Global Courant
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down Republican-signed Alabama congressional districts that civil rights activists say discriminated against black voters in a surprise reaffirmation of the landmark Voting Rights Act.
The court ruled 5 to 4 against Alabama, meaning the map of the seven congressional districts, which strongly favor the Republicans, will now be redrawn. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, both conservatives, joined the court’s three liberals in the majority.
In doing so, the court — which has a conservative majority of 6 to 3 — rejected the state’s attempt to make it harder to allay concerns from civil rights advocates that black voter power in states like Alabama is being diluted by voters divide into districts where white voters dominate.
Voters leave a polling station at the National Guard military base during the presidential primary in Camden, Ala., on March 3, 2020. Joshua Lott/AFP via Getty Images file
In the ruling, Roberts, writing for the majority, said a lower court correctly concluded that the congressional map violated the voting rights law.
In 2013, Roberts wrote a ruling that struck down a separate, key provision of the Voting Rights Act and has long argued that various government efforts to address historic racial discrimination are problematic and could exacerbate the situation.
He wrote in Thursday’s ruling that there are genuine fears that the Voting Rights Act “could improperly elevate race in the allocation of political power” and that the Alabama ruling “does not lessen or ignore those concerns.”
The court instead “simply states that a faithful application of our precedents and a fair reading of the record before us do not confirm them here,” Roberts added.
As such, the court left open future challenges to the law, with Kavanaugh writing in a separate opinion that his vote did not rule out challenges to Section 2 based on whether there is a time when the 1965 law allows consideration of race in redistribution is no longer justified.
Civil rights groups and their supporters, including the Biden administration, enjoyed a largely unexpected victory.
“Today’s decision rejects efforts to further erode fundamental protections of the right to vote, and upholds the principle that in the United States all eligible voters should be able to exercise their constitutional right to vote free from discrimination based on their race said Attorney General Merrick Garland. in a statement.
Abha Khanna, a lawyer for plaintiffs challenging the cards, said the court had rightly rejected a “handbook violation” of the Voting Rights Act.
Despite the ruling, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall vowed to fight on.
“While the majority’s decision is disappointing, this case is not over,” he said in a brief statement.
The two consolidated cases arose from litigation over the new congressional district map created by the Republican-controlled Alabama legislature after the 2020 census. The challengers, which included individual voters and the NAACP’s Alabama State Conference, said the card violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by discriminating against black voters.
The new map created one of seven districts in the state in which black voters were likely to elect a candidate of their choice. The challengers say the state, which has a population that is more than a quarter black, should have had two such districts and provided evidence that such a district could be drawn.
A lower court agreed to a ruling last January, saying prosecutors had shown, according to Supreme Court precedent, that Alabama’s black population was both large enough and dense enough to form a second-majority black district. The court ordered a new map drawn, but the state’s Republican Attorney General Steve Marshall turned to the Supreme Court, which stayed the lawsuit and agreed to hear the case.
Four conservative justices, led by Justice Clarence Thomas, disagreed with Thursday’s ruling.
Thomas wrote that his preferred result “does not require the federal judiciary to decide the proper racial distribution of Alabama’s congressional seats.”
He added that according to the lower court’s approach Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is “nothing more than a racial right to more or less proportional control over election offices … wherever different racial groups consistently elect different candidates.”
Last year, the Supreme Court was tied 5-4 when it allowed the map drawn by Republicans to be used in the November election, with Roberts joining the court’s three liberals who disagreed. Kavanaugh then indicated that his vote for using the card was based on the lower court decision being made too close to the election.
Republicans won six of the seven seats in the election, while Democrats won the majority black district. With black voters more likely to vote for Democrats, Democrats might have gotten an extra seat had a new map been passed.
The Alabama case was one of many in which the Supreme Court’s decisions may have helped Republicans win their fragile majority in the House of Representatives.
Alabama argued that the lower court placed too much emphasis on race in reaching its conclusions. Marshall said in court filings that the fact that the challengers were able to demonstrate, using computer-generated maps, that it was possible to draw a black district with a second majority was not sufficient evidence that the state’s actions were discriminatory . He cited other traditional “race-neutral” map-drawing factors that take into account things like regional culture and identity, as well as the requirement that districts have similar-sized populations.
Richard Pildes, an expert on suffrage at the New York University School of Law, said the ruling “is more important … in the future than just a reaffirmation of the status quo.”
That’s because the court effectively approved the use of computer-generated maps in challenging districts. New technology makes it easier to find cards that could potentially be challenged under the Voting Rights Act, he added.
The Supreme Court has weakened the Voting Rights Act in two cases in the past decade, beginning in 2013 when it struck down a key provision of the law that allowed federal oversight of electoral law changes in certain states. In a 2021 Arizona ruling, the court made it more difficult to bring cases under Section 2.
The case is one of three cases the court is hearing in its current term, in which conservative lawyers say they are pushing race-neutral arguments favored by the right as a way to fight racial discrimination. In the other cases, the court could end affirmative action in college admissions and strike down part of a law favoring Native Americans seeking to adopt Native American children.
The court is also considering another major election-related dispute during its current term, in which the court will rule on an attempt by Republicans to curb state courts’ ability to enforce state constitutional provisions in federal elections. That ruling, expected before the end of this month, could make it easier for Republican lawmakers to restrict voting rights.
