The Supreme Court on Tuesday cleared the way for Alabama to use a congressional map that favors Republicans by eliminating one of two districts where voters had elected a Black Democrat to Congress.
The decision effectively reversed a three-year-old ruling that had required the state to create a second district where African American voters could prevail, and the high court chastised the three-judge federal court in the case for failing to follow its orders.
The three-judge panel, which included two Trump appointees, had ruled unanimously that the Alabama map was illegal because it was "tainted by intentional race-based discrimination" and violated the Constitutional guarantee to equal protection of the law.
Late April rulings by the court "all but gutted what remained of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act," the report said, a development that set off a scramble in some Southern states to undo previous redistricting maps to gain partisan advantage and eliminate districts where Black voters had a fair chance of electing their candidate of choice.
The Supreme Court's recent decisions have played a role in changing congressional maps in Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, and California, and those decisions mostly benefitted the Republican party, the article said; the case was accompanied by a four-page unsigned opinion that many election law experts said seemed to encourage more chaos.
UCLA law professor Richard Hasen said, "They've closed the door on intentional discrimination claims." He added, "What the court has done is denude Congress of its powers that were given after the Civil War," noting that Congress enacted the Fourteenth Amendment to ensure equal voting rights for former slaves.
Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller said the court "seems to want to wash its hands of political cases, the result being maximum gerrymandering, whether the state is Alabama or California." He suggested Congress could limit opportunistic redistricting: "Even if you did very simple restrictions, such as…you can only engage in redistricting once a decade or you can't change the rules for redistricting more than a year before an election. Those are ways to prevent some of the opportunism we have," Muller observes, and he said Congress could also bar states from splitting up heavy concentrations of minority voters — though he admitted those solutions "will be very difficult to achieve."