Case involves seven congressional districts in southern US state of Alabama and 1965 Voting Rights Act, which aims to prevent discrimination against African Americans at the polls.
(Reuters Archive)
The US Supreme Court’s
conservative justices have appeared sympathetic toward
Alabama in the state’s defence of a Republican-drawn electoral
map faulted by judges for diluting the clout of Black voters in
a major case that could further undermine a landmark federal
voting rights law.
In spirited oral arguments lasting nearly two hours on Tuesday, Alabama
Solicitor General Edmund LaCour faced tough questioning from the
court’s three liberal justices — Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena
Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.
Some of the conservative justices, however, appeared open to
certain of LaCour’s defences of the map devised by the state’s
legislature delineating the boundaries of Alabama’s seven US
House of Representatives districts.
An eventual ruling siding
with Alabama could make it harder to prove that state voting
laws harm minorities. The court has a 6-3 conservative majority.
A three-judge federal court panel invalidated the map after
it was challenged as unlawful by Black voters.
But the Supreme
Court, in a 5-4 decision in February, let Alabama use the map
for the November 8 US congressional elections in which Republicans
are trying to regain control of Congress.
Rolling back protections
The dispute gives the court’s conservatives a chance to
further roll back protections contained in the 1965 Voting
Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting.
Conservative Justice Samuel Alito expressed support for
raising the burden on plaintiffs to show that an electoral map
is biased, suggesting that given current legal standards in
“every place in the South … will not the plaintiffs always run
the table?”
Alito added, “It may be that Black voters and white voters
prefer different candidates now because they have different
ideas about what the government should do.”
The lower court found that Alabama’s map diminished the
influence of Black voters by concentrating their voting power
into a single House district even though the state’s population
is 27 percent Black while distributing the rest of the Black
population in other districts at levels too small to form a
majority.
Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the court,
rejected LaCour’s argument that states should not consider race
in crafting electoral district lines to comply with the Voting
Rights Act.
The law, Jackson said, “is saying you need to
identify people in this community who have less opportunity and
less ability to participate – and ensure that that’s remedied.
It’s a race-conscious effort.”
“What strikes me about this case is that under our precedent
it’s kind of a slam dunk” against Alabama’s map, Kagan said.
LaCour told the justices that Alabama’s legislature drew the
map “in a lawful race-neutral manner.”
“The state largely retained its existing districts and made
changes needed to equalize population. But that wasn’t good
enough for the plaintiffs. They argued that Section 2 of the
Voting Rights Act requires Alabama to replace its map with a
racially gerrymandered plan maximizing the number of
majority-minority districts,” LaCour said.
The Voting Rights Act was enacted at a time when Southern
states including Alabama enforced policies blocking Black people
from casting ballots. The case centres on a Voting Rights Act
provision, called Section 2, aimed at countering voting laws
that result in racial bias even absent racist intent.
Source: Reuters
