A panel of three federal judges has struck down Alabama’s latest map of congressional election districts for not following a court order to comply with the landmark Voting Rights Act.
In an order released Tuesday, the judges said they are “deeply troubled that the State enacted a map that the State readily admits does not provide the remedy we said federal law requires.”
"We are not aware of any other case in which a state legislature — faced with a federal court order declaring that its electoral plan unlawfully dilutes minority votes and requiring a plan that provides an additional opportunity district — responded with a plan that the state concedes does not provide that district," said U.S. Circuit Judge Stanley Marcus, U.S. District Judge Anna Manasco and U.S. District Judge Terry Moorer. "The law requires the creation of an additional district that affords Black Alabamians, like everyone else, a fair and reasonable opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. The 2023 Plan plainly fails to do so."
Because it doesn’t matter whether the map “looks” fair. It needs to have two majority Black districts to comply with the court order. And those two districts are probably not going to elect Republicans.
A map can almost assuredly be constructed that gives those two districts, even with democrat representatives, and yet maintains overwhelming republican power in the state regardless. Two districts against however many others.
Again, I’m not advocating for this. Gerrymandering is a disgusting practice. But it’s still something I’m pretty sure they could have done.
This is a Congressional map. Nobody in this lawsuit is trying to flip the state legislature. They are trying to enforce the Voting Rights Act, which is about race not party affiliation.
According to the SCOTUS, the number of Black-majority Alabama districts should be proportional to the number of Blacks in Alabama. Alabama has seven Congressional representatives, of whom one is Black. The state is roughly one quarter Black, so the goal of the lawsuit is to make sure it has two Black-majority districts in Congress. Nothing more. The other five will surely be Republican-controlled, and everyone knows that the courts cannot change that. Two out of seven is our best-case scenario, for now at least.
Other lawsuits have tried to force various maps, at the state and congressional level, to match the number of Democratic-leaning districts to the proportion of Democrats in the state. Any such efforts have no support from the SCOTUS and no chance of success in Alabama.
Ah, I see what you are saying now. Basically, the thing I was hung up on was that I figured they would get what they could and leave it at that. But basically, they aren’t satisfied with getting what they could and simply want to get it all, court order be damned. And there’s no way to comply with the court order AND get it all, so violating the court order was the only option.
Expect that now, with an independent organization drawing the next map, they might lose even more than the paltry two majority congressional districts. Good.