The Supreme Court handed down two very brief orders on Tuesday, informing the state of Alabama that no, it is not allowed to defy one of the Court’s decisions on gerrymandering.
In June, in one of the most surprising decisions the Court has handed down in years, the justices voted 5-4 to affirm a lower court decision striking down Alabama’s congressional maps. The courts ordered the state to draw new maps that include at least two districts where Black voters can elect their candidates of choice.
African Americans make up about 27 percent of the state’s population, and Alabama has seven congressional districts. So, if the state has two Black districts, that will give Black voters representation that is roughly proportional to their population.
Both the lower court decision and the Supreme Court’s decision affirming it, in Allen v. Milligan, were uncontroversial under longstanding precedents interpreting the federal Voting Rights Act. But the Court’s Republican-appointed majority has historically been very hostile toward voting rights plaintiffs generally, and toward the Voting Rights Act in particular.
Alabama’s lawyers litigated this case with that history seemingly front and center in their minds — acting as if they had the Supreme Court in their back pocket. The first time the Milligan case was before the justices, the state’s lawyers proposed several ways to read the Voting Rights Act that would effectively eliminate its safeguards against racial gerrymandering.
But five justices rejected this effort to rewrite the law in their June opinion, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing that Alabama’s proposed rules run “headlong into our precedent.”
Nevertheless, Alabama refused to comply with the Court’s order, drawing a new map that contained only one district where Black voters could elect a candidate of their choice. The state then asked the Supreme Court to allow these new maps to go into effect because, while the state did not…
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