On June 8th the SCOTUS ruled that the voting map in Alabama was a violation of the voting rights act....
Supreme Court backs challenge to Alabama congressional map
Justices side with Black voters who contend state violated a section of the Voting Rights Act
The Supreme Court on Thursday sided with Black voters who challenged Alabama’s congressional map as a violation of the Voting Rights Act, meaning the state likely will have to draw a new map with another majority-minority district before the 2024 election.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing the 5-4 majority opinion, upheld lower court rulings that found that Alabama’s congressional map, known as HB1, likely violated the VRA because it only has a single district where Black voters would have the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.
Thursday’s opinion could also spur redistricting in more than just Alabama, which currently is represented by six Republicans and one Democrat. The justices had paused the lower court rulings while they considered the case, allowing Alabama to use its original map for the 2022 election.
The ruling also directly affects the map in Louisiana, where the Supreme Court paused a similar ruling against the state’s map while it dealt with the Alabama cases. Several other states, including Georgia, Texas and South Carolina, are still facing federal litigation challenging their maps under the VRA.
Thursday’s decision, which some Supreme Court watchers called surprising, comes a decade after Roberts wrote the opinion in Shelby County v. Holder that wiped out a key VRA enforcement mechanism.
That ruling tossed the formula the Justice Department used to subject states and localities to preclearance of election law changes and changed redistricting efforts nationwide.
Black Belt
Alabama appealed a judgment from a three-judge panel that its congressional map discriminated against Black voters in part by splitting up the Black population in the state’s Black Belt — named for its soil — among the state’s other six districts.
The panel of three federal judges in Alabama found the state’s map discriminated against Black voters since they are more than 25 percent of the state’s population but can choose their representative in only one of seven districts. The Supreme Court case combined two lawsuits from voters in the state challenging the map.
Roberts, joined by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberal justices, wrote that the lower court correctly applied Supreme Court precedent when finding Alabama should draw a second district where Black voters could elect the candidate of their choice.
“We are content to reject Alabama’s invitation to change existing law,” Roberts said.
Alabama’s solicitor general, Edmund LaCour Jr., said in oral arguments that the lower court, by allowing the challengers to prioritize race when drawing a map that shows a possible additional majority-minority district, effectively mandated the state to violate the Constitution by dividing up voters by race.
The majority of the court explicitly rejected Alabama’s argument for a “race-neutral” evaluation of congressional districts that relies on hundreds of computer-generated maps. Roberts wrote that would make it too difficult to prove a map violated the VRA and go against the law’s goal to prevent racial discrimination in legislative districts.
“Section 2 cannot require courts to judge a contest of computers when there is no reliable way to determine who wins, or even where the finish line is,” Roberts wrote.
Roberts’ opinion also rejected Alabama’s effort to declare that the VRA does not apply to congressional districts, or that it was a violation of the 15th Amendment and unconstitutional.
Dissent
Justice Clarence Thomas filed a dissenting opinion, and was joined by Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett in parts of it. Thomas criticized the majority for siding against Alabama in a decision he said would effectively mandate proportional representation for minority voters across the country — which he described as a violation of the Constitution.
“The only benchmark that can justify it — and the one that the District Court demonstrably applied — is the decidedly nonneutral benchmark of proportional allocation of political power based on race,” Thomas wrote.
Thomas would have preferred a race-neutral test of mapmaking. “The text of [the VRA] and the logic of vote-dilution claims require a meaningfully race-neutral benchmark, and no race-neutral benchmark can justify the District Court’s finding of vote dilution in these cases,” Thomas wrote.
Other reactions
Challengers to Alabama’s map praised the decision Thursday, including Elias Law Group partner Abha Khanna, who argued the case before the Supreme Court.
“Alabama’s current congressional map systematically dilutes the voting power of Black Alabamians, in clear violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Thankfully, the Court today identified Alabama’s redistricting scheme as a textbook violation of the landmark civil rights law,” Khanna said in a statement.
The Biden administration argued against Alabama in the case, and Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said the ruling will prevent racial discrimination in voting and “rejects efforts to further erode fundamental voting rights protections.”
Garland also called on Congress to pass legislation giving the DOJ additional authority to enforce voting rights, though Democratic efforts to do so have stalled over the past decade.
"The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, the right from which all other rights ultimately flow," Garland's statement said. “Over the past two years, the Justice Department has rededicated its resources to enforcing federal voting rights protections. We will continue to use every authority we have left to defend voting rights.”
House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries praised the decision Thursday in a news conference and said Alabama had engaged in racial gerrymandering.
“And they’re not the only ones throughout the country who have done that, and we can at least draw some comfort from the fact that the 1965 Voting Rights Act remains alive,” the New York Democrat said.
Rep. Terri A. Sewell, the only Democrat in Alabama’s congressional delegation, tweeted that the decision was “Amazing!!”
“Historic victory for the Voting Rights Act, our Democracy and Alabama Black Voters!!!” said Sewell, who is Black.
https://rollcall.com/2023/06/08/supreme-court-backs-challenge-to-alabama-congressional-map/In regards to Louisiana, today they chose to let a lower courts ruling to stand by lifting a hold on that ruling and letting it stand.......
Supreme Court allows for Louisiana congressional map to be redrawn to add another majority-Black district
The Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Louisiana congressional map to be redrawn to add another majority-Black district.
The justices reversed plans to hear the case themselves and lifted a hold they placed on a lower court’s order for a reworked redistricting regime. There were no noted dissents.
The move from the high court comes after a ruling the justices issued earlier this month about Alabama’s congressional maps that upheld how courts have historically approached the redistricting provisions in the Voting Rights Act, the landmark civil rights law that Black voters are using to challenge the Louisiana congressional plan.
“Today’s decision follows on the heels of the court’s 5-4 ruling earlier this month holding that Alabama also has to re-draw its congressional district maps to include a second majority-minority district,” said Steve Vladeck, a CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law.
“And like the Alabama ruling, it doesn’t explain why the court nevertheless had issued emergency relief to allow Louisiana to use its unlawful maps during the 2022 midterm cycle,” Vladeck added. “It puts the court’s interventions last year into ever-sharper perspective.”
The new order means that the lower court proceedings in the case, which were put on hold by the conservative majority in late June of last year, will restart. At the time, a merits panel of the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals was preparing for an expedited review of a judge’s ruling that said that the 5-1 congressional plan likely violated the Voting Rights Act.
The judge, US District Judge Shelly Dick, had been considering a remedial congressional plan, after lawmakers in Louisiana refused to pass a plan with a second majority-Black district themselves.
The justices said Monday that their latest move “will allow the matter to proceed before the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit for review in the ordinary course and in advance of the 2024 congressional elections in Louisiana.”
Louisiana state officials were sued last year for a congressional map – passed by the Republican legislature over Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards’ veto – that made only one of its six districts majority Black, despite the 2020 census showing that the state’s population is 33% Black.
Order comes after justices froze redrawing of map before midterms
More than a year ago, Dick ordered the map redrawn to add a second Black-majority district to the congressional plan, finding that the map drawn by the Republicans likely violated the Voting Right Act’s prohibitions against racial discrimination in voting.
The judge wrote that “the evidence of Louisiana’s long and ongoing history of voting-related discrimination weighs heavily in favor of” the arguments put forward by the Louisiana State conference of the NAACP and the other challengers that brought the case.
The case, known as Robinson v. Ardoin, then went to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, a very conservative appeals court, and a three-judge appellate panel – which included two circuit judges that were Republican appointees – declined to put Dick’s order on hold. The appeals court expedited a fuller review of the case, but those proceedings were frozen last summer once the Louisiana officials successfully sought intervention from the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court in late June of last year, took up the case but put it on pause while it decided the challenge to the Alabama map.
In filings after the Alabama ruling was handed down, lawyers for the Louisiana Republican state officials argued that the Louisiana dispute presented a “unique situation” that would allow the high court to resolve legal questions about the Voting Rights Act that they claimed were left open by the Alabama ruling, known as Milligan.
“Today’s decision in Milligan does not address the district court’s significant errors of law that should rightly result in reversal,” the Louisiana filing said.
The state’s opponents countered that the district court in the Louisiana case had decided that the 5-1 map likely violated the Voting Rights Act under the same exact legal test the Supreme Court sanctioned in its Alabama ruling.
“Plaintiffs in both Milligan and Robinson presented the kind of evidence this Court has long required and has now reaffirmed in Milligan as sufficient to prove a (Voting Rights Act Section 2) violation,” the filing from the map’s challengers said.
One of the lawyers challenging the map, Abha Khanna, of the Elias Group, cheered the Supreme Court’s move to send the case back to lower courts.
“By dismissing this case as improvidently granted, the Supreme Court once again affirmed the power of the Voting Rights Act to prevent racially discriminatory redistricting, this time in Louisiana,” Khanna said in a statement. “Black voters in Louisiana have suffered one election under a congressional map that unlawfully dilutes their political influence. Thankfully, Louisiana is now on track to add an additional minority opportunity district in time for 2024, ensuring that Black Louisianians are finally afforded fair representation in the state’s congressional delegation.”
Angelique Freel, civil division director at the Louisiana attorney general’s office, said: “Our job is to defend what the legislature passed, and we trust the 5th Circuit will review the merits in accordance with the law.”
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/26/poli...a-congressional-redistricting/index.html
