SCOTUS Overrules Self From April, Tells Alabama To Be As Racist As It Wants

Well, multiracial democracy was fun for a minute.

Never gets old.

The clowns on the Supreme Court have done it again, the clowns.

Late Monday, SCOTUS vacated a lower court decision that had blocked the state of Alabama from using gerrymandered congressional maps that eliminated one of the state’s two Black majority districts. The lower court had found that this action violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the 14^th Amendment. SCOTUS had actually upheld that decision in 2023, telling Alabama it had to use the old maps.

But we all know how our wingnutty Supreme Court feels about the VRA deep down. If you don’t know, SPOILER ALERT: they do not care for it.

So in the wake of the decision in Callais v. Louisiana that was released not even two weeks ago, Alabama asked the Court to reconsider its earlier decision, so tha tthe state could fulfill every stereotype of itself as being the province of a bunch of backwards, inbred, hayseed-spittin’, cornpone eatin’, straw-hat-wearin’, Black-folk loathin’ redneck bigots.

Apologies to any Wonkette friends in Alabama. You people are good. Unfortunately, the assholes there are running the place.

SCOTUS was mighty happy to oblige Alabama. In a one-paragraph order, they remanded the case, Allen v. Caster, to the district court for “further consideration.” In the meantime, with primaries starting in a week, Alabama is free to use the previously blocked maps that the lower court had found, and painstakingly laid out in a 168-page opinion, to be incredibly racist.

---

Supreme Court Used Bullsh*t Data From DOJ Hacks To Kill Voting Rights Act, Surprise!

---

There are a couple of things going on here, both of which pretty much lay bare (as if anyone still had any doubt) just how blatantly partisan SCOTUS is. The first is that telling Alabama now, a week before the primaries, that it can use the gerrymandered maps violates the Purcell Principle, the SCOTUS doctrine that prohibits courts from interfering when elections are this close at hand.

It turns out SCOTUS only believes in Purcell if it hurts Democrats. If an action helps Republicans, as Monday’s does, then Purcell is out the window:

The Texas case is this one, where Democrats fled the state last summer to deny the legislature a quorum so it could not approve a new map that drew five districts with Black and Latino majorities out of existence. When they bowed to the inevitable and came back, the Republicans tried to assign them all state trooper escorts to make sure they didn’t leave town again. They also locked one legislator, Nicole Collier, in the chamber overnight, after she refused to go along with everyone getting their own personal prison guard.

---

Just Texas Governor Holding Black Lady Texas Rep Hostage In Capitol, IS THAT FINE?

---

The other grotesquerie here is that the SCOTUS order specifically orders the lower court to reconsider its ruling “in light of” the result of Callais v. Louisiana. But in the majority opinion in that case, Sam Alito specifically said that Callais had nothing to do with the Alabama case. Sonia Sotomayor noted this in her dissent on Monday:

Nothing in the District Court’s Fourteenth Amendment analysis is affected by this Court’s opinion in Callais. Most obviously, Callais changed the legal standard for vote-dilution claims under §2. See 608 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 19) (“[W]e must understand exactly what §2 of the Voting Rights Act demands”). It said not a word about the standard for Fourteenth Amendment intentional-discrimination claims like the one that the District Court decided on remand in round two.

Callais also insisted that this Court’s prior decision in Allen remains good law.

And yet here we are, not even two weeks later, with SCOTUS telling the lower courts, Hey, that thing we said about this case having nothing to do with that case? We lied. Sue us. No wonder lower court judges are supposedly frustrated with the Supremes.

One can picture Alito sneering as he read Sotomayor’s dissent. Maybe he went to the SCOTUS cafeteria for lunch, paused next to her table, leaned down, and yelled “PSYCH!” in her face.

Now theoretically, the lower courts could slap an emergency injunction on the map again, perhaps with the argument that they need more time to reconsider earlier rulings. We’re hoping this happens simply because we know how much it would annoy Alito and Neil Gorsuch.

Then SCOTUS can grant Alabama’s inevitable appeal of the injunction, and the courts can just keep passing this dog’s breakfast back and forth to each other, forever and ever, amen.

It has not even been a week since John Roberts sat down at a legal conference and sniveled — out loud, where people could hear him — about how unfair it is that the public thinks the court is partisan, how incorrect, how the judges are really doing their best to “figure out what the Constitution means” and how to apply that understanding to the cases before it.

And it has been all of four days since we wrote that the next SCOTUS decision that would piss everyone off and send Roberts “into a whiny shame spiral” should be coming down soon enough. We didn’t think it would be this soon, for some reason. Obviously we lack the imagination.

[SCOTUS]

Do you like Wonkette? We survive on your appreciation and also your donations.