In 2023, a three-judge federal district court panel blocked congressional maps drawn by lawmakers in Alabama and effectively ordered the state to create a second majority-minority district.
At the time, conservatives blasted the ruling as yet another example of courts forcing race-based congressional mapmaking onto states under the guise of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
But the legal ground shifted dramatically after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, a decision that took a constitutional sledgehammer to race-driven redistricting pushes used by Democrats for decades.
Following that ruling, Alabama asked the Supreme Court to revisit the lower court’s decision.
In early May, SCOTUS vacated the district court ruling and sent the case back for reconsideration in light of the new precedent.
Shockingly, on Tuesday, the same three-judge federal panel once again blocked Alabama from using its 2023 congressional maps.
The goofball judges ruled that the districts under the 2023 map were intentionally discriminatory against black voters and violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The panel argued the decision was necessary to avoid voter confusion ahead of upcoming elections.
Huh?
Critics immediately pounced, saying the appeals court’s refusal to fully account for the Supreme Court’s recent Callais ruling has only created even more uncertainty by throwing Alabama’s election maps back into legal chaos.
As expected, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall responded Wednesday by filing an emergency application with the Supreme Court. He is seeking a stay that would allow the state to continue using the 2023 maps while the legal battle plays out.
Alabama’s Solicitor General A. Barrett Bowdre presented the brief:
In its filing on Wednesday, Alabama urged the court to freeze the lower court’s ruling and allow it to use the 2023 map in the upcoming elections. That map, Bowdre wrote, “addressed this Court’s concerns about the State’s prioritization of core retention” – the principle of trying to have districts resemble their earlier iterations as closely as possible – “at the cost of splitting the Black Belt region,” an area in central Alabama originally named for its rich, dark soil but now named for its large Black population, the descendants of formerly enslaved people. The 2023 map, Bowdre said, divided the Black Belt “as little as possible, while also keeping together the Gulf Coast as the State had done for 50 years.”
Frankly, this emergency appeal to SCOTUS should be a lay-up. The appeals court’s ruling is beyond absurd. Either maps are being drawn without consideration of race, which is the proper course under the Constitution, or they’re not:
“Callais,” Bowdre continued, “vindicates Alabama’s position on the lawfulness of the 2023 Plan, yet the district court decided in one week that Callais changed nothing.” The district court, Bowdre stressed, did not require the challengers to offer alternative maps that would achieve Alabama’s goals while still maintaining two majority-Black districts, as the Supreme Court suggested it should have, and “[i]t did not matter to the district court that drawing an additional race-based district came at the cost of sacrificing communities of interest and pairing incumbents.”
“Worse,” Bowdre concluded, the district court’s conclusion that the state intentionally violated the Constitution rests on the idea “that Alabama intentionally discriminated by refusing to intentionally discriminate.”
In short, Bowdre is begging the high court to make it make sense.
The only reason for this BS ruling from the appeals court is to delay, delay, delay to prevent the August 11 special election from happening. And that’s a massive interference from the Judicial Branch into a state election issue that has already been adjudicated by the highest court in the land.
However, unless and until we get some serious court reforms from Congress that hold these politicized lefty judges to account, this kind of foolery will continue.
That said, given the prior SCOTUS ruling, Alabama should win this case pretty quickly.
