their propensity to favor Democratic candidates.”

Pryor insisted: “The record reveals a stark lack of evidence of discriminatory intent of the present Florida Legislature.” (Emphasis in the original.)

Walker declared that the Legislature’s stated concern over voting fraud was pretextual but Pryor took the lawmakers at the word.

History’s relevance

“It is easy to see how a history of discrimination, when evinced in present-day data, is relevant not just to the historical background factor, but also to the foreseeability of a disparate impact and the government’s knowledge of that impact,” Wilson wrote.

“The Fifteenth Amendment attacks not only the simple-minded modes of discrimination, but also the more subtle sophisticated ones as well.

“When a present-day state government enacts a law that is neutral on its face, it is very much relevant whether or not the ‘neutral’ criteria it purports to utilize are in fact built upon a history of past racial discrimination. Simply put, our Constitution does not require us to overlook the truth that this nation’s history of discrimination is still reflected in the present.”

Wilson complained the court was abusing its authority in rejecting Judge Walker’s factual findings of discriminatory intent — an outcome he said sets a baleful precedent for the three states within the circuit court’s jurisdiction, which includes Alabama, Georgia, and Florida.

That result “should raise eyebrows,” he wrote, adding: “Unfortunately, it is not all that surprising. In recent years, this court has picked up a troubling habit of too easily overriding district courts’ factual findings.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and Twitter.

Would losing the Republican presidential nomination mellow Gov. Ron DeSantis?

The leader of the state House Democrats doesn’t necessarily think so, but she does think the balance of power between the Capitol’s Plaza Level and Fourth Floor might shift.

The Plaza contains the governor’s office; the House and Senate chambers are on the Fourth Floor.

“Tallahassee was broken in a lot of ways before this governor, but this governor in particular has found ways to exploit that brokenness and bend it and wield it to his advantage in a way that we’d not seen before,” Fentrice Driskell, representing the Tampa area in the House, said on a Zoom call with reporters Monday.

“Should DeSantis lose the Republican primary, he comes back here, he’ll have to face all of these problems that he’s either ignored or created in Florida. And I think he comes back to a Legislature as a lame duck [governor] and he’s also weaker. So, I don’t know that the Legislature is going to play ball with him in the same way that they have previously,” she continued.

DeSantis will retain the power to veto budget items dear to individual House members and senators, retaining that leverage, Driskell said. And the Republican Party will retain control of the “triumvirate” of Florida governance: the executive, including governor’s office and independently elected Cabinet members, the House, and the Senate, she added.

“There are no real checks and balances in terms of making sure that the voices of all Floridians are heard,” she said.

Republicans won supermajorities in the state House and Senate last year. They used their power to push through severe restrictions on abortion, permitless carry rights for gun owners, and insurance reforms that have done little to control premiums while crimping policyholders’ ability to sue for non- or underpayment of claims.

DeSantis trails Donald Trump in the latest FiveThirtyEight average of national polls, with 14.2% support to 55.5% for Trump.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and Twitter.