Supreme Court grants Alabama’s emergency appeal to use map a lower court ruled racially discriminatory
The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority granted Alabama’s emergency request to use a congressional map that a lower court deemed racially discriminatory even after the high court made voting rights claims harder to prove in Louisiana v. Callais.
In an opinion on Tuesday night that is poised to help the GOP in the midterms and beyond, the high court majority said that the lower court failed to abide by Callais and failed to give the benefit of the doubt that state legislators weren’t engaged in intentional discrimination.
In a dissent for the three Democratic appointees, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the majority “disregards
both democratic values and the rule of law.”
She said the majority chose a path that will cause “a chaotic election” with a “never-before-used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black Alabamians, that Alabama adopted in unashamed defiance of a prior court order directly affirmed by this Court, and that will require officials to change the voter registrations of hundreds of thousands of voters in just days at best, a task that Alabama previously represented would take months.”
After its April ruling in Callais, the Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed majority ordered the lower court panel in Alabama to review its prior ruling against the state in light of Callais.
On further review, the three-judge panel, which had two Trump-appointed judges on it, still ruled against the state. The panel noted it had previously made a separate finding of intentional discrimination against Black voters, which the Callais ruling didn’t disturb. Plus, the panel said Black voters could separately satisfy the high court’s new Voting Rights Act test from Callais.
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Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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