The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that Alabama discriminated against black voters during its redistricting process last year, a decision that relied on the Voting Rights Act.
The ruling in Allen v. Milligan means that Alabama will have to redraw its congressional map to include a second majority-black district. The 5-4 decision was written by Chief Justice John Roberts and saw Justice Brett Kavanaugh join, marking an alliance between two conservatives and three liberals in the majority.
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With the help of Roberts and Kavanaugh, the decision tells Alabama it should have created a second black-majority district, upholding a three-judge panel that threw out the previous map that included only one district with a majority of black voters despite African Americans comprising more than a quarter of the state’s population.
Abha Khanna, an attorney with Elias Law Group who argued the case on behalf of the respondents who sued the state, lauded the Supreme Court’s decision as an upholding of the district court’s decision using “decades of established precedent.”
“Thankfully, the court today identified Alabama’s redistricting scheme as a textbook violation of the landmark civil rights law,” Khanna said.
Alabama argued the changes to its previous districts were race-neutral and asserted that federal law shouldn’t compel states to draw additional minority districts just because such districts were merely possible to draw.
But voters challenging the state succeeded in their interpretation of the VRA, arguing the changes would significantly undermine its purpose and dilute the power of black voters. Civil rights advocates feared the conservative court would further weaken the VRA despite the win they received on Thursday.
The chief justice wrote that there were legitimate concerns that the law “may impermissibly elevate race in the allocation of political power within the states.” He added, “Our opinion today does not diminish or disregard these concerns. It simply holds that a faithful application of our precedents and a fair reading of the record before us do not bear them out here.”
The Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court has, in two cases over the last decade, modified the Voting Rights Act, starting in 2013, when it tossed out a provision of the law that permitted federal oversight of election law challenges in certain states.
And after it gained a 6-3 conservative supermajority, it decided a separate 2021 ruling based out of Arizona, imposing more hurdles for lawsuits alleging violations of Section 2 of the VRA.
The case from Alabama also involves Section 2 but in the context of redistricting.
“As we explain below, we find Alabama’s new approach to §2 compelling neither in theory nor in practice. We accordingly decline to recast our §2 case law as Alabama requests,” Roberts wrote for the majority.
Still, the other four conservative justices dissent, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing for the minority that this decision forces “Alabama to intentionally redraw its longstanding congressional districts so that black voters can control a number of seats roughly proportional to the black share of the State’s population.”
“Section 2 demands no such thing, and, if it did, the Constitution would not permit it,” Thomas added.
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The Supreme Court’s first black woman on the court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, dismissed the idea that race could not be part of the matter during oral arguments in October.
Jackson and the other two liberals on the court, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, said during arguments that a decision such as the one issued on Thursday would provide better opportunities for minorities to elect candidates of their choice.
