This week, the U.S. Supreme Court abruptly put on hold a lower court order that demanded the redrawing of Alabama’s Congressional districts ahead of the state’s next elections. At issue is, quite simply, the fact that the new map as passed by Republican officials in the state impedes the ability of Black residents of Alabama to substantively make their voices heard; under the challenged map, just one district out of seven features a Black majority, although Black residents comprise over one-fourth of the state’s population. Five out of nine Justices on the Supreme Court supported putting the lower court order on hold; the other four included the court’s three liberal Justices and Chief Justice John Roberts. Liberal Justice Elena Kagan wrote a dissenting opinion dismantling the arguments presented on Alabama’s behalf.
BREAKING: By a 5–4 vote, with Roberts joining the liberals in dissent, the Supreme Court halts a lower court order that required Alabama to redraw its congressional map, which diluted Black votes in violation of the Voting Rights Act.
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) February 7, 2022
Journalist Mark Joseph Stern noted that the U.S. Supreme Court “also granted cert in this case and will issue a decision later this term—teeing up the opportunity to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act’s remaining protections for racial minorities against gerrymanders that dilute their voting strength.” In other words, the Court will be eventually issuing a more expansive opinion regarding this particular case. Justice Kagan, among other points of her argument, criticized the fact that the Court issued its latest conclusions without going through the regular hearing process. As she observed:
‘Today’s decision is one more in a disconcertingly long line of cases in which this Court uses its shadow docket to signal or make changes in the law, without anything approaching full briefing and argument… That decision does a disservice to our own appellate processes, which serve both to constrain and to legitimate the Court’s authority. It does a disservice to the District Court, which meticulously applied this Court’s longstanding voting-rights precedent. And most of all, it does a disservice to Black Alabamians who under that precedent have had their electoral power diminished—in violation of a law this Court once knew to buttress all of American democracy.’
Donald Trump is making it pretty clear he was on the side of the people who violently attacked the government
— Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) February 8, 2022
Kagan also noted that the original request from Alabama authorities for a halt on the lower court ruling essentially introduced an entirely new factor into the equation deciding whether or not the original challenge or any original challenge along these legal lines was legitimate. Plaintiffs claiming under the Voting Rights Act that votes were diluted under some particular map’s framework must abide by a series of long-documented conditions, Kagan notes, including the requirement to show that a marginalized group is “sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority” in an additional district that is drawn according to traditional district line-drawing procedures. Alabama officials wanted challengers to prove that an additional majority-minority district (as it would be known) could emerge from the usage of redistricting technology without explicitly considering race at all… something that Kagan noted has never been a documented requirement.
New: National Archives says in statement they removed 15 boxes of records from Mar-a-Lago: “Trump’s representatives have informed NARA that they are continuing to search for additional Presidential records.”
— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) February 7, 2022
The requirements on plaintiffs in cases claiming that vote dilution was unfolding are associated with a 1986 case known as Thornburg v. Gingles. As Kagan put it in her opinion, discussing the so-called Gingles condition demanding showing a possibility of an additional majority-minority district:
‘At no time has this Court held that plaintiffs must answer the race-infused question of the first Gingles condition without any awareness of race; indeed, until recently, that would have been well-nigh impossible. In Alabama’s view, though, the advent of computerized districting should change the way the first Gingles condition operates. Plaintiffs can now use technology to generate millions of possible plans, without any attention to race. Alabama claims that some number of those plans (what number is unclear) must contain an additional majority-Black district for Section 2 [of the Voting Rights Act] plaintiffs to satisfy the first Gingles condition… But whatever the pros and cons of that method, this Court has never demanded its use; we have not so much as floated the idea, let alone considered how it would work. Alabama’s stay request, then, is premised on an entirely new view of what the law requires.’
The key to the stories about Trump's serial violation of the Presidential Records Act is that he was repeatedly told he was breaking the law, but he kept doing it.
Same was true of the Hatch Act. His whole administration's attitude was that obeying the law was optional.
— Paul Waldman (@paulwaldman1) February 7, 2022
Kagan adds that Alabama officials claimed that one of their experts “randomly generated
a large number of Alabama plans, and produced not a one with two majority-Black districts,” but the state never even formally introduced this study into the record. And in addition, ‘When the plaintiffs’ expert was asked at the hearing whether a race-blind computer program could produce maps with two majority-Black districts, she replied that it “certainly” could,” as the Justice explains things. It’s certainly unsettling for a push that has presently concluded with yet another setback for the voting rights of Black Americans to be based on something so flimsy. Racism obviously often co-exists with brazen ignorance, and that’s certainly the case here — and neither side of that destructive equation was apparently enough to sway the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.
Atlanta DA investigating Trump plans to start issuing subpoenas in May, with a bulk to come in the summer — and has identified about 100 witnesses. “All of them are not going to welcome our invitation to come speak with us," Willis to @SaraMurray https://t.co/KvAOWMB6U5
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) February 8, 2022
