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Far-right justices on Florida’s Supreme Court on Thursday turned the definition of “racism” on its head by approving a redrawing of the state’s congressional districts, OK’ing a Jim Crow-style power grab effectuated by Florida Republicans and backed by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
In 2022, DeSantis vetoed a map drawn by Florida’s ultraconservative Legislature and pressured it to vote instead for a map drawn by his staff that eliminated a majority-Black district, held at the time by Democrat Al Lawson. As The Associated Press wrote back in 2023, DeSantis’ gerrymander helped Republicans win a House majority in the 2022 midterms.
The outlet reported Thursday that the Florida Supreme Court has ruled that the map can stand and that restoring the majority-Black district would amount to racism.
The court, dominated by DeSantis appointees, ruled that restoration of the district that previously united Black communities from Jacksonville to west of Tallahassee, or across 200 miles (322 kilometers), would amount to impermissible racial gerrymandering. That, the majority ruled, violates the Constitution’s equal protection guarantees. ‘The record leaves no doubt that such a district would be race-predominant. The record also gives us no reasonable basis to think that further litigation would uncover a potentially viable remedy,’ said Chief Justice Carlos Muniz in the court’s majority opinion.
That’s former Trump administration official Carlos Muniz who wrote the majority opinion, by the way, arguing that to correct DeSantis’ diluting the power of Black voters would itself amount to racism. It aligns with the twisted logic that’s typical of the MAGA movement, which asserts that efforts to remedy racism are in and of themselves racist.
It also speaks to a pattern of right-wing election-rigging that’s expanding illiberalism in the U.S. election system. Donald Trump’s administration is pushing for Texas to gerrymander its already-imbalanced maps ahead of next year’s midterms by eliminating multiple largely Black and Latino districts. And earlier this year, even multiple Trump-appointed judges denounced Alabama’s gerrymandered maps as “a deliberate decision to double down on the dilution of Black Alabamians’ votes.”
The decision by conservative justices to uphold Florida’s gerrymander is just the latest example of Republicans trying to manipulate elections by demonstrably racist means.