Cite as: 512 U. S. 997 (1994)
Opinion of the Court
plaintiffs) filed a similar suit, which the three-judge District Court consolidated with the De Grandy case.1
Several months after the first complaint was filed, on April 10, 1992, the state legislature adopted Senate Joint Resolution 2-G (SJR 2-G), providing the reapportionment plan currently at issue. The plan called for dividing Florida into 40 single-member Senate, and 120 single-member House, districts based on population data from the 1990 census. As the Constitution of Florida required, the state attorney general then petitioned the Supreme Court of Florida for a declaratory judgment that the legislature's apportionment plan was valid under federal and state law. See Fla. Const., Art. III, § 16(c). The court so declared, while acknowledging that state constitutional time constraints precluded full review for conformity with § 2 of the Voting Rights Act and recognizing the right of any interested party to bring a § 2 challenge to the plan in the Supreme Court of Florida. See In re Constitutionality of Senate Joint Resolution 2G, Special Apportionment Session 1992, 597 So. 2d 276, 285-286 (1992).2
The De Grandy and NAACP plaintiffs responded to SJR 2-G by amending their federal complaints to charge the new
1 The complaints also challenged Florida's congressional districts, but that element of the litigation has been resolved separately, see De Grandy v. Wetherell, 794 F. Supp. 1076 (ND Fla. 1992) (three-judge court), and
without appeal.
2 In an additional step not directly relevant to this appeal, the State submitted SJR 2-G to the Department of Justice for preclearance pursuant to 42 U. S. C. § 1973c (§ 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965). Five Florida counties, but not Dade County, are subject to preclearance. De Grandy v. Wetherell, 815 F. Supp. 1550, 1574 (ND Fla. 1992). When the Attorney General of the United States refused to preclear the plan's Senate districts for the Hillsborough County area and the state legislature refused to revise the plan, the Supreme Court of Florida ordered the adjustments necessary to obtain preclearance, 601 So. 2d 543 (1992); it is the version of SJR 2-G so adjusted that is at issue in this litigation. 815 F. Supp., at 1557-1558.
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