The U.S. Supreme Court Monday voided a lower court’s order for Alabama to use a recent congressional map with two majority-black congressional districts, paving the way for the state to drop one of the two districts ahead of the midterm elections.
The Court ruled that it “unceremoniously discard[ed]” the District Court order that barred Alabama from using a 2023 congressional map on the basis that the map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
The ruling follows the Court’s decision in the case involving Louisiana, in which the Court’s reinterpretation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act informed its May 4 ruling that a largely black U.S. House district in Louisiana was an unconstitutional race-based gerrymander.
Alabama had argued that their case mirrored Louisiana’s and that they wanted the same outcome, adding that their goal was to prioritize policy and not racial considerations, SCOTUSblog reported.
The District Court had ruled “that Alabama violated the Fourteenth Amendment by intentionally diluting the votes of Black voters in Alabama,” the dissenting justices wrote in part.
“That constitutional finding of intentional discrimination is independent of, and unaffected by, any of the legal issues discussed in” the Louisiana case, they further argued.
That the Court threw out the lower court’s order was, therefore, “inappropriate and will cause only confusion as Alabamians begin to vote in the elections scheduled for next week,” according to the dissenting justices, who were referring to the May 19 primaries.
Alabama Republicans hailed the ruling, with the state’s Republican House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter calling the decision “a massive victory not just for Alabama, but for conservatives across the country,” the Associated Press (AP) reported.
The NAACP National President Derrick Johnson slammed the ruling as “a return to Jim Crow,” according to the outlet.
“[A]nybody who is alarmed by these developments — as everybody should be — better be making a plan to vote in November to put an end to this madness while we still can,” Johnson said.
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