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DiMaio Revises Lawsuit To Claim Reverse Discrimination
Posted Apr 10, 2008 by William March
Updated Apr 11, 2008 at 05:56 PM

Vic DiMaio and Mike Steinberg, two Tampa Democrats who have sued to overturn the national Democratic Party’s sanctions against Florida, have revised their lawsuit to make a claim of reverse discrimination.
They contend the national party discriminated against Florida by favoring the black and Hispanic minority voters in South Carolina and Nevada, which were allowed to hold early primaries.
The background: The national Democratic Party says it won’t seat Florida’s national convention delegation because the state’s primary was held too early, on Jan. 29. But the DNC allowed South Carolina and Nevada to hold early primaries in order to balance the influence of the mainly white, traditional early states of Iowa and New Hampshire.
“It may have seemed a fair way at the time to handle the situation ... but they really can’t do that – it’s a violation of the civil rights act,” said Mike Steinberg, the attorney in the case, who’s also local party chairman.
One lawsuit over the party sanctions, by Sen. Bill Nelson, has already failed, and any litigation faces difficult hurdles because courts have long ruled that political parties are private entities, free to set their own rules for choosing their presidential nominees.
But Steinberg and DiMaio, a local party activist and consultant, contend they have a good legal argument because the courts have made one exception: Parties aren’t allowed to discriminate by race. A 1953 Supreme Court decision in a Texas case, for example, invalidated “whites only” primaries in which blacks weren’t allowed to vote.

This will be heard 5/28 in the 11th US District Court of Appeals.