On Thursday morning's episode of Huntsville WVNN's "The Dale Jackson Show," State Sen. Sam Givhan (R-Huntsville) discussed a federal court's recent ruling, blocking a 6-1 Republican congressional map passed by Alabama legislators in 2023.
According to the legislator, the panel's supporting logic for the verdict is weak at best.
"I hadn't read all the opinion; I read different chunks of it, but I did notice that the three-judge panel was trying to emphasize the facts that they determined. What they believed and disbelieved," explained Givhan. "The fact of the matter is, it's hard to change the ore tenus rule. Now, not all the testimony was oral, certainly, but from everything I heard about it, it's pretty weak sauce. I think they got the result they wanted to get, and they seem to be doubling down on that."
Givhan argued the court relied on events from the 1960s to support its ruling.
"They tried to use things that happened back in the 60s to determine that Alabama still had a racial animus, which the Supreme Court said you can't do, and they're like, we saw what we saw, and we're not going to change our mind, but they're saying that they've got a race blind map," he contended. "It's so race blind that it goes down and takes in all the black area of Mobile and puts it in a congressional district that has not typically been involved. How do they not see their own? It's got to be race-neutral, and theirs is not race-neutral."
Givhan added, "Just because they call it race-neutral doesn't make it race-neutral."
The aforementioned court consists of U.S. Circuit Judge Stanley Marcus, District Judge Anna Manasco and District Judge Terry Moorer.
The NAACP and ACLU lobbied the court for a 5-2 Republican map that was court-ordered and used in the 2024 election and would be used in the 2026 election.
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