Alabama is back in the Supreme Court — to seek the justices’ permission to openly defy one of the Court’s recent orders.
In June, the Supreme Court ordered Alabama to redraw its racially gerrymandered congressional map to include a second district where Black voters could elect their representative of choice. This case is known as Allen v. Milligan.
The decision was not particularly ambiguous. Five justices voted to affirm a lower court decision, which itself held that “the appropriate remedy is a congressional redistricting plan that includes either an additional majority-Black congressional district, or an additional district in which Black voters otherwise have an opportunity to elect a representative of their choice.”
Nevertheless, Alabama responded to this decision with overt defiance — drawing a new map which, by the state’s own admission, includes only one district, of seven total, where Black voters are likely to elect their chosen representative. That’s just like the old maps that were struck down by the Supreme Court.
Under the new map, just one district has a Black majority. The district with the second-largest Black population is more than 50 percent white and less than 40 percent Black.
There is some risk that one key justice, Brett Kavanaugh, could flip his vote in this case. In June, when the Court handed down its decision ordering Alabama to redraw its maps, the vote was only 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Kavanaugh joining the Court’s three liberal justices to form a majority. Kavanaugh, however, wrote a separate opinion where he suggested that he might be open to declaring part of the Voting Rights Act, the federal law that prohibits race discrimination in elections, unconstitutional.
The oddest thing about Alabama’s latest brief to the justices, where the state’s lawyers ask the Court to bless Alabama’s defiance of the previous Milligan decision, is that it barely discusses this constitutional argument….
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