How often do we expect to hear any good news coming out of a Supreme Court, 6 of whose members were appointed by Trump (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett), George Bush II (Roberts and Alito) and George HW Bush (Thomas)? Nonetheless, early yesterday, the Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 ruling against Alabama’s gerrymandered racist congressional map. It was a shock… not that it should’ve been.
The Court ordered the state to create a second district with a large Black population. Mike Cason, writing for AL.com, reported that John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh “joined with the court’s liberals in affirming a lower-court ruling that found a likely violation of the Voting Rights Act in an Alabama congressional map with one majority Black seat out of seven congressional districts in a state where more than one in four residents is Black.” The Court ruled that Alabama’s congressional district map, with six majority white districts out of seven, most likely violates the Voting Rights Act.
A three-judge federal panel in January 2022 ordered Alabama to redraw the congressional map to add a second district that was majority or near-majority Black. The judges, including two appointees of President Trump, ruled after a seven-day hearing that the plan most likely violated the Voting Rights Act. “Black voters have less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice to Congress,” they wrote.
In February 2022, the Supreme Court put that decision on hold at Alabama’s request to allow the map to be used in the 2022 elections. However, the justices did not rule on the merits of the Voting Rights claims, and that decision came Thursday morning.
“The Court affirms the District Court’s determination that plaintiffs demonstrated a reasonable likelihood of success on their claim that HB1 (the redistricting bill) violates (Section 2 of the Voting Right Act),” the opinion says. “The District Court faithfully applied this Court’s precedents in concluding that HB1 likely violates (Section 2).
Individual voters and organizations filed lawsuits in 2021, challenging the district map approved by the Alabama Legislature after the 2020 census.
The plaintiffs alleged that the map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits election laws and procedures that are racially discriminatory. A key contention was that Black residents make up 27% of Alabama’s population, but only one of the seven Congressional districts, or 14%, had a majority Black population.
The decision comes 10 years after the Supreme Court issued an important ruling on the Voting Rights Act in another Alabama case, Shelby County v. Holder, which ended the requirement for Alabama and other states with a history of racial discrimination on voting to seek preclearance from the Justice Department on election law changes.
Evan Milligan, executive director of the organization Alabama Forward and a lead plaintiff in the redistricting case, told AL.com in May that the decision in the current case, called Allen (for Secretary of State Wes Allen) v. Milligan, will help determine the viability of the Voting Rights Act in stopping racial gerrymandering of districts.
Lawyers representing state officials and defending the current map have argued that it is similar to those adopted after the census in 2000 and the census in 2010, which were both precleared by the Justice Department.
The state’s lawyers said the Legislature drew the current map with race-neutral criteria, making changes to adjust to the population shifts needed after the 2020 census.
They argued that the three-judge panel that ruled in favor of the plaintiffs made a legal error in their interpretation of the Voting Rights Act, saying that to draw a second majority Black district would require “race-based sorting,” or putting race ahead of all other considerations.
Needless to say, the 4 most conservative and most partisan judges— in effect, Republican Party operatives— dissented. Clarence Thomas’ handlers wrote that his preferred outcome “would not require the federal judiciary to decide the correct racial apportionment of Alabama’s congressional seats” and added that that under the approach taken by the lower court, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act “is nothing more than a racial entitlement to roughly proportional control of elective offices... wherever different racial groups consistently prefer different candidates.”
And this ruling could reverberate in very similar cases in 3 other Southern states where partisan Republican legislatures based their gerrymanders on racism: South Carolina, Louisiana and Georgia. That could mean 3 more seats for Democrats (4 if you include Alabama). Right now those 4 seats are a crucial part of McCarthy’s 222-212 seat majority (+ one vacant blue seat in Rhode Island), so let’s call it 222 to 213. Take 4 seats away from the GOP and add them to the Dems and you have… a 218 to 217 Republican “majority.” And if McCarthy can’t govern the House with a 222-212 majority, how would he be able to get anything done at all with a one vote majority, where just one neo-fascist or nihilist could shut the works down for any reason and any time?
All the maps I’ve seen would have an AL-07 (Terri Sewell’s district) that would still include Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, while creating a new district south of there that could go from Mobile up to Montgomery and all the way to the Georgia border. Presumably, that would throw extreme MAGAt Barry Moore into a primary battle with slightly more mainstream conservative Republican Jerry Carl, while the new district would lean blue (with a D+9 partisan lean). One proposed new map:
The Cook Report has already changed several predictions based on the ruling, although poorly-thought through. Amy Walters put AL-01 (Carl) and AL-02 (Moore) into the toss-up category, although only one would be. They also put LA-06 (Garret Graves) into the toss up category.
With current technology, one can easily gerrymander on a very local level by party affiliation, and document with reams and reams of printouts that race was not a factor in determining that gerrymander. AFAIK, there is no law against such a disenfranchisement, and no way to stop it at a state level with reptilicans in charge. A limited victory at best.
Am I correct that the DOJ did NOT enforce VRA here. It was some other group or individual that brought the suits?
Also note that the supremes let the racist gerrymanders stand long enough so that a close election would likely result in a nazi house.
So... there's that.
well, better late than never. but how much longer can americans rely on states and the nazi supreme court to do the (democrap) DOJ's job for them?