The Alabama legislature will initiate a special session in the coming weeks to redraw the state’s congressional districts after a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling, according to an announcement from Gov. Kay Ivey.
Earlier this month, in a 5–4 ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that the state’s congressional district likely violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, alleging the maps may have discriminated against black voters. Republican-appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts joined the three Democrat-appointed justices in rendering the majority opinion, while Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a lengthy dissent.
During the special session, the congressional redistricting will be the only topic of discussion, she said. The legislature will convene for the session on July 17, while other details were not provided.
“It is of the utmost importance that this special session only address the congressional map and nothing else. The task at hand is too urgent and too important,” the Republican governor said. “The Alabama Legislature has one chance to get this done before the July 21 court deadline. Our Legislature knows our state, our people, and our districts better than the federal courts or activist groups do.”
The three-judge panel ordered the state’s Republican-controlled legislature to come up with a new redistricting plan with two new districts by July 21. It’s not clear how those maps will look, but plaintiffs who filed lawsuits against the legislature proposed two districts that would have black populations of slightly more than 50 percent each, handing what appears to be a victory to Democrats in the state as black voters overwhelmingly tend to favor Democratic candidates in the state and nationwide.
In a majority opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts, he said that the court disagreed with Alabama’s position on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. He made note that some parts of Section 2 “may impermissibly elevate race in the allocation of political power within the States.”
“We are content to reject Alabama’s invitation to change existing law,” the chief justice said. “We find Alabama’s new approach to [Section] 2 compelling neither in theory nor in practice. We accordingly decline to recast our [Section] 2 case law as Alabama requests.”
In making his argument, Roberts made reference to an earlier precedent in which the Supreme Court held that “racial gerrymandering, even for remedial purposes, may balkanize us into competing racial factions; it threatens to carry us further from the goal of a political system in which race no longer matters.”
“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,” he also wrote.
But in a dissent, Thomas argued that “the question presented is whether [Section] 2 of the Act, as amended, requires the State of Alabama to intentionally redraw its longstanding congressional districts so that black voters can control a number of seats roughly proportional to the black share of the State’s population.”
“Section 2 demands no such thing, and, if it did, the Constitution would not permit it,” Thomas continued to say. “At the outset, I would resolve these cases in a way that would not require the Federal Judiciary to decide the correct racial apportionment of Alabama’s congressional seats,” the justice said.
The ruling was largely hailed by Democrats and Biden administration officials, including Attorney General Merrick Garland’s office.
“Today’s decision rejects efforts to further erode fundamental voting rights protections and preserves the principle that in the United States, all eligible voters must be able to exercise their constitutional right to vote free from discrimination based on their race,” Garland said in a statement earlier this month.
And this month, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a similar ruling targeting Louisiana’s Republican-drawn congressional map, paving the way for the state to have another majority-black district. That case was placed on hold pending the outcome of Alabama’s ruling.
Reports have said that Graves is House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) advisor on key issues, including the debt ceiling negotiations with the White House and congressional Democrats.
