Federal Court Slaps Down Alabama's Illegal Gerrymander. It Might Stick This Time!
Federal Court Slaps Down Alabama's Illegal Gerrymander. It Might Stick This Time!
A special master will now un-racist the state's racist congressional map.
Alabama, the Yee-haw We Stepped on Our Own Dicks Again state, has again stepped on its own dick.
Which dick, you are probably asking yourselves. There are so many options with Alabama. Closing exit roads from the state to pregnant women who want abortions while throwing them wide open to transgender people it is trying to eliminate by banning their medical care? Nope, we’ve still got more litigation on those issues to look forward to.
This particular dick is the once-a-decade redrawing of its congressional districts. In drawing a new districting map after the 2020 census, the Legislature had crammed most of the state’s Black voters into one congressional district. This meant that Alabama, despite having a population that is 26% Black, would have only one majority-Black district and six majority-white ones.
Last year a federal district court ruled that this map violated the tattered remaining shards of the Voting Rights Act and the state needed to draw a new one that would give its citizens two majority-Black districts. Alabama appealed to the Supreme Court, which affirmed the federal court’s position and ordered Alabama to draw a new map.
It seems there was a lot of this “federal judges telling a Southern state’s majority-bigot legislature that it needs to update its election maps from the Jim Crow era” stuff going around this weekend.
Do you have any idea how blatantly racist a congressional map has to be that even Chief Justice John Roberts rejects it? Roberts has made a career out of wanting to staple the VRA to a launch pad and then firing a rocket off of it. But he still demands laws give him some level of plausible deniability that he can brag about the next time the Federalist Society asks him to keynote one of its dinners.
So Alabama submitted a new map in a way that can only be interpreted as a giant “fuck you, outside agitators” towards the federal courts. From Politico:
The GOP-dominated legislature ultimately drew a new map that once again had just one majority-Black district and one with a Black voting age population of just under 40 percent. Alabama Republicans argued that they were complying with the law, saying the challengers did not prove the new maps violated the Voting Rights Act and that they were not compelled to draw a second majority-Black district to remedy any violation.
Oh, pardon us, we didn’t realize that federal courts telling you that you violated the VRA means the exact opposite thing.
So on Tuesday the same federal district court that had slapped the state down in the first place sighed wearily and told the government of George Wallace’s Racism and Squirrel Meat Emporium that since it couldn’t play nicely with the other children, it could go sit in a corner for the rest of recess.
“The law requires the creation of an additional district that affords Black Alabamians, like everyone else, a fair and reasonable opportunity to elect candidates of their choice,” the judges ruled Tuesday. “[The new map] plainly fails to do so.”
They also said they did not need to give the legislature another chance to redraw the map, saying there is no need to provide “a second bite at the apple” after state lawmakers made no effort to comply with the Voting Rights Act.
The three-judge panel — which included two Trump-appointed judges, possibly indicating that on at least this one issue, not every Trump judge infesting the judiciary from now until the end of time is a harebrained troglodyte — said it will appoint a special master to redraw Alabama’s map. The judges also pronounced themselves “deeply troubled” that the state openly and proudly defied their orders.
Who could have guessed Alabama of all places would engage in massive resistance to Black people getting equal treatment under the law? Besides anyone who was alive at any point in American history, of course.
So now Alabama’s Black population can have proportionate representation in Congress, and all the state legislators can run for re-election on the issue of “We will always protect all you God-fearin’ white folk from the communists in Washington, dangnabit.” Win-win for everyone.
[POLITICO]
60 years ago white Alabamians were murdering black Alabamians for even trying to vote. Now the rear guard of White Supremacy has been pushed back to squabbling in court over overtly racist maps. It still isn't enough, but, looked at this way, we do after all seem to be on the winning side.
Even Assmouth-appointed judges don’t care much for being told to go pound sand. Comes from being in a lifetime gig with no accountability.