A three-judge federal panel on Thursday found the congressional redistricting map passed by Alabama Republican lawmakers in 2023 violated the Voting Rights Act.
The State of Alabama is still defending its congressional map, which legislators approved in 2023. A special master hired by a three-judge panel in Birmingham redrew the map for the 2024 congressional elections after Democrats and liberal groups were successful in their initial legal challenge. The issue is still being litigated.
United States Circuit Judge Stanley Marcus, United States District Judge Anna Manasco, and United States District Judge Terry Moorer ruled the 2023 plan violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.
In the ruling, the judges said they’d take up the plaintiffs' application to “bail Alabama back into federal preclearance for future congressional districting” at a status conference at noon Wednesday, May 28. Preclearance, if approved, would allow the federal court to oversee Alabama redistricting for as long as it sees fit.
“We emphasize that we remain deeply disturbed that the State purposefully enacted a map that the State readily admits does not provide the required remedy for the vote dilution that we clearly found. We also emphasize our concern about the State’s assertion that in response to any injunction we may issue, it is free to repeat its checkmate move. We are troubled by the State’s view that even if we enter judgment for the Plaintiffs after a full trial, the State remains free to make the same checkmate move yet again — and again, and again, and again. We reject in the strongest possible terms the State’s attempt to finish its intentional decision to dilute minority votes with a veneer of regular legislative process. On the rare occasion that federal law directs federal courts to intrude in a process ordinarily reserved for state politics, there is nothing customary or appropriate about a state legislature’s deliberate decision to ignore, evade, and strategically frustrate requirements spelled out in a court order,” Marcus, Manasco and Moorer said in their ruling.
“This is not the first time the Alabama Legislature has purposefully refused to satisfy a federal court order about redistricting even after the Supreme Court affirmed that order. See generally Sims v. Baggett, 247 F. Supp. 96 (M.D. Ala. 1965) (three-judge court: Rives, Thomas, and Johnson, JJ.) (per curiam). We hope it will be the last time. The Legislature has raised the stakes of this litigation well beyond redistricting. In a case all too familiar to Alabama, the Supreme Court explained decades ago that decisions to ignore court orders are intolerable in our system of ordered liberty, even when they are undertaken in unassailable good faith and for purely 'righteous' purposes. See Walker v. City of Birmingham, 388 U.S. 307, 321 (1967). '[R]espect for judicial process,' the Supreme Court explained, 'is a small price to pay for the civilizing hand of law, which alone can give abiding meaning to constitutional freedom.'
"Finally, we cannot help but observe the hazards of the Legislature’s conduct that it apparently overlooked. We do not diminish the argument that race-based redistricting under Section Two cannot last forever. But it seems painfully obvious to us that the State’s decision to purposefully dilute the votes of Black Alabamians, particularly after exhausting its appellate rights for a preliminary injunction entered under Section Two, flies in the face of its position that Section Two has outlived the purpose Congress intended. Likewise, we do not diminish the substantial improvements Alabama has made in its official treatment of Black Alabamians in recent decades. Yet we cannot reconcile the State’s intentional decision to discriminate in drawing its congressional districts with its position that Alabama has finally closed out its repugnant history of official discrimination involving voting rights. The 2020 redistricting cycle in Alabama — the first cycle in 50 years that Alabama has been free of the strictures of federal preclearance — did not have to turn out this way. We wish it had not, but we have eyes to see the veritable mountain of evidence that it did.”
Spokespersons for Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall and Senate Majority Leader and Reapportionment Chairman Steve Livingston (R-Scottsboro) didn’t return requests for comment on Thursday night. Reapportionment Committee Chairman Chris Pringle (R-Mobile) said he was waiting on attorneys to read the ruling before commenting.
Three Judge Panel 2 by Caleb Taylor on Scribd
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