Sept 8 (Reuters) – Alabama Republicans were at it again on Monday, when they asked the U.S. Supreme Court to change a voting rights law after the justices rejected identical arguments just three months ago, and despite defying the court’s order to comply with laws against racist voter suppression.
The state on Sept. 11 filed a petition to have its congressional district map reinstated after losing multiple challenges before a three-judge district court panel and the Supreme Court, both of which held that Alabama’s map likely discriminates against Black voters in violation of the Voting Rights Act. Both courts ordered lawmakers to redraw the map so that Black Alabamians have a more equitable chance at the ballot box, but Alabama instead diluted Black votes even further.
In February, I wrote that a ruling for Alabama would nearly confirm the view that the Supreme Court mostly enables Republican policies, given the state’s judicial defiance and its apparent reliance on partisan sentiment to seek the nullification of a seminal civil rights law, the Voting Rights Act.
The most recent evidence, including sworn testimony from lawmakers who sat for depositions before the plaintiffs lawyers last month, suggests Alabama’s conduct is even more troubling than it appears on the surface.
Under the circumstances, the conservative justices’ credibility would be crippled among most Americans, to put it bluntly, if they countenance the state’s conduct.
Alabama has never explained how or where its latest unlawful congressional district map came from, according to a Sep. 5 ruling by the district court panel.
“To this day, the record before us does not make clear who prepared the 2023 Plan,” the three-judge panel wrote.
But one thing we do know. According to the lawmakers’ deposition testimony, which is part of the court record, Alabama Solicitor General Edmund LaCour – the same lawyer defending the state’s redistricting in court – played a crucial role in developing the unlawful map, including drafting legislative findings, developing talking points, and even working on actual map-drawing, according to sworn testimony from Republican lawmakers.
LaCour didn’t respond to requests for comment. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall also didn’t respond to my inquiries.
Alabama House Republican Representative Chris Pringle testified during depositions on Aug. 9 that “LaCour worked as a map drawer.” Asked how he knew, Pringle replied that the solicitor general “was in the room with his computer across from me in reapportionment working on maps.”
Pringle didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The latest evidence also showed that the so-called legislative findings that backed the new map were actually “drafted by the Alabama Solicitor General,” and adopted without the legislature “even really knowing why they were placed there,” judges wrote on Sep.5.
Michael Li, senior counsel for redistricting and voting at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, told me that LaCour’s role in Alabama’s efforts “has been both head-spinning and head-scratching.”
“It’s a very unusual posture for the state’s lawyer to be intimately involved in basically plotting the state’s defiance of a federal court order,” Li said.
Peyton McCrary, who was previously the Justice Department’s in-house historian on voting rights litigation, said that it isn’t unusual for state attorneys to advise map-drawing experts about the legislature’s goals. He added that being involved in the technical aspects of map-making is generally unheard of, partly because of the specialized expertise and training needed to draw district maps. McCrary is a lecturer at George Washington University.
“It looks like the lawyer as well as the legislature is thumbing their noses at the Supreme Court,” McCrary said.
The long-running case centers around Alabama’s drawing of congressional district maps after the 2020 census.
The lower court threw out Alabama’s original map in January 2022, and rejected its purportedly remedial map again on Sept. 5, writing that it was “disturbed” by Alabama’s “unprecedented” disregard of federal court orders. The court also noted that conservative lawmakers excluded Black people from the map-making process entirely, including their Black colleagues in the statehouse.
Despite that, Alabama is circling back to the Supreme Court with another unlawful map and the same unfounded legal arguments the justices firmly rejected in August. And they’re doing so after Republican lawmakers have now essentially admitted in public that they’re counting on a partisan change-of-heart by a Republican-appointed justice.
The “only new support” for its redrawn map that Alabama offered is an unsworn report by a redistricting consultant whose expertise had already been rejected by the court because his findings and testimony were unreliable, the three-judge panel said on Sep. 11.
In my view, Alabama is making a shameless appeal to the court majority’s partisan sensibilities, apparently betting that at least five conservatives will decide to entrench an electoral advantage for Republicans by essentially nullifying the Voting Rights Act, while ignoring egregious racial gerrymandering. To make matters worse, officials are also subverting legal and legislative processes in their pursuit of a ruling that would disenfranchise their Black constituents.
At this point, Alabama is arguing against all odds, evidence and perhaps common sense, that it is likely to prevail at the Supreme Court — even though the justices only recently dismissed these very same arguments.
If the justices have any self-interest in preserving the court’s plummeting reputation, the court will have little choice but to dismiss the petition.
Reporting by Hassan Kanu; editing by Leigh Jones
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Opinions expressed are those of the author. They do not reflect the views of Reuters News, which, under the Trust Principles, is committed to integrity, independence, and freedom from bias.
