{"id":429,"date":"2026-06-09T04:12:51","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T04:12:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=429"},"modified":"2026-06-09T04:12:51","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T04:12:51","slug":"the-supreme-courts-latest-blow-to-black-voters-rights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=429","title":{"rendered":"The Supreme Court\u2019s Latest Blow to Black Voters\u2019 Rights"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Louisiana v.\u00a0Callais, in late April, gutting what remained of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it insisted, unconvincingly, that it was merely offering an \u201cupdate,\u201d clarifying the precise standards for determining violations of the law. Last week, the Court issued an unsigned order in a long-running case involving congressional redistricting in Alabama that exposed that obvious fiction. The four-page order, issued on the Court\u2019s emergency, or shadow, docket, makes clear that Section\u00a02 of the Voting Rights Act\u2014which is supposed to protect against voting procedures, such as drawing skewed district lines, that have the intent or effect of discriminating against racial minorities\u2014is a dead letter. There remains no feasible route, under the Voting Rights Act or the Constitution, to challenging district lines that prevent Black voters from electing candidates of their choice.<\/p>\n

Read more Ticks to Fear This Summer<\/a><\/p>\n

For years, Alabama had balked at obeying a series of orders, including from the Supreme Court itself, to insure that its Black voters have a voice in how they are governed. The conservative Justices rewarded this strategy, rebuking not Alabama but the lower court for not being deferential enough to a state that had repeatedly demonstrated its determination to delay and obstruct. And, despite repeated lectures about the danger of changing voting rules too close to an election, the Court in effect invited state legislatures to do precisely that. It has produced a system impenetrably rigged against the voters that the law was supposed to protect.<\/p>\n

More than a quarter of Alabama\u2019s residents are Black, but, with the Court\u2019s intervention, just one of the state\u2019s seven congressional districts is likely to be held next year by a Black representative. This outcome will be no accident. The lower court\u2014some disputes under the Voting Rights Act are heard by a three-judge panel\u2014repeatedly found that, in redrawing congressional districts in the aftermath of the 2020 census, Alabama lawmakers intentionally discriminated against Black voters. In the lingo of redistricting, they \u201cpacked\u201d one majority-minority district with Black voters and \u201ccracked\u201d the rest among three other districts. To fix the problem, the court instructed Alabama to create a second majority-minority district. This conclusion was no ideologically driven result: the three judges include two appointed by President Donald Trump during his first term, and a Bill Clinton nominee.<\/p>\n

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The case made its first emergency trip to the Supreme Court in February, 2022, when the Justices, splitting 5\u20134 (Chief Justice John Roberts joined the three liberals), overturned the lower court\u2019s order and granted Alabama\u2019s request that elections proceed that year under the discriminatory map. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, noting that absentee voting in Alabama\u2019s primaries would begin in just seven weeks, invoked what is known as the Purcell principle, after a voting-rights case from 2006, that federal courts should not intercede to block a state\u2019s election laws in the period close to an election. \u201cThe District Court\u2019s order would require heroic efforts by those state and local authorities in the next few weeks\u2014and even heroic efforts likely would not be enough to avoid chaos and confusion,\u201d Kavanaugh wrote then.<\/p>\n

After the election, the Supreme Court, to the surprise of many observers, decided that the lower court was correct after all\u2014the voting had been conducted under a map that most likely violated Section\u00a02, and Alabama needed to redraw its districts accordingly. (In this round, Kavanaugh largely joined Roberts and the Court\u2019s three liberals.) But the state did not give up so easily. In 2023, Alabama\u2019s legislature approved another map with a single majority-minority district, drawing a sharp rebuke from the lower court, which pronounced itself \u201cdeeply troubled that the State enacted a map that the State readily admits does not provide the remedy we said federal law requires.\u201d The court appointed its own experts to draw new districts in time for the 2024 election, which resulted in the election of two Black representatives. In 2025, as Alabama continued to contest the case, the lower court ruled for the third time that Alabama had violated Section\u00a02\u2014\u201cnot a close call,\u201d it noted. The court also went further, finding that Alabama had violated the Constitution. \u201cTry as we might, we cannot understand the 2023 Plan as anything other than an intentional effort to dilute Black Alabamians\u2019 voting strength and evade the unambiguous requirements of court orders standing in the way,\u201d the court said. \u201cThis amounted to intentional racial discrimination in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment\u2019s Equal Protection guarantee.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Inside the Creative Cavern of JR<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Then came the Louisiana decision. Alabama, backed by the Trump Administration, raced back to the lower court to ask that it be allowed to use its preferred map. The three-judge panel refused, emphasizing its finding that the line-drawing not only had the effect of disadvantaging Black voters (as in Callais) but was \u201ctainted by intentional race-based discrimination.\u201d Under the Supreme Court\u2019s precedents, such determinations should be reversed only where there has been \u201cclear error\u201d by the lower court. In other words, the lower court\u2019s conclusions prevail so long as they are \u201cplausible\u201d and supported by the record\u2014in this case, an eleven-day trial that featured fifty-one witnesses and nearly eight hundred exhibits. That didn\u2019t deter the conservative Justices. The panel, the Court said, \u201cdid not heed the presumption of legislative good faith\u201d in finding intentional discrimination, and failed to make certain that all the state\u2019s legitimate interests in drawing district lines were accommodated. (For example, the legislature had said it wanted to make sure that Gulf Coast communities with \u201cFrench and Spanish colonial heritage\u201d were kept together. It was silent about the descendants of formerly enslaved people living in the state\u2019s Black Belt, named for the region\u2019s fertile soil.) In addition, the Court said, the panel should not have cited the impending primary election in determining that it would create fewer problems to use the court-ordered map: \u201cWhile federal courts should not impose changes close to an election, States are free to decide for themselves whether last-minute changes to an election are in their best interests.\u201d<\/p>\n

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, blasted this reasoning. \u201cBefore the Court are two paths,\u201d Sotomayor wrote. \u201cDown one lies an orderly election, held under a tried-and-tested congressional map that protects Black Alabamians\u2019 right to vote and with which all voters, elections officials, and candidates alike are familiar. Down the other lies a chaotic election, held under a never-before-used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black Alabamians, that Alabama adopted in unashamed defiance of a prior court order directly affirmed by this Court, and that will require officials to change the voter registrations of hundreds of thousands of voters in just days at best.\u201d The Court\u2019s order, she added, \u201cdebases the democratic process by upending Alabama\u2019s entire election in the name of permitting Alabama to discriminate against Black Alabamians. It also corrodes the rule of law by rewarding Alabama\u2019s gamesmanship and outright defiance of court orders.\u201d<\/p>\n

The majority\u2019s contortion of the Purcell principle may be the most disturbing aspect of its order. Recall that in 2022, with voting set to begin in seven weeks, Kavanaugh, in siding with Alabama, claimed that it would be intolerably disruptive to redraw district lines in order to avoid discriminating against Black voters. This time around, the time line is even more compressed. After the Louisiana ruling, Alabama cancelled its May primary in the four affected congressional districts, voided the early votes that had already been cast, and set a new primary for August\u00a011th, with early voting to start on June\u00a017th. Accurately reassigning voters to the redrawn districts is no easy task; to get this work accomplished, Alabama elections officials testified, would ordinarily take three to four months. In fact, Alabama\u2019s director of elections, Jeff Elrod, said the work would need to be finished by June\u00a02nd\u2014as it happened, the date on which the Supreme Court issued its order. As Sotomayor pointed out, \u201cconcerns about the administrative burdens associated with \u2018the last-minute reassignment of hundreds of thousands of voters to new districts,\u2019 have apparently melted away.\u201d The danger of chaos, it appears, depends on who suffers the consequences, and who will benefit.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more Kurt Vile Gets the Feeling<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ruth Marcus reports on the Supreme Court\u2019s unsigned order legitimatizing an Alabama congressional-district map that a lower court had claimed \u201camounted to intentional racial discrimination.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-lede"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Supreme Court\u2019s Latest Blow to Black Voters\u2019 Rights - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=429\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Supreme Court\u2019s Latest Blow to Black Voters\u2019 Rights - 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