A 79-page opinion written by two Donald Trump-appointed federal judges and one put in place by former President Bill Clinton has put the Supreme Court on the spot to make clear how the nation's highest court, with its conservative majority, justifies race-based gerrymandering.
On Tuesday, the panel blocked Alabama from using its 2023 congressional map, which the court found was deliberately designed to dilute Black voting power. The judges ordered the state to adopt a replacement map allowing Black voters the right to elect their preferred candidates.
The three judges, U.S. District Judges Anna Manasco and Terry Moorer (Trump appointees) and U.S. Circuit Judge Stanley Marcus (the Clinton appointee), wrote that Alabama's 2023 map "made it impossible not only to remediate the vote dilution we identified, but also to respect the longstanding community of interest the Legislature identified in Alabama's Black Belt."
According to Slate's Alexis Romero and Mark Joseph Stern, the court's analysis was unsparing, with the two legal analysts explaining, “This right-leaning lower court’s thundering, exasperated decision shows just how obvious Alabama’s Jim Crow–style discrimination has been over the past few years. And it will force SCOTUS to either draw the line at overtly racist gerrymandering or admit that it has declared open season on Black Americans’ political representation."
Noting the judges wrote, "Alabama cannot use Callais to legitimize its pre-Callais decision to double down on the discriminatory vote dilution," the Slate report states, "It is important to emphasize how cynically strategic the entire Alabama state government’s coordination has been in its attempt to disenfranchise Black Alabamians."
Alabama is already appealing Tuesday's decision to the Supreme Court and has vowed to seek an emergency stay, Slate is reporting, with Romero and Stern adding, "... although the right-wing [SCOTUS] justices may well grant it, they cannot feign ignorance toward the profound injustice and bad faith of their actions. The district court has now laid out, in the starkest terms, the stakes of this case for voting rights, racial equality, and judicial authority. All will be badly damaged if Alabama secures permission from SCOTUS to eliminate yet another diverse district by enacting a racial gerrymander. And Callais’ assurances—that it neither overturned precedent nor blessed intentional racism—will be exposed as a cynical fiction that could not survive its first test."
