Re: Alabama Redistricting Battle Is Back at SCOTUS, With a Lay-Up From the DOJ's Civil Rights Division

Leroy N. Soetoro <[email protected]> wrote:
> https://redstate.com/jenniferoo/2026/05/27/alabama-redistricting-battle-m
> oves-back-to-scotus-n2202771 
> 
> As RedState reported, in 2023, a district court three-judge panel
> blocked the use of 2023 maps drawn by the Alabama legislature and forced
> them to draw a second majority-minority district. After the Supreme
> Court of the United States' decision in Louisiana v. Callais, Alabama
> petitioned for redress of this ruling, and SCOTUS vacated the district
> court decision in early May, sending it back to the district court to
> review the case. 
> 
> On Tuesday, this same three-judge panel once again blocked the use of
> 2023 maps on the same basis: that the maps are deliberately
> discriminatory and violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The
> district court panel claims they are striving to prevent confusion among
> the voters. However, their refusal to apply the latest SCOTUS ruling to
> determine this case has bred more confusion than maps that change two
> districts. 
> 
> As projected, on Wednesday, Alabama attorney general Steve Marshall
> filed an application for an emergency stay with SCOTUS, which would
> allow the state to still use the 2023 maps. 
> 
> Alabama's Solicitor General A. Barrett Bowdre presented the brief: 
> 
> In its filing on Wednesday, Alabama urged the court to freeze the lower
> court’s ruling and allow it to use the 2023 map in the upcoming
> elections. That map, Bowdre wrote, “addressed this Court’s concerns
> about the State’s prioritization of core retention” – the principle of
> trying to have districts resemble their earlier iterations as closely as
> possible – “at the cost of splitting the Black Belt region,” an area in
> central Alabama originally named for its rich, dark soil but now named
> for its large Black population, the descendants of formerly enslaved
> people. The 2023 map, Bowdre said, divided the Black Belt “as little as
> possible, while also keeping together the Gulf Coast as the State had
> done for 50 years.” 
> 
> As stated in Alabama Map Fight Erupts Again As Federal Panel Defies
> SCOTUS Momentum, the district court's interpretation comes off as utter
> nonsense. Either maps are being drawn without racial specifications, or
> they are not. 
> 
> “Callais,” Bowdre continued, “vindicates Alabama’s position on the
> lawfulness of the 2023 Plan, yet the district court decided in one week
> that Callais changed nothing.” The district court, Bowdre stressed, did
> not require the challengers to offer alternative maps that would achieve
> Alabama’s goals while still maintaining two majority-Black districts, as
> the Supreme Court suggested it should have, and “[i]t did not matter to
> the district court that drawing an additional race-based district came
> at the cost of sacrificing communities of interest and pairing
> incumbents.” 
> 
> “Worse,” Bowdre concluded, the district court’s conclusion that the
> state intentionally violated the Constitution rests on the idea “that
> Alabama intentionally discriminated by refusing to intentionally
> discriminate.” 
> 
> Shorter, Bowdre is begging the court to make it make sense.
> 
> As stated before, this makes little sense except as a tactic to prevent
> the August 11 special election from moving forward. The work of
> reassigning voters to new districts was scheduled to begin on Wednesday,
> May 27. Last Friday, Alabama Director of Elections Jeff Elrod testified
> to the panel that the window for voter rolls to be unlocked would be
> between Wednesday, May 27, and Tuesday, June 2. This is an exceptionally
> tight window in which to work; thus, the state's request for an
> administrative stay. 
> 
> U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has purview over this
> Northern Alabama district court, so the petition for a stay ended up on
> his docket. 
> 
> On Wednesday afternoon, Justice Thomas issued his response but declined
> to immediately restore the use of the 2023 maps. Thomas did order the
> plaintiffs in this action to respond to Alabama's request by Monday,
> June 1, at 4:00 p.m. 
> 
> What may weigh in Alabama's favor is the amicus brief filed by the Civil
> Rights Division of the Department of Justice. In it, Assistant Attorney
> General Harmeet Dhillon and Solicitor General John Sauer argue that the
> district court is not assessing the case with the newly established
> precedent of Callais in the forefront. 
> 
> 
> On remand, however, the district court promptly reinstated its
> pre-Callais injunction largely based on its pre-Callais reasoning. The
> court held that Alabama had engaged in intentional discrimination by
> declining to draw a second black opportunity district that the court had
> earlier suggested was a required remedy for a Section 2 violation. And
> the court again held that Alabama had violated Section 2. Those holdings
> were wrong even before Callais and are indefensible after it. 
> 
> With respect to intentional discrimination, the district court paid only
> lip service to its obligations to “disentangle race and politics” and to
> begin “with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith.”
> Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, 602 U.S. 1, 6
> (2024). The court disregarded Alabama’s indisputably partisan aims when
> the 2026 legislature chose to use the 2023 map for the upcoming midterms
> and when the 2023 legislature pursued incumbency protection. 
> 
> Essentially, Dhillon and Sauer surmised the three-judge panel disparaged
> Alabama's good faith intent, twisting it into an effort to be
> intentionally racist. 
> 
> The district court instead concluded that Alabama must have intended to
> discriminate because it declined to draw a second black opportunity
> district that the district court had signaled Section 2 required. But a
> State’s insistence on pursuing its partisan goals in the face of an
> earlier Section 2 holding does not somehow make those partisan goals
> racially discriminatory. The district court’s contrary holding flouts a
> central lesson of Callais: that the pre-Callais Section 2 standard
> improperly condemned the refusal to create additional majority-minority
> districts in situations that did not even support “a strong inference”
> of intentional discrimination. 146 S.Ct. at 1157; see id. at 1157-1161.
> In any event, Alabama sought in good faith to correct the disparate
> treatment of two communities of interest—the Gulf Coast and the Black
> Belt—that was the premise of this Court’s pre-Callais holding in Allen
> v.Milligan, 599 U.S. 1 (2023), that an earlier map violated Section 2.
> That legitimate effort to comply with this Court’s decision cannot be
> reasonably construed as racial discrimination, particularly in light of
> the presumption of good faith. 
> 
> The district court’s decision to reinstate its Section 2 holding despite
> Callais was tainted by the same errors. 
> 
> The court again failed to disentangle race and politics, ignored
> Alabama’s partisan goals, and deemed illegitimate the State’s effort to
> preserve the Gulf Coast community. The court also failed to hold
> respondents to their burden to control for party affiliation in
> analyzing racial voting patterns, relying on a smattering of largely
> irrelevant pre-Callais findings. And the court used its flawed
> intentional-discrimination analysis to conclude that the totality of
> circumstances demonstrated likely intentional discrimination in
> violation of Section 2. 
> 
> For all intents and purposes, the district court panel is ordering
> Alabama to violate the Constitution. 
> 
> Thus, as in Callais, the court ordered a racial gerrymander, mandating a
> minority-opportunity district that the State never would have created
> based on its race-neutral districting principles and political goals.
> See 146 S. Ct. at 1161-1162; see also Malliotakis v.Williams, 146 S. Ct.
> 809, 810 (2026) (Alito, J., concurring in the grant of stay) 
> 
> Dhillon and Sauer further argued that the district court was acting in
> bad faith to disrupt an already established election. The district court
> did not stay in its lane in its attempt to dictate what would or would
> not be a burden to voters. 
> 
> Worse still, the district court issued its injunction deep into the
> election calendar—less than three months before the primary and after
> the candidate-qualifying window had closed. The court excused that clear
> violation of Purcell v. Gonzalez, 549 U.S. 1 (2006) (per curiam), on the
> theory that Alabama had created the timing problem by deciding to use
> the 2023 map only after Callais, even though the State acted as soon as
> it could once this Court vacated the prior injunction in light of
> Callais. But state legislatures are democratically elected bodies that
> are competent to make the policy judgments inherent in late election
> changes and are accountable to the voters for any ill effects. Federal
> district courts do not have the same license to interfere with election
> rules at the eleventh hour, particularly on such dubious merits
> theories. 
> 
> Pretty brutal. We will see what counterargument the plaintiffs in this
> case choose to submit and what SCOTUS will decide to hopefully put this
> to bed once and for all.  
> 
> 


a small win for integrity.......