With about a week to go until oral arguments before the Florida Supreme Court over the state's plan for legislative redistricting, justices are already fighting about how far the court can go in reviewing the new maps.
In what could amount to a victory for opponents of the proposal for carving up House and Senate districts, SJR 1176, the court issued an order Tuesday calling for the Florida Democratic Party and a coalition of voting-rights organizations to hand over information they had on lawmakers' residences.
The court said it would then ask Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Legislature to review the addresses and make sure they're correct.
Democrats and the voting-rights groups -- including the League of Women Voters, the National Council of La Raza and Common Cause Florida -- contend that the lawmakers violated the anti-gerrymandering Fair Districts provisions in the Constitution by protecting incumbents.
"In order for the court to properly carry out its duties in evaluating this constitutional standard, it is necessary that the court be provided with information concerning the residences of legislators," the majority said in a 4-3 ruling.
The unsigned opinion was joined by Justices Barbara Pariente, Peggy Quince, Jorge Labarga and James Perry.
But in a sharply worded dissent, Chief Justice Charles Canady said the majority was overstepping its bounds in what has traditionally been a limited review of the once-a-decade redistricting process making sure that the plan passed the most basic tests, such as ensuring that all districts are contiguous.
"Nothing in the Constitution permits us to employ an interrogative process such as that undertaken by the majority," Canady wrote.
Justice Ricky Polston joined Canady's dissent. Justice Fred Lewis dissented without comment.
The boundary of the court's authority is already shaping up as a major part of the case against the maps. The state has argued that nothing about the Fair Districts amendments -- adopted by voters in a November 2010 referendum -- changes what the court has to consider in its redistricting review.
Challenges under Fair Districts can be heard later by a court without a March 9 deadline the Supreme Court faces for its review, supporters of the map say.
But opponents have argued that the new amendments add standards to the Florida Constitution that justices are supposed to consider in their initial look at the maps.
In a separate order, justices said they would allow the coalition of voting-rights organizations to file a reply to the arguments raised by the state on the jurisdiction question, and set a deadline of noon Wednesday for the filing. Bondi's office and the House and Senate would have 24 hours to respond.
The vote on that order was 5-2, with Lewis joining the majority in the original case. Canady argued that the court should stick to its original schedule, under which all briefs were already supposed to be filed.
"Additional briefing in this proceeding is not necessary, and it will not be beneficial to the decision-making process," he wrote.
