MOBILE, Alabama — In the Alabama redistricting case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 4, the liberal justices made false assertions in obvious search of misguided conclusions that would balkanize this Alabama county along racial lines.
This is absurd. The court should wholeheartedly approve the congressional district lines that Alabama adopted after the 2020 census, which would keep Mobile County whole.
SUPREME COURT’S ALABAMA REDISTRICTING CASE WILL TEST JUSTICE JACKSON’S INFLUENCE
For decades, Alabama has had seven seats in Congress. For decades, one of Alabama’s seven districts has had a black majority. Plaintiffs challenging Alabama’s districts say that because 27% of the state’s population — not quite two-sevenths — is black, the state should be forced to create a second black-majority district. But that population percentage has only barely changed in all the intervening years, as federal courts have repeatedly found Alabama’s districts perfectly constitutional. The new districts drawn by the state legislature are quite similar to those old districts that passed constitutional muster. Common sense says if almost nothing has changed, then what was constitutional before remains constitutional now.
Plaintiffs base their demands for a second black-majority district on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which guarantees equal access to the political system for black voters. Unfortunately, they mistake “access” for racial “results.”
To make clear its goal is access and not results, Section 2 says, “Nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population.” That statement is clear and direct. In a series of rulings, the Supreme Court repeatedly has ruled that race absolutely may not be the “predominant” factor in drawing district lines.
Yet plaintiffs demand that race be the essential factor, ignoring other neutral and judicially approved factors such as geographical features or county borders. To concoct a second district with a black majority, plaintiffs create lines that obliterate those traditional and sensible factors, meandering across the landscape while cherry-picking black communities to append to the new district while excluding immediately neighboring white ones.
Mobile County, in the state’s southwest corner, has throughout recent memory been the anchor, in whole, of the state’s 1st Congressional District. Plaintiffs want a gerrymander that snakes down in a bizarre way to gobble up black neighborhoods in Mobile and force them into a different congressional district, along with black areas from all the way across the state. Their thesis, entirely racialist and arguably racist, is that black Alabamans in a coastal county adjoining Mississippi have more in common with landlocked black Alabamans near Georgia than they have with their white coastal neighbors just three streets away from themselves.
At oral argument, the high court’s liberal justices, led by Elena Kagan, seemed to be fishing for some kind of justification to support this argument that race should trump other considerations. But Kagan has her facts wrong. As if stuck in the 1960s, Kagan said, “You’re looking at a state where … there is incredible racially polarized voting.”
Well, not exactly. In 2021, the city of Mobile, for the fifth consecutive election, chose a mayor of a different race than the city’s voting majority. In 2005 and 2009, when the city still had a substantial white majority, it elected black Democrat Sam Jones over white Republican candidates. By 2013, the city had become majority-black, but in 2013, 2017, and 2021, it elected white Republican Sandy Stimpson over black Democrats.
Obviously, the only way a black man can win twice in a white-majority city and a white man can win three times in a black-majority city is if each winner has attracted significant support from voters of other races.
Likewise, in a statewide Democratic gubernatorial primary in 2010, white candidate Ron Sparks decisively defeated Rep. Artur Davis, who is black, among black voters. At the same time, Davis captured close to 40% of the white Democratic vote. In Mobile, Davis carried a strong majority of both black and white precincts. But Starks won the race because of his statewide black support.
Contra Kagan, there clearly is not “incredibly racially polarized voting.” Later, Kagan misused the Section 2 language ensuring that black voters have equal participatory opportunity to elect a “candidate of their choice” to assume that it essentially means “candidate of the same race.” As shown in all those elections cited above, that’s nonsense.
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Why would a black voter in the rural “wiregrass” area of Alabama, near Georgia, automatically “choose” to be represented by a black politician from urban Mobile over a white politician whose lifetime in the wiregrass region helps him understand local concerns?
By shoehorning black voters together solely on the basis of race, the plaintiffs actually propose to follow George Wallace’s adage — “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” When a white Alabama governor uttered that horrible line, he was rightly branded a despicable racist. Do Kagan and four other justices want to carry Wallace’s mantle?
