The Supreme Court just sided against Alabama’s ongoing quest to discriminate against Black voters, clearing the way for a congressional map with two majority-Black districts to be in place for 2024. Alabama Republicans had been defiantly clinging to having just one such district, in their transparent attempt to stop Democrats from picking up a House seat.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court rejected the state GOP’s attempt to keep a map with a single majority-Black district. Without an explanation from the high court in these orders (which isn’t unusual), we don’t know its rationale, but we can assume that at least a majority of the justices, for now at least, weren’t inclined to abide by the state’s defiance of prior orders.
In June, the justices surprisingly ruled 5-4 against Alabama, upholding a lower court’s order to draw a second majority-Black congressional district or “something quite close.” Instead, Alabama Republicans doubled down, with a three-judge lower court panel — two of whom are Donald Trump appointees — saying it was “disturbed” by the state’s continued defiance.
It’s unclear whether there was even a tie for Kavanaugh to break this time. Rather than be chastened, the state then turned back to the high court, hoping that the tiebreaking vote in that June case, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, would flip. It wasn’t a totally unreasonable expectation, partly because Kavanaugh wrote a separate opinion in that case, Allen v. Milligan, that left open the possibility he might go the other way the next time. Alabama was hoping that the next time would be now, as it sought a stay — or pause — of the lower court’s ruling from the justices as it appealed that ruling. The justices rejected that attempt on Tuesday. With none of them noting any disagreement with that rejection, it’s unclear whether there was even a tie for Kavanaugh to break this time. But we will see if that resolve holds on the court in this or any other voting rights cases that come to the justices ahead of the 2024 elections.
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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