The Supreme Court. (Agenzia Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Black voters who challenged a Republican-drawn congressional district map in Alabama received a major victory Thursday when the U.S. Supreme Court found the state violated a federal civil rights law that prohibits racial discrimination in the vote
In an unexpected 5-4 ruling by the conservative majority court, the justices decided not to further dilute the protections of the Voting Rights Act, which the court had done twice in the last decade.
The opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts, a Republican appointee who has led the Supreme Court in previously restricted and repealed parts of the Voting Rights Act.
“We find Alabama’s new approach in Section 2 [of the Voting Rights Act] unconvincing in either theory or practice,” he wrote.
Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined Roberts and the court’s three liberal justices: Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Thursday’s decision upholds a lower court’s ruling that the congressional district map must be redrawn. Alabama lawmakers had approved a newly drawn map to reflect the 2020 census, with only one majority-black district even though black residents make up 27 percent of the state’s population. The rest of the black voters were scattered among the other six congressional districts.
“In an era of highly polarized voting and highly polarized geography, [voting maps] they’re destiny,” Dave Wasserman, senior editor of the Cook Political Report, told Yahoo News. “The way the maps are drawn determines who wins them in November 80 percent to 90 percent of the time.”
Wasserman spoke to Yahoo News about what the political implications could be for the 2024 election as a result of the justices’ decision in the Alabama voting rights case. Some answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Cook’s political report flipped five House races from solid GOP to close after the SCOTUS Alabama decision. How will this affect the 2024 election?
“It almost never goes from solid Republican to solid Democrat overnight. In that case, it’s still unclear which Republican seats will be eliminated or redrawn to make way for additional black-majority districts,” Wasserman explained .
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“But we moved the members who are in the most geographic danger to the throwaway column. That doesn’t mean Democrats get four seats [Alabama and Louisiana],” he said. “It just means that at the end of the day, one seat in each state will end up in a solid Democratic column. We don’t know which ones yet.”
How else could the SCOTUS decision reverberate beyond Alabama in the 2024 election?
“A federal case [in Louisiana] it was essentially put on hold when the Supreme Court took up the Alabama case because they were so similar,” Wasserman told Yahoo News. “It’s pretty simple to draw a majority-black second district in Louisiana, so I think it’s very likely.
“The other two states I’m looking at, Georgia and South Carolina, are less clear,” Wasserman said. Both states also have pending racial gerrymandering cases.
Why are the seats all in the south?
Southern states tend to be white Republican majorities, with large black populations that lean heavily Democratic. State legislatures dominated by Southern Republicans redrew their congressional district maps after the 2020 census to maximize Republican seats.
“Political parties always seek to maximize their own power. Until that [SCOTUS] decision, the way Republicans in Alabama and Louisiana did it was by packing as many black voters, who are heavily Democratic, into single districts as possible,” Wasserman said, referring to gerrymandering.
The Supreme Court held that the way Alabama’s map was drawn diluted the power of black voters. The decision reaffirmed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting practices.
Are there states where this SCOTUS decision could give Republicans more seats?
“No,” Wasserman said simply.
What other big implications could this SCOTUS decision have for the 2024 election?
During the 2022 legislature, North Carolina Republicans won control of the state Supreme Court, overturning an earlier ruling by the Democratic-controlled court that said the state’s 2022 congressional map it was the result of partisan gerrymandering.
“Republicans have a very dim look [House] majority and it is very likely that they will draw a new gerrymander in North Carolina [with a GOP-led majority] to pad their margin and try to maximize their seats to protect themselves from losses elsewhere,” Wasserman said. “Now, this latest ruling probably offsets that at least partially. So it’s a game changer for Democrats.
“This [Alabama] Not only does the ruling have the potential to offset swings in North Carolina, but it could also affect the thinking of Republicans in North Carolina when they go to draw the map later this summer. Republicans could be more risk averse and decide they don’t want to attack the Democrat from a substantially black district, Don Davis,” Wasserman told Yahoo News.
Donnita Hathaway prepares to participate in the 57th Selma-to-Montgomery Black Voters Matter March on March 9, 2022 in Selma, Alabama (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
