Alabama has seven congressional districts and about 27% of its population is Black. Under normal circumstances you'd expect the Black vote to prevail in two districts, but Alabama has never been normal. In 1992 it got its first Black district since Reconstruction, and it's been limited to one Black district ever since.
In late 2021 Alabama passed HB1, a redistricting statute following the 2020 census. The map in HB1 was similar to the previous map and was limited, once again, to a single Black district. Alabama was sued the same day and the case went before a three-judge panel, which ruled decisively that the map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In an order handed down today, the Supreme Court concurred in a 5-4 decision:
The three-judge District Court received live testimony from 17 witnesses, reviewed more than 1000 pages of briefing and upwards of 350 exhibits, and considered arguments from the 43 different lawyers who had appeared in the litigation. After reviewing that extensive record, the Court concluded in a 227-page opinion that the question whether HB1 likely violated §2 was not “a close one.”...Based on our review of the record, we agree.
The groups suing Alabama presented their own redistricting maps, but Alabama argued that they were flawed because they split a "community of interest"—namely the Gulf Coast. The Supreme Court found this unpersuasive, and in any case ruled that Alabama's maps split a community of interest too:
Named for its fertile soil, the Black Belt contains a high proportion of black voters, who “share a rural geography, concentrated poverty, unequal access to government services, . . . lack of adequate healthcare,” and a lineal connection to “the many enslaved people brought there to work in the antebellum period.” The District Court concluded—correctly, under our precedent—that it did not have to conduct a “beauty contest[ ]” between plaintiffs’ maps and the State’s. There would be a split community of interest in both.
Alabama also argued that its maps were were based on a "race-neutral benchmark" and thus couldn't be racially discriminatory. The Court rejected this:
A district is not equally open, in other words, when minority voters face—unlike their majority peers—bloc voting along racial lines, arising against the backdrop of substantial racial discrimination within the State, that renders a minority vote unequal to a vote by a nonminority voter.
This is not a vigorous ruling. It was written by Chief Justice John Roberts and mostly says only that it agrees with the District Court's "careful factual findings." Its own arguments are generally bland explanations of the Court's precedent in Thornburg v. Gingles, which governs redistricting challenges.
Nevertheless, it's a rare Supreme Court victory for racial challenges to redistricting laws. Two conservatives, Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh, joined the three liberals in the majority opinion.
How did 4 justices not agree with the majority opinion??
Is this question serious? Clarence Thomas loves stomping on the faces of black people every chance he gets - rumor is, that's what makes Ginni orgasm like Meg Ryan in "When Harry Met Sally" - so right off the bat, there's 1 vote against the majority. Alito also hates black people for being so uppity all the damn time - I mean, Jesus, we've allowed 2 blacks on the Supreme Court and 1 in the White House, what else do those people want?! - so bam, we're now at 2 votes against. Gorsuch and the Handmaid look up to Thomas and Alito, so they often just say "I'll have what they're having" and now we reached 4.
😉
Now if there were only some sort of law that would prevent this. Something about voting rights would be useful.
i'm genuinely shocked any conservatives voted to support black voting rights.
Thomas almost argues that we need to abandon districting in favor of proportional representation. In the Alabama case, candidates would run state wide, and the top 7 vote-getters would be elected to office. The elected politicians would not represent a geographical area within the state, but would represent a stripe of the population of the state.
Yeah thanks Lucy, I mean, Clarence.
Conservatives always move the goalposts. If Clarence is suggesting we need proportional representation, it's because he knows damn well that there's no feasible way to implement that in our current political state, with the current crop of politicians we have and the current interpretation of the US Constitution that dominates the judiciary. There's no way an amendment allowing for PR is going to pass a supermajority of Congress or the state legislatures in our lifetimes. This whole mental wank is reminiscent of previous SCOTUS rulings suggesting that independent state level re-districting committees were perfectly legal or that states could regulate guns, until SCOTUS then pulls the rug out from underneath those moves too in a later case.
The top 7 vote getters? That's not "proportional representation"; it's more like a "jungle" race. For proportional, each of the parties (at least 2, ideally) would have slates of candidates. Voters would pick the party, not the individual. (There really are no "individuals" in government anymore.) The proportion of votes for each party would determine how many members of each slate was named to office.
Frankly, I like it. The one rep per district/winner take all/ first past the post method has outworn its welcome, and has solidified a rigid, calcified two party system.
I remember when liberals loved the activist Warren court. Now however we seem to be on defense, so we appreciate the merits of stare decisis. If I understand commentary elsewhere on the decision, Roberts and Kavanaugh adhered to the importance of statutory stare decisis, which they differentiate from constitutional stare decisis, on the basis that Congress has the power and opportunity to change the law, even though earlier SCOTUS decisions upholding the law were erroneous
I even saw one comment that the logic might bode well for the affirmative action cases.
The Warren Court ended in 1969. If you're remembering liberals loving it, that was a good half-century ago. Might as well reminisce about conservatives loving the Jim Crow era too.
General feeling is that the Warren Court got it right with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, even though the country had stuck to the "separate but equal" Plessy v. Ferguson for the previous 58 years. Warren strongly felt the decision should be unanimous. By contrast Thomas/Alito/Gorsuch/Coney Barrett/Kavanaugh have no problem issuing radical 5 to 4 decisions and then wondering why the Court's judicial character is being questioned.
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"Under normal circumstances you'd expect the Black vote to prevail in two districts, but ..."
Isn't that interesting? If we were totally colorblind in housing and education, and our population spread were totally heterogeneous, I'd expect blacks, hispanics, et al, to be evenly distributed in all districts, in which case I would not be at all surprised to see NO black vote of any significance.
It follows a longstanding Roberts court pattern -- blast some major precedent out of the water, and follow up with a few sops to the 20th century to tamp down the criticism. Note: 20th century is deliberate.
Chief Supreme is a smooth operator.