It came as a genuine surprise when the conservative-dominated US Supreme Court ordered the conservative-dominated state government of Alabama last month to redraw its congressional map and include either a second congressional district with a majority of black people or something very similar to it.
It may also come as a surprise that Alabama appears to have said no. In the Allen v. Milligan case, Alabama’s legislature redrawn the congressional map to reduce the black voting-age population in the current Democratic seat held by Rep. Terri Sewell from approximately 55% to slightly over 50%, and then raised the number of black residents in a second district to roughly 40%.
This drama is far from done; in August, federal courts will evaluate the new map that the Alabama legislature and governor authorized.
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Challenge for the US Supreme Court
Republican Kay Ivey appeared to defend the legislature’s disobedience when it approved the new map on Friday: “The Legislature knows our state, our people, and our districts better than the federal courts or activist groups.”
CNN’s Dianne Gallagher noted in her report that the previous congressional map was ruled invalid by a panel of three federal district court judges. Black voters in Alabama have “Gallagher and CNN’s Tierney Sneed claim that Alabamans have “less opportunity than other Alabamans to elect people of their choice to Congress.”
Before the 2022 midterm elections, the US Supreme Court had tabled action on Alabama’s map, which helped Republicans win the tenuous four-seat House majority they currently hold (Gallagher and Sneed wrote last Monday).
Sneed also wrote on Monday. Janai Nelson, head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, called the revised map “outright disobedience of the Supreme Court’s ruling” in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on Monday. She subsequently said, “At this point, it is up to our federal courts to safeguard black voters as well as to preserve their own power here.
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Source: CNN
