A Supreme Court ruling on Aug. 17 denying a request to block a city-drawn electoral map for Miami that was challenged as illegally racially gerrymandered means that the disputed map will be used in the city’s Nov. 7 elections.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas referred to the full court a community group’s request to vacate a stay issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit that blocked the map. The nation’s highest court then denied the request in an unsigned order.
The map that will be used reportedly leaves one commissioner in his district and places another candidate outside of the district where he has lived for two decades.
Miami officials hailed the Supreme Court’s decision.
“The City of Miami is gratified that our City map is now settled for the 2023 fall election. The U.S. Supreme Court denied the plaintiff’s application to vacate the 11th Circuit’s decision to impose a stay, which now allows the districting map adopted by the City to be used in the November 2023 municipal election,” the city told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.
“The City will continue to work on behalf of all residents to provide district maps that are fair, equitable, and representative and in line with all legal requirements.”
The case is GRACE Inc. v. City of Miami, court file 23A116. GRACE is an acronym for Grove Rights and Community Equity Inc. Two local chapters of the NAACP also challenged the map.
Miami’s city council is known as the Miami City Commission. Five city commissioners are elected from single-member districts in which they reside.
The mayor, currently Francis Suarez, is directly elected by city voters. Mr. Suarez is one of several candidates seeking the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination.
They argued that the city’s use of race in drawing the five districts wasn’t narrowly tailored to satisfy a compelling governmental interest and that the resulting map, therefore, ran afoul of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
“The City Commission engaged in egregious, explicit, and unapologetic race-based sorting of its residents,” they stated in the emergency application filed with the Supreme Court.
“This is not a case where Applicants cobbled together circumstantial evidence to suggest an inference of racial predominance.
“Rather, commissioners brazenly explained over the course of a half-dozen public meetings that Miami’s City Commission must continue to have three Hispanic seats, one Black seat, and one ‘Anglo’ (non-Hispanic white) seat.
“The Commission instructed its redistricting consultant to make that happen. He did. The Commission was not subtle about its racial sorting.
“Its instruction to maximally divide Hispanic from Black from Anglo residents into separate districts was unequivocal: ‘We need to make sure that there’s gonna be an African American elected and up in this Commission.’ We need to make sure there’s an Anglo American elected and up in this Commission [and] that in the rest of the districts that are majority Hispanic, that they stayed that way so that the 67% of the population, 68, of the City of Miami, the Hispanic, will have three representatives in the Commission.’”
Judge Kevin Michael Moore of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, who was appointed by the late President George H.W. Bush, rejected the map on May 23 and issued a preliminary injunction barring its use in upcoming elections.
The judge directed the parties involved “to discuss a potential timeline to create and implement a constitutionally conforming remedial map.” Later, the judge approved another version of the map.
The ACLU Foundation of Florida appealed the case to the 11th Circuit on behalf of GRACE Inc. and the other original map challengers.
On Aug. 4, a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit invoked the so-called Purcell principle, which holds that federal district courts ordinarily shouldn’t enjoin state election laws close to an election.
While the panel expressed no opinion on the merits of the challenging groups’ request to block the map, it stated that it was “not clear cut that the remedial plan the district court adopted remediates the alleged racial sorting in the City’s re-districting legislation.”
The Purcell principle “requires that we stay the district court’s order adopting the remedial plan and ordering the City to implement it.” The panel granted the city’s emergency motion to block the latest map.
On Aug. 17, the Supreme Court denied the challenging groups’ request to vacate the order issued by the 11th Circuit.
The new order didn’t explain the Supreme Court’s decision. No justices were recorded as dissenting.
Carrie McNamara, staff attorney at the ACLU of Florida, said in a statement that she was disappointed by the ruling.
“This decision by the Supreme Court is disheartening and a blow to the residents of Miami and our democracy,” she said.
“Unfortunately, that Court has chosen to temporarily permit blatantly gerrymandered maps that divide our communities along racial lines, compromising our right to fair representation. This decision has taken us a step back, stripping Miami residents of their voice and ability to be adequately represented, regardless of their race.”
