Unlike the other states that have engaged in partisan gerrymandering since President Trump called on Texas to do so last summer, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has explicitly declared that is not why he has called for the Legislature to reconvene in Tallahassee in April for for a special session to redistrict Florida’s congressional seats.

Cognizant that gerrymandering is banned in the state’s Constitution, the governor has made the case that the Legislature will “be forced to do it because the Supreme Court’s VRA [Voting Rights Act] decision is going to impact the current map. No matter what else, that is going to have to be addressed.”

But what happens if the justices opt not to weigh in on a crucial part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in the pending case Louisiana vs. Callais by the time the Legislature returns to Tallahassee on April 20 for that special session? The case tests whether Section 2 of the VRA violates the Constitution by discriminating against white voters. The section prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate based on race.

“Now that primaries are underway in all of these cases, I think the court is more likely to wait until the end of the term to release this decision, so that it is clear that the decision cannot affect districts for the 2026 midterm elections, that the court’s decision is only post-2026, so 2028 and beyond. So, I don’t expect to get that decision anytime soon,” said Sarah Isgur, editor of SCOTUSblog, speaking on Dan Abram’s Sirius/XM show on Feb. 20.

The U.S. Supreme Court usually delivers its decisions in its biggest cases right before the justices end their term in late June, although they will issue important rulings before then (such as last month, when they issued their decision that the tariffs President Trump issued under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act were illegal).

Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University who served in the Biden White House as senior policy adviser for democracy and voting rights, said that while it’s impossible to know when the court will rule, he believes the only way we’ll have an answer before the end of June is “if it turns out to be not a big deal.”

“That’s still a possibility — many observers thought that the decisions in Allen v. Milligan (the last big Voting Rights Act decision in 2023) and Moore v. Harper (the case about whether legislatures could ignore their state constitutions when drawing congressional lines) were going to be seismic changes, and when they came, they didn’t really change the law at all,” Levitt told the Phoenix in an email.

“That doesn’t mean that if the case comes after April 20, it’s necessarily a big deal: There could be a big dissent over not doing something big. But I think the timing on a big deal is going to be late in the term,” he said.

What happens if the high court doesn’t rule by April 20?

The governor said in Tampa in December that he didn’t want redistricting to elect more Republicans, because the Legislature is “not allowed to use the partisan data,” indicating he does not want to run afoul of the Florida Fair District Amendments. They say no reapportionment plan or individual district can be drawn “with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or incumbent.”

So, does that mean that without a Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act by April 20 that the special session on redistricting will be called off?

Not likely, observers say.

“What I think the Legislature and DeSantis can rely on is they’ll argue that based on the Florida Supreme Court’s decision about the 5th Congressional District last year, where they sort of intimated that there might be an opening to challenges in other district layouts, the Legislature could say, ‘Well, we are going to go ahead and, based on that state court ruling, we are going to reconfigure some of these districts,” said Matt Isbell, a data analyst for Democratic campaigns.

The Florida Supreme Court in July upheld the 2022 redrawing of the map authored by DeSantis that reconfigured what had been Florida’s 5th District and erased Black representation in North Florida. That map permitted Republicans to increase their congressional representation from 16 to 20, while decreasing the Democratic numbers from 11 to 8 (the Republicans captured the new congressional seat the state was awarded after the 2020 U.S. Census).

In its written decision in the case known as Black Voters Matter Capacity Building Institute vs. Secretary, Florida Department of State, there was this key passage, written by Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz, hinting how the court could rule on the Fair District Amendments:

“Finally, we conclude by emphasizing that the defendants have not asked us to decide whether every district intentionally drawn to comply with this Court’s interpretation of the Non-Diminishment Clause [of minority voting strength] is necessarily race-predominant and therefore subject to strict scrutiny, even if the district satisfies the FDA’s [Fair District Amendments] race-neutral standards. That issue can wait for another day.”

DeSantis has previously asserted that he believes that Florida’s 20th Congressional District in South Florida is “the most irregularly shaped district on Florida’s map.” Isbell says that could be the seat GOP lawmakers say they need to redistrict based on the state Supreme Court’s ruling, “and then just in the process of re-drawing a couple of districts, they then can conveniently make changes that have a more partisan affect.”

House Speaker Daniel Perez noted the Florida Supreme Court’s opinion when he announced the creation of a select committee on Congressional Redistricting last summer, which met during committee weeks late last year but stopped its work after DeSantis announced the special legislative session on redistricting.

“Here in Florida, our state Supreme Court’s recent decision in Black Voters Matter Capacity Building Institute Inc. v. Secretary, Florida Department of State, raises important and distinct questions about the applicability and interpretation of certain provisions of the so-called ‘Fair Districts’ provisions of the Florida Constitution and their intersection with Federal law,” Perez said.

“Exploring these questions now, at the mid-decade point, would potentially allow us to seek legal guidance from our Supreme Court without the uncertainty associated with deferring those questions until after the next decennial census and reapportionment.”

“My own feeling is they will go to Tallahassee on April 20, they will redraw the maps, the maps will favor Republicans, and Republican leadership will say, ‘Well, you know, we had to get ahead of the curve, because we couldn’t wait for the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Bob Jarvis, a professor of constitutional law at Florida’s Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad College of Law.

In initially making his case for congressional redistricting last year, DeSantis also contended the state was “malapportioned” in the 2020 census, and that he was working with Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier to somehow “correct” that census. He noted in a news release that Florida had gained nearly 2 million new residents since 2019.

But there was no redone census done last year, and so if and when the Legislature does produce congressional maps during the special session, members will rely on data from the 2020 census — and likely the election results in 2022 and 2024 — to figure out how to favor Republicans in the 2026 midterm election in November.

A dummymander?

As far as how those drawings will go, Isbell argues Republicans need to be careful, because he considers the 2022 congressional map to already be a “very, very, very effective Republican gerrymander.”

“This is already a pretty Republican map, and if you start to make it even redder you do risk making it a dummymander perspective, because there’s only so many areas that the Democrats in some of these districts can be moved to and the Republicans can be added,” he said. (A “dummymander” is a play on the term gerrymander, refering to a redrawing that ends up benefiting the opposite party that it was designed to help).

And then there’s whether the Florida House and Senate can come together on newly redrawn congressional maps. The two chambers have been at odds a lot this session on policy priorities, and a clash over competing tax proposals led to a 105-day session last year.

In 2015, the two chambers failed to come to an agreement on a final map, forcing the Florida Supreme Court to create congressional and state Senate districts.

“That was back in an era when Republicans were just feuding with each another, and right now they’re feuding with each other, so right now that becomes the question: Do they do just keep fighting and not coming to an agreement?” said Isbell.

“I do see a map coming together. But I think there’s not a lot of clarity right now because of these of internal divisions on other issues.”

Meanwhile, the Florida Supreme Court on Friday rejected a legal challenge brought by two Florida voters to block DeSantis’ move to redraw the state’s congressional districts.