Alabama suffered a court loss on Monday to stay a ruling that struck down Republicans’ latest congressional map over alleged Voting Rights Act violations.
Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen filed the appeal to the Supreme Court last week after the federal district court ruled against the state legislature’s bid to draw its congressional map without a second majority-black district.
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A three-judge panel on a federal district court wrote Monday that it’s “exceptionally unusual for a litigant who has presented his arguments to the Supreme Court once already — and lost — to assert that he is now ‘overwhelmingly likely’ to prevail on those same arguments in that Court in this case.”
The Monday order follows a Sept. 5 ruling by the same court that found the Alabama legislature failed to remedy the Voting Rights Act problems identified by the panel and the Supreme Court. A special master has a Sept. 25 deadline to submit three remedial maps to the federal court to decide Alabama’s congressional districts for the 2024 elections.
The redrawn map, passed in July, only included one majority-black district, but it also included a district where 40% of the voting population is black.
“We have said before that ‘this is a straightforward Section Two case, not a legal unicorn,'” the judges wrote. “This case remains straightforward. We are aware, however, of no other case — and the Secretary does not direct us to one — in which a state legislature, faced with a federal court order declaring that its electoral plan unlawfully dilutes minority votes and requiring a plan that provides an additional opportunity district, responded with a plan that the state concedes does not provide that district.”
Although the Supreme Court already ruled against the state once over the same matter on June 8, the counsel for Allen argued the justices did not specify a need to draw a second majority-black district to be in compliance with the high court’s ruling. Other conservative legal experts have echoed that the Alabama GOP wasn’t “defying” the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Ilya Shapiro, a director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on July 31, saying the “media talking point is that the state is ‘defying’ the justices” is a “case of gaslighting.”
Ahead of their request to stay the Sept. 5 ruling, attorneys for Alabama said they would likely prevail on the merits of its argument and that failing to order a stay would bar the state from enforcing a statute enacted by the representatives of its constituents.
But the judges on Monday argued that Alabama lawmakers did not join Allen’s calls, pointing out they didn’t file a motion for an emergency stay.
“This detail is not material to our separate and independent rejection of the Secretary’s arguments about Alabama’s sovereignty, but we cannot help but notice that the Legislators apparently do not share the Secretary’s concern about this ‘emergency,’” they wrote.
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“As a practical matter, the Legislators’ silence undermines the Secretary’s position. It is the Legislature’s task to draw districts; the Secretary simply administers elections,” the judges ruled.
The Alabama attorney general’s office has indicated it will pursue the stay request to the Supreme Court. That filing may come as soon as Monday evening.
