Alabama Appeals the Rejection of Its Redistricting Map and the Left May Get More Than It Wanted or Expected – Opinion

This is the decennial year of Congressional redistricting. We all know what happens next. Democrat state are free to draw as many lines as they like. New York for example, which went for Biden 60 to 37 in 2020, has drawn a map of 85-15 Democrat that includes one amazing gerrymander in NY-10.

Any attempt to reduce the number of Democrat seats in your state or to protect current holdings will be dragged to federal court. This is where any Leftist/Soros-funded group who wants to take part can use you as a target practice.

Alabama has this happening.

Alabama currently has seven House seats, according to the 2011 map. Six seats in the House are currently held by Republicans while one seat is being held by a Democrat. AL-7, the one Democrat-held seat is majority Black. The GOP seats that are least vulnerable to attack include AL-7, which is majority Black. However, the R+32 advantage can be used by the seat with the lowest percentage.

The GOP attempted to pass a map that had the exact same districts lines. It was challenged by federal courts and an Alabama panel found Alabama lacking one Black majority seat.

A panel of three federal judges threw out Alabama’s congressional map on Monday and ordered state lawmakers to draw a new one with two, rather than just one, districts that are likely to elect Black representatives.

The map that Alabama’s Republican-majority State Legislature adopted last fall drew one of the state’s seven congressional districts with a majority of Black voters. The court ruled that with Alabama’s Black population of 27 percent, the state must allot two districts with either Black majorities or “in which Black voters otherwise have an opportunity to elect a representative of their choice.”

“Black voters have less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice to Congress,” the panel of judges wrote.

Singleton vs. Merrill

Just a quick comment to let you know that I am not going anywhere. Contrary to what the panel of judges thinks, I can’t think of anything being more racist in intent and more hostile to the vision of the Founders of our nation than the notion that black voters can only vote for black candidates or that black communities will always opt for black representation or that black candidate can only win in minority Black districts. You want racial Balkanization de facto segregation, then I can’t conceive of a better way of going about it than by creating ethnic enclaves that politically fence in minority groups and ensure that they are represented by candidates running on a platform of racial identity or racialism, if not outright racism (looking at you, Maxine Waters).

Plaintiffs hired a gunman to map out several districts with Black majorities. However, the man had to tear down 2-3 old districts and cherry-pick Black voters for his new area. The various combinations can be viewed at the following link.

Alabama decided against this overreach by the judiciary and joined fourteen other states, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia. Indiana, Kentucky. Louisiana. Mississippi. Missouri. Montana. Oklahoma. South Carolina. Texas. Utah.

“In a 234-page decision, just four days before Alabama’s candidate-filing deadline and mere months before absentee ballots will be sent to voters, a federal district court has enjoined Alabama from using its newly drawn congressional districts—districts Alabama created on a remarkably truncated schedule, through no fault of its own,” the AGs said. “In doing so, the district court injected confusion in the election cycle, penalized Alabama for diligently drawing new congressional districts on a tight timeline, and improperly held Alabama violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by not using race as a predominate feature of its maps. This Court should grant the stay and end this Court-created injury.”

Ian Milhiser (legal equivalent to a Jack Russell terrier on Vox.com) sees more sinister activity. I can’t say that I disagree with him.

Based on an exemption in the Voting Rights Act that prohibited racialgerrymanders, the lower court directed the state legislature to redeploy the map. The judges spent over 225 pages going through the extremely complex test. Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), which asks whether a state election law that imposes a disproportionate burden on racial minorities “interacts with social and historical conditions to cause an inequality in the opportunities enjoyed by [minority] and white voters to elect their preferred representatives.”

As I’ve written, the legal rule that the Court announced in Gingles — which governs many redistricting cases filed under the Voting Rights Act — is a mess. The law advises judges to weigh no less than Nine There are many factors. It would make sense for the state to request that the Supreme Court create something simpler to assist lower courts in sorting through such cases. Alabama could have chosen this path, but it would be reasonable to propose a modification. Gingles test, it’s possible that such a modification could have helped them defend their maps.

Alabama, however, does not do the exact same thing in the Merrill case. Instead, it proposes a new rule that, if adopted by the Supreme Court, could effectively make it impossible to challenge a racial gerrymander in federal court.

At one point, for example, Alabama quotes favorably from a 1994 opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas, which was joined only by one other justice, and which suggests that no voting rights violation occurs even if a state gerrymanders its districts to make it impossible for racial minorities to elect their preferred candidate. Under this theory, “minorities unable to control elected posts would not be considered essentially without a vote; rather, a vote duly cast and counted would be deemed just as ‘effective’ as any other.”

The state’s primary argument, meanwhile, would trap voting rights plaintiffs in a kind of Catch-22.

Alabama Response by Singleton to Merrill by Scribd

Milhiser is referring to the Catch-22 Milhiser. Alabama claims that using race in redistricting is against the law, however, to obtain two Black majority district, you have to make race the sole characteristic.

This map was drawn by a race-neutral map-drawer, as it is well-established at the court below. In a sample of more than two million race-neutral maps generated by 1Plaintiffs’ own experts, not even one contained two majority-black districts. This is the best evidence to show that this claim of vote dilution hasn’t been proven. See Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U.S. 30, 50-51 (1986). A second majority black district that can be drawn only by initially subverting race-neutral redistricting criteria to a “non-negotiable” racial target is not a “reasonably configured” district. Cooper v. Harris, 137 S. Ct. 1455, 1470 (2017). Accordingly, no invocation of the VRA can justify, much less require, the race-based redraw of Alabama’s race-neutral map.

I am neither a lawyer nor a necromancer, but I can’t help but feel that Milhiser accurately senses the way the wind is blowing here. Not only do you have the state’s defense that the districts have been in place for 30 years, that they got data late, and they are acting in good faith, I get the sensing that the Supreme Court is trying to pull back from some of the positions it took in the past that embroiled it in hot-button issues. For instance, last term, both Roe v. Wade (Supreme Court Humiliates Biden, Refuses to Stop Texas Heartbeat Law, and Gorsuch and the Wise Latina Have a Public Spat) and gun control (Supreme Court Conservatives Maul New York’s Restrictive Concealed Carry Law in First Major Second Amendment Case in a Decade) was manhandled in oral arguments. Of course, you can’t tell how a case is going to turn out by the arguments, but the combativeness of the conservative questions indicated that the majority was tired of seeing the same issue over and over.

The Supreme Court has been removing the courts from the redistricting game since it was abolished in Shelby County v. HolderIt has set a new standard for federal judicial interference with state prerogatives. Rucho and Common Cause ruled that federal courts cannot review blatant partisan-gerrymanders. It doesn’t take a legal genius to see that a court skeptical about the idea of racial quotas (for the Roberts-doubters, I’d point you toward his record on affirmative action and various voting rights grifts as well as his opinions acknowledging that no matter how virtuous the intent, the government can’t make decisions based primarily on race) that has already done away with “pre-clearance” isn’t very far away from saying that unless you can prove that diluting minority vote was the intent of drawing a district, the state’s version of the map prevails.

It is hard to imagine the irony that this decision could bring. Alabama is being sued by activist groups over its 30-year-old map. This could lead to the end of the country’s racial gerrymandering system.