Alabama Republicans keep trying to create a racially gerrymandered district map, and as my MSNBC colleague Ja’han Jones explained, they keep failing.
A federal court in Alabama struck down a congressional map drawn by Republican lawmakers, ruling the map didn’t satisfy requirements to shore up Black voter power in the state. The ruling on Tuesday could have major implications for the balance of power in Congress once the 2024 elections come around.
For those who might need a refresher, let’s revisit our earlier coverage and review how we arrived at this point.
It was in early June when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Alabama’s congressional map was racially discriminatory under the Voting Rights Act. In a surprising victory for progressives, the justices ruled, 5 to 4, that the state’s Republican majority would have to redraw its district lines to include a second majority-Black congressional district.
GOP officials in the Yellowhammer State heard the high court, but they apparently didn’t much care for the directions. In fact, Alabama Republicans approved a new map, but like the one that was struck down, it included only one majority-Black district.
In effect, GOP policymakers in the state said to the Supreme Court, “We know what you said, but we decided to go a different way.”
Helping guide their hands was none other than House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who acknowledged the fact that he’d been in contact with GOP officials in Alabama. One state legislator told local reporters that ahead of the vote on the second map, Congress’ top Republican called to say, “I’m interested in keeping my majority.”
It was quite a message. Sure, policymakers in Alabama could’ve simply followed the U.S. Supreme Court’s order — a ruling backed by two Republican-appointed justices — but McCarthy’s majority is wafer thin; it might disappear next year; so he preferred that his partisan allies in the legislature prioritize his electoral concerns over the justices’ concerns about radical discrimination under the Voting Rights Act.
The best-case scenario was that GOP officials in Alabama were simply playing for time: They might’ve hoped that by keeping the legal dispute going, the state would’ve been able to utilize the discriminatory map in the 2024 election cycle.
The worst-case scenario was that Alabama policymakers had made a conscious and deliberate choice to defy a Supreme Court ruling.
Whatever the motivation, the road ahead became far clearer this week. In a 217-page order, the jurists wrote, “We are disturbed by the evidence that the State delayed remedial proceedings but ultimately did not even nurture the ambition to provide the required remedy.”
Or put another way, the judges marveled at the fact that Alabama Republicans didn’t bother to try to honor the court order.
With this in mind, as Ja’han’s report added, “The judges assigned a special master and cartographer to redraw the map ahead of the 2024 elections that ‘complies with the Voting Rights Act,’ according to the order.”
Alabama Republicans are appealing the latest ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is weird, given that this is the same court the state policymakers were ignoring in the first place.
Assuming that the justices are consistent, the state GOP officials will lose, and independent experts will draw a new map to be used in the 2024 cycle.
As for why so much of the right seemed wholly indifferent to Alabama’s willingness to ignore a Supreme Court order, even amidst partisan chatter about the left trying to “delegitimize the court,” I’ll leave it to conservatives to explain the contradiction.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
