A 5-4 Supreme Court docket vote reinstated GOP-drawn congressional districts, regardless of one choose warning it’s a “disservice to black Alabamians”
The US Supreme Court docket put a maintain on a decrease courtroom ruling ordering the state of Alabama to attract new congressional districts out of concern for black voters not being taken into consideration sufficient.
The congressional map with contemporary approval from the Supreme Court docket was drawn up by a Republican-controlled legislature, and activists argue that the congressional strains may assist to low cost minority votes and assist the GOP maintain onto nearly all of the state’s representatives.
In a pointy dissent from the bulk opinion, Justice Elena Kagan referred to as the congressional map a “disservice to black Alabamians,” including they’ve had their “electoral energy diminished.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in the meantime, defined the courtroom’s resolution by saying that it was far too near the 2022 midterms for Alabama to adjust to a courtroom order to redraw their districts.
Whereas the district mapping will stay in place for the midterms, the justices stated they’d be listening to arguments and considerations over the map itself, probably within the fall. This might result in the map being scrapped. For now, nonetheless, the map stays in place. Kavanaugh wrote that the choice to freeze the decrease courtroom order “doesn’t make or sign any change” to voting rights legal guidelines.
Activists argued the district strains wanted to be redrawn as Alabama has 1 / 4 inhabitants that’s black, however just one district with a majority of black voters, which is represented by Terri Sewell, a black Democrat.
A earlier decrease courtroom order dominated that the congressional map drawn violated the Voting Rights Act, arguing that the state ought to have two majority-black districts, as an alternative of 1.
“Black voters have much less alternative than different Alabamians to elect candidates of their option to Congress,” the three-judge panel wrote of their resolution final month.
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