Last month, the Supreme Court held that Alabama violated the Voting Rights Act when it drew racially gerrymandered congressional districts. Under maps drawn by the state’s Republican legislature, Black voters (who make up more than a quarter of Alabama’s population) only had a real shot of electing a member of the US House in one of the state’s seven districts. The Court effectively ordered Alabama to draw a second district that was likely to elect a candidate preferred by Black Alabamians.
The state’s response to this Supreme Court decision was swift and defiant. Last week, the state legislature enacted new maps, which do not comply with the Court’s order. By the state’s own admission, only one of the seven districts in this new map has a Black majority. The district with the second-highest Black representation under the new maps is nearly 55 percent white — and less than 40 percent Black.
At least in the short term, this defiance is unlikely to be tolerated by the courts. The Supreme Court’s decision in Allen v. Milligan affirmed a lower court decision that also struck down the state’s gerrymandered maps. And the three lower court judges who heard this case wrote that it was not a “close one.” The lower court invited the plaintiffs challenging Alabama’s maps to submit their objections to the new maps by Friday, and it’s likely that the lower court will act swiftly to curb Alabama’s defiance.
Even so, there is a risk that the Supreme Court will not stand by its decision in Milligan once that lower court’s decision is appealed (again) to the justices.
Milligan was probably the most surprising decision the Court handed down in its recently completed term. Although it did nothing more than apply to Alabama’s maps the framework the Court announced nearly 40 years ago in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), that framework — and the provision of the Voting Rights Act that it rests on — have been under siege from the Court’s…
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