Just a few months ago, the US supreme court issued one of its most surprising rulings in recent memory.
In a 5-4 decision in Allen v Milligan, the court said Alabama’s congressional map violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act because it diluted the influence of Black voters, who make up about a quarter of the state’s population, but comprise a majority in just one of Alabama’s congressional districts. The justices upheld a lower court’s decision ordering Alabama to redraw its map “to include two districts in which Black voters either comprise a voting-age majority or something quite close to it”.
It was widely seen as a major win for the Voting Rights Act, a statute that the US supreme court has significantly hollowed out over the last decade. It was a victory that was supposed to give the Black belt, a historically Black region in the state that is among the poorest in the US, better representation in Washington.
The statute, a landmark of the civil rights movement, has been critical in increasing Black representation at all levels of government across the US.
But when Alabama’s Republican-controlled legislature convened just a few weeks later, they ignored the mandate. Their new map still included just one majority Black district. It increased the percentage of Black voters in a second district to be around 41% Black, but continued to crack the Black belt, a historically Black region that stretches across the middle of Alabama, into multiple districts. Now, it is asking a federal court to approve that map and, if they don’t, the case will probably return to the supreme court.
Evan Milligan, the president of Alabama Forward, and one of the lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit challenging the maps, said the process to pass the remedial plan was rushed and opaque.
“The Black belt is a region that deserves better than that,” he said. This has been a place that has given a lot and when we drive through here today it’s been locked out of the economic benefits that have really been derived from those contributions … It deserves [someone] who will wake up thinking about that and will go to sleep thinking about that.”
Redistricting experts said it was one of the most brazen acts of defiance of a federal court order they had ever seen.
“It’s so disingenuous,” said Jonathan Cervas, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who specializes in redistricting. “It speaks of 1950s America and not 2023 America. And it gets me very heated.”
Alabama Republicans have come up with a smattering of rationales to try and justify their new map. In court filings, they argue that two counties along the Gulf coast, Mobile and Baldwin counties form a “community of interest” that must be kept together in any plan because they share economic, tourism and transportation interests, among others. Demographically, the counties are very different – Mobile county is 37% Black while Baldwin county is 8.4% Black and 85% white. Cervas said the state’s justification for keeping the two counties together was pretextual.
Chief Justice John Roberts already essentially rejected the idea that they were a community of interest in the court’s June ruling.
“Alabama argues that the Gulf coast region in the southwest of the State is such a community of interest, and that plaintiffs’ maps erred by separating it into two different districts,” Roberts wrote for the court’s majority. “We do not find the state’s argument persuasive.”
Analyses have shown that there is racially polarized voting in Alabama – Black voters overwhelmingly tend to vote for Democrats while white voters support Republicans. An additional majority-Black district, or something close to it, is likely to elect a Democrat. A majority-white district is likely to elect a Republican. It’s no surprise then that Kevin McCarthy, the Republican speaker of the US House, called Alabama Republicans as they were drawing the map and was concerned about preserving his Republican majority.
Keeping Mobile and Baldwin counties together in the same district makes it nearly impossible to draw a second majority Black district since a significant portion of the Black voters needed to do so live in Mobile.
“They say that the purported Mobile-Baldwin community of interest is so strong that it can’t be broken in order to give African Americans a meaningful opportunity to elect candidates of choice in a second district,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who has worked in top voting rights roles at both the justice department and White House.
“Their theory would effectively render meaningless the [Voting Rights Act] as it has existed since 1982, by allowing the state endless opportunities to choose ostensibly race-neutral pretexts for limiting minority political power.”
The US supreme court is expected to weigh in on Alabama’s revised map in the near future and its decision will have significant implications.
A decision upholding Alabama’s new map would “essentially be abandoning” its June decision confirming that Alabama had to redraw its districts, said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice.
“I don’t think it is going to do that,” he said. Such a ruling would provide a way for other states to avoid increasing Black representation in their congressional maps (there is similar pending litigation to the Alabama case in Louisiana and Georgia).
Milligan, the lead plaintiff in the case, said he wasn’t surprised to see the Alabama legislature attempting to do an end run around the courts. “There’s always that rollercoaster of hope and disappointment,” he said. “Those of us who do advocacy work have developed defense mechanisms.”
Still, he cautioned that it would be extremely alarming if Alabama lawmakers were able to get away with their efforts to ignore the court’s ruling.
“If people feel that there’s nothing that can be done, then we’re eating at any incentive for compromise. At this particular point in our history. Globally and for our country, that’s a dangerous example to set. Because that makes the appeal of authoritarianism even more appealing.”
