U.S. court asked to reconsider ruling upholding DeSantis’ quashing of Black congressional seat

One month after a federal court upheld Gov. Ron DeSantis’ erasure of a Black-held congressional district in North Florida, voting-rights groups have asked the court to reconsider in light of the discriminatory intent the judges suggested the governor might hold.

A three-judge panel sitting in the federal Northern District of Florida ruled on March 28 that evidence suggested DeSantis might have set out to quash Black voting power in the area to boost Republican strength, but that that didn’t matter because it found no evidence of bias within the Legislature, which actually passed the map.

Common Cause Florida, FairDistricts Now, the Florida State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Branches, and 10 individual voters argued in a brief filed this week that the distinction is meaningless under U.S. Supreme Court precedent.

“The court’s opinion seems to suggest that, when multiple state actors jointly bring about the challenged state action, all of them must share an illicit racial motive for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to be triggered. That is not correct,” the brief reads.

“[A] plaintiff need only show ‘that a discriminatory purpose has been a motivating factor’ behind the challenged state action — not ‘that the challenged action rested solely on racially discriminatory purposes,’” it adds.

A similar lawsuit over the congressional map is pending before the Florida Supreme Court.

It’s too late to redraw congressional districts before the November elections; qualifying for those races ends on Friday. But the groups asked the court to order the Legislature to draw a new map for the November 2026 elections.

The groups originally named as defendants DeSantis and the leaders of the state House and Senate and their redistricting committees, but agreed to drop the case against them. The latest brief names only Secretary of State Cord Byrd, whose office oversees elections.

‘Cannot stand’

DeSantis’ map eliminated a version of the old Congressional District 5, extending from Jacksonville through Tallahassee to majority-Black Gadsden County to gather descendants of the plantation-era “slave belt,” which for years sent Black Democrat Al Lawson to Congress.

The map instead created a series of white-majority districts that have elected Republicans. The governor forced the Legislature to accept his map after vetoing its own legislative plan, which would have preserved the district.

DeSantis argued that the district represented an illegal “racial gerrymander.”

“A map that moved through the legislative process with intent to discriminate against the voters cannot stand,” Amy Keith, executive director of Common Cause Florida, said in a written statement.

“We know full well the governor exercised his legislative powers by drafting and introducing his own map, vetoing a map not to his liking, and participating in the redistricting process to an unusual extent. And we know that the governor was acting with race as a motivating factor. We are asking the court to reconsider so that Black voters can exercise their right to fair representation in Congress,” Keith added.