It should surprise no one that the Florida Supreme Court is allowing Gov. Ron DeSantis’ cynical congressional district gerrymander to take effect in this year’s elections.
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As we noted after a previous punitive redistricting, our highest courts are now reduced to being a judicial arm of the Republican Party of Florida — with one notable difference.
It’s much worse this time. The last instance snatched just one seat in Congress from Democrats. This rigged map is contrived to take away four more.
Six politicians in black robes wrote off the voting rights of multitudes of Floridians in the latest case , refusing to take it away from the First District Court of Appeal and decide it promptly. The district court does not intend to act until the election is long past.
Ignoring the voters’ will
If history repeats again, the district court will refuse to enforce the anti-gerrymandering Fair District amendments that voters approved resoundingly 16 years ago.
The Supreme Court will go along. The gerrymander, which significantly disrupts four Central Florida seats (DIstricts 8 9, 10 and 11) will be baked in for at least this year’s primary and general elections. The majority party will continue to deny the minority party a fair chance to win. The state’s judiciary will bless the sinful.
The district court willfully favors the governor and Legislature when it refuses to expedite redistricting cases to the Supreme Court, as the Constitution allows.
Once again, the higher court is all in with the delaying game.
It’s a wonder the black-robed politicians did not dispose of the case the day they received the current appeal from a group of public interest plaintiffs.
It took six days, perhaps because the court’s newest member, Adam Tanenbaum, was writing a prickly seven-page rebuttal to Justice Jorge Labarga’s dissent, which was half as long.
The dissent criticized the district court as well as Labarga’s Supreme Court colleagues. Until DeSantis promoted Tanenbaum, he was a judge of the district court. He was instrumental in upholding the 2022 gerrymander.
A poor excuse for inaction
The main by six of the seven justices, contended the high court lacks jurisdiction and cannot assume that the First District’s eventual decision will be reviewable.
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That’s a shabby excuse, as Labarga pointed out.
“(O)ur state’s constitution anticipates that some matters may be so urgent as to require an expedited path to this court,” Labarga wrote. “Surely, the upcoming 2026 congressional elections affecting the representation of millions of Floridians meet that threshold … and, had the district court invoked pass-through jurisdiction here, doing so would have established an independent basis for this court’s jurisdiction in this matter.”
This case makes poignantly clear how much Florida will miss Labarga, the only justice who was not appointed by DeSantis. The justice must retire upon turning 75 in October 2027.
The former Palm Beach County circuit judge has been the lonely dissenter in a long line of cases in which his colleagues, chosen by DeSantis expressly for right-wing and Republican credentials, have made it easier to invoke the death penalty and harder for citizens to defeat the government or corporate power in court.
The term-limited DeSantis will leave office in January. His successor will pick Labarga’s successor, but a majority of the nominating commission that sends the governor up to six names will be holdover DeSantis appointees.
Cleaning up the courts
So the next justice will likely be a right-winger, too.
It’s futile to ask this of a Republican governor, but if Democrat David Jolly should win, it should be his highest priority to depoliticize the courts. That would entail restoring the system established by Gov. Reubin Askew in 1971, by which he and his successors could appoint only three members of each nine-member judicial nominating panel.
The Florida Bar named three. The members named by the governor and the Bar then chose three members of the public who could not be lawyers.
Under a 2001 law enacted under Gov. Jeb Bush when Republicans were in full control, the governor appoints all nine.
Bush and his successor, Charlie Crist, wielded that authority with restraint. Labarga is the last of four justices appointed by Crist who sought to balance the court philosophically.
The figurative scales of justice are totally out of whack now. Things will be worse without Labarga.
The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board includes Executive Editor Roger Simmons, Opinion Editor Krys Fluker and Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick. The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant, Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney and editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman. Send letters to [email protected].
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