Supreme Court Halts Order, Allows Alabama to Use New Congressional Map
The new map could leave Alabama with one Democratic district.
The Supreme Court vacated the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama’s ruling blocking the state from implementing a 2023 congressional redistricting map.
SCOTUS remanded it back to the lower court “for consideration in light of Louisiana v. Callais.”
The majority did not offer any explanation, but the three leftist judges penned a four-page dissent because, of course, they did.
Alabama went to SCOTUS after the ruling in the Louisiana case, in which SCOTUS reminded everyone that you cannot use race as a factor in drawing a congressional district.
The district court’s ruling required Alabama to have two black congressional districts, similar to the Louisiana case.
The court also stopped Alabama “from changing its congressional district and state legislative maps until 2030, after prior efforts to make changes ended up in court.”
I don’t know if the 2023 map will work either because I’m seeing outlets report that the decision leaves Alabama with one black majority Congressional district:
After the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature adopted new House district lines in 2021, the high court agreed with a lower court that Alabama’s congressional map likely violated Section 2 by diluting the votes of Black residents. The lower court had said the state should have two House districts where Black voters have the opportunity to elect their preferred candidates.
Following that decision, state lawmakers enacted in July 2023 a new House map, which, like the 2021 plan, included a single majority-Black district. State officials said the congressional districts were drawn to minimize county splits, including in the so-called Black Belt, a rural region named for its fertile soil, and to adhere to traditional redistricting principles.
But that 2023 map drew another challenge and again, a three-judge district court panel blocked those congressional districts from being used in the 2024 elections. The Supreme Court declined to let Alabama use those House boundaries, and 2024 congressional elections were held under a remedial map drawn by the district court.
I’m guessing if Alabama can prove it did not use race to redraw that district, then it’d be fine.
The legislature finished its special session on May 8, passing bills to reinstate the maps and redo primary elections in districts 1, 2, and 7 since the new map affects them.
[Featured image via YouTube]
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Wonder if Abigail regrets sowing all that wind.
TBH it wouldn’t have mattered in the deep South. Once Callias opinion struck down mandatory ‘majority minority’ districts specifically drawn to favor/disfavor on racial grounds were eliminated those CD and legislative districts were toast. Keep in mind that less than 15 years ago most deep South States couldn’t do diddly squat re elections without seeking permission from the Feds. It wasn’t until Shelby County was decided in 2013 that ended the era of ‘pre clearance’ that had existed since the ’65 VRA.
There’s a ton of regional resentment over these sorts of neo reconstructionist policies. No way those oppressive, discriminatory programs/policies were gonna continue in place once the State Legislatures were finally freed from underneath the boot of the Federal Govt.
This has nothing to do with Abigail, or Virginia. Callais was in the works long before most of us had even heard of her.
I’m going to sound like I’m a fan of Spanberger at first but let me explain.
This actually wasn’t her doing, and she campaigned against doing it. She is looking more and more like a feckless puppet of the Dem party in the state that will just roll over and do what they want after throwing a bit of fussy words at them.
Time will tell, but she is pretty much ending any semblance of that bipartisanship brand she was hoping to build (or perhaps it was all a short-term ploy to get the mansion stay with no future plans at all). She’s also in serious danger of looking like a useless puppet. If she knows or cares, we may see a few public disagreements and vetoes soon.
She campaigned against a lot of things (wink wink), then embraced those things once elected.
Last.week the legislature passed provision for using the 2023 CD map as well as altered State Senate map. Gov Ivey signed it into law. In essence we’re gonna hold the regularly scheduled primary vote on 19 May with results for some primary elections for HoR and State.Senate voided in advance. New primary elections held for those altered districts after a campaign period to accommodate the new district borders and constituents. Gonna be a hoot as the old districts drawn to accommodate the racist demands of the Federal Judiciary are finally swept away by SCOTUS. The usual suspects of grievance grifters, race hustlers and others who derived benefits from racist districts are howling mad, apoplectic even.
dem mayor chinese spy! hurry bury this news
no word if she slept with swallowswell or aoc:
https://www.newsweek.com/eileen-wang-arcadia-mayor-china-agent-charges-plea-11938753
Former Arcadia Mayor Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent of the Chinese government, federal prosecutors announced Monday.
The admission places a sitting U.S. elected official at the center of a foreign influence case tied to undisclosed coordination with Beijing-linked officials. Wang, a Democrat who was elected in 2022, now faces up to 10 years in prison and has resigned from her post.
She is not a spy, at least as far as anyone knows. She is not even being accused of that. Read your own sources before reporting on them.
Semantics…she was a foreign agent pushing propaganda.
That’s not semantics, they’re not the same thing at all. It’s like calling a murderer a rapist, or a drug dealer a bank robber.
As a propagandist agent, she is essentially a PR saboteur.
It’s semantics because both roles have things in common. Both would be nefarious agents of a foreign government looking to undermine the country in which they are pretending to serve.
Yes, you are making a tone deaf criticism because it completely loses the plot due to some psychological hang up on being exact. This is pretty regular for you and suggests a moderate deficiency in social intelligence.
No, it is NOT semantics. Everyone knows what a spy is, and a foreign agent is not even remotely it. If she were a spy she’d be charged with espionage, not with a FARA violation. Michael Flynn was an unregistered agent for the Turkish government; he was certainly not a spy!
Being a foreign agent is not even a crime. The only crime is failing to register. Most foreign agents do register, because they’re honest and good citizens, and no one has a problem with it. That’s how different a foreign agent is from a spy!
Yeah health guy. How could people possibly think a secret agent of a foreign government and secretly being an agent of a foreign government are the same thing? Wait…
Make Milhouse happy –after all, one of his fellow Democrats, determined to destroy the US, just got caught.
She’s not a spy. She’s a secret agent.
Hey, demon, have you registered as an agent of your Infernal Master? Hell is not part of the USA, you know, so its agents are subject to FARA.
Hmm…sounds like discrimination based on religion Milhouse.
he state should have two House districts where Black voters have the opportunity to elect their preferred candidates
And this is the part that everyone actually thinking says, “Huh, WUT?”
Black voters always have the opportunity to elect their preferred candidates, the same as white/yellow/brown/red/green people. The point of majoritarian voting is you have to get enough people to agree with you to get your preferred candidate across the finish line.
Of course, racist reasoning has always been a bit askew.
No, when black voters are a political minority in their district, i.e. they vote Democrat while their neighbors vote Republican — they don’t have the opportunity to elect their preferred candidates. And of course the same is true for white voters and for all other voters if they are in the same circumstances.
But for decades, until just now, the courts interpreted § 2 of the VRA as requiring districts to be drawn where black voters would be concentrated enough to be able to elect a Democrat. Wherever such a district could be drawn, it had to be, so as to maximize the power of black voters as opposed to all other voters. SCOTUS finally said no, that’s not what it means, so they’re losing this special privilege they had enjoyed for decades.
They do have the opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice, th same.as everyone else. Whether they get the outcome they prefer in the course of the election is another thing. What the d/prog want is to continue to have the outcome of.elections decided in advance by carefully curating the population to ensure a political majority exists using race as a proxy for political affiliation.
If it were an actual requirement for voters to ‘be able to elect the candidate of their choice’ not just vote for them, volunteer for their campaign, work to convince others to vote for them….then I was discriminated against by Federal Court order when my CD was altered to shove me into a ‘majority minority’ CD which used race as proxy for political affiliation to deliberately diminish the political power of voters other than those who matched ‘majority minority’ demographics.
No, they don’t. No political minority ever does. That’s how it works.
Now you’re just being confused. “To elect the candidate of their choice” means getting the outcome they prefer. The two phrases are exactly the same. Electing someone is an outcome. What else could it be? And a minority in a district is by definition unable to do that.
That’s what the Dem Party wants. The “Black activists”, though, want more than that; they want to have the outcome of elections decided in advance by carefully curating the population to ensure a political majority exists for candidates supported by the Black community.
All such candidates will of course be Democrats, but more than that, they will be Democrats who support the Black community’s agenda. Remember that when the VRA was enacted most Democrats were not ones who supported that agenda. So from their perspective, as opposed to the party’s, they’re not using race as a proxy for affiliation, race is the affiliation they’re interested in creating a majority for.
Yes, that is the whole point. Until just now, the courts understood VRA § 2 as requiring such discrimination in favor of black voters wherever it is possible. A state must maximize the number of districts in which “minorities” constitute a majority, so that they can not merely vote for their preferred candidates but also elect them, while the rest of the district’s population, being in the minority, cannot do that. In other words, they understood the law to require racial discrimination in this one case, while banning it everywhere else. And this reading was so entrenched that the same SCOTUS that now struck it down voted to uphold it just a few years ago.
And again. Plot lost.
Nice try, Democrat, but no.
This is not true–
But for decades, until just now, the courts interpreted § 2 of the VRA as requiring districts to be drawn where black voters would be concentrated enough to be able to elect a Democrat.
THIS is
But for decades, until just now, the courts interpreted § 2 of the VRA as requiring districts to be drawn where black voters would be concentrated enough to be able to elect a black representative.
No, you filthy lying demon, it was never about the winning candidate’s race. It was about the race of the people who supported that candidate. Thus Steve Cohen, who is not black but is the candidate that the black voters of his district have consistently shown they prefer, was a beneficiary of this racist reading of the law, and now that the supreme court has finally come to its senses he will be out of a seat, because the black voters of Memphis will no longer be given this special privilege of having their district artificially drawn so as to let them elect him. They will now be treated just like white Democrats in a state controlled by Republicans, and put in districts with Republican majorities. They don’t like it because it strips them of a special privilege; while the national Democrat Party, which is mostly white and doesn’t actually care about them, doesn’t like it because it strips them of a safe seat.
You realize you sound insane, right?
Democrats, be careful for what you desire. “End gerrymanding!” cried Abby Spunberger and the Virginia Democrats. “Oaky Doky” said Thomas, Alito et al “Here you go!”
Whereas November loomed as a Democratic victory for the control of the US House appears more and more as a night of sackcloth and ashes, and wailing and gnashing of teeth for the Blue.
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