Black Leaders Call FL Congressional Redistricting Map Unconstitutional

TAMPA, FL — Ahead of Tuesday's special session on the Florida congressional redistricting map, Black elected officials, activists and clergy are speaking out at a news conference at 11 a.m. Monday in Miami, calling the map unconstitutional because it dilutes Black congressional districts.

Florida Sen. Shevrin Jones and state Reps. Felicia Robinson and Dotie Joseph will lead the news conference at the Little Haiti Cultural Center in Miami.

Florida legislators are returning to Tallahassee this week for a special session focused on congressional redistricting.

In an unprecedented move, Florida's GOP-dominated Legislature said it would allow DeSantis to draw the new district boundaries after he vetoed the congressional redistricting map drawn by the Legislature in March.

On Wednesday, DeSantis released a map that reconfigures current congressional districts to make the map more favorable to four Republican-held districts and eliminating the districts held by Black Democrats U.S. Reps. Al Lawson of North Florida and Val Demings of Orlando.

Defending his map, DeSantis said it was drawn "in a race-neutral manner."

"We are not going to have a 200-mile gerrymander that divvies up people based on the color of their skin. That is wrong. That is not the way we have governed in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said.

However, Rep. Kelly Skidmore, the ranking Democrat on the House congressional redistricting committee, said the governor's map is anything but race neutral.

“His goal is to eliminate minority access seats to build more Republican domination in Congress to give himself an advantage going into the presidency by having more Republicans from Florida in Congress,” Skidmore said.

Sen. Linda Stewart, D-Orlando, shared Skidmore's concerns.

“We see multiple districts broken up and redrawn to configurations similar to those tossed out by the courts after the last redistricting cycle,” said Stewart.

She said the map violates the federal government's Tier 1 standards.

There are two tiers of guidelines, along with federal law, that direct lawmakers when drawing redistricting maps.

Tier 1 criteria:

• No apportionment plan or district shall be drawn with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent.
• Districts shall not be drawn with the intent or result of denying or abridging the equal opportunity of racial or language minorities to participate in the political process or to diminish their ability to elect representatives of their choice – no racial gerrymandering.

Tier 2 criteria must be followed unless doing so would conflict with the Tier 1 standards or federal law:

• Districts shall consist of contiguous territory.
• Districts shall be as nearly equal in population as is practicable.
• Districts shall be compact.
• District lines shall, where feasible, follow existing political and geographical boundaries.

“I think the original maps submitted to the governor followed the guidelines we had set in place by the voters, and produced seats that fairly represented their constituents," Stewart said.

"It was emphasized in committee not only the above thresholds to achieve, but that there is a 1 percent deviation in population among districts. The maps produced by the Legislature achieved the tiers and federal requirements," Stewart said. "We listened to input, we made changes where appropriate, and were still able to achieve what I considered a nonpartisan redistricting map. We had a process that was followed, and now we are entering a process that has not been the case for drawing maps. We are even looking at a potential trial on May 12 over these maps because of this impasse. We need less of a political redo and more plain, fair maps."

Under the proposed map drawn by DeSantis, the only districts with a solid Democratic majority are Orlando's 9th district held by Darren Soto and Fort Lauderdale's 20th district held by Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick.

Altogether, DeSantis' redistricting map has eight Democratic-leaning seats, 18 Republican-leaning seats and two competitive seats.

That's four more Republican-leaning seats and three less highly competitive seats than the previous district map.