Justices mull challenge to landmark voting rights law
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Tuesday took up an Alabama redistricting case that could have far-reaching effects on minority voting power across the United States and seemed likely to divide the court along ideological lines.
The justices heard two hours of arguments in the latest showdown over the federal Voting Rights Act, with lawsuits seeking to force Alabama to create a second Black majority congressional district. About 27% of Alabamians are Black, but they form a majority in just one of the state’s seven congressional districts.
The court’s conservatives, in a 5-4 vote in February, blocked a lower court ruling that would have required a second Black majority district in time for the November elections. A similar ruling to create an additional Black majority district in Louisiana also was put on hold.
Conservative high-court majorities have made it harder for racial minorities to use the Voting Rights Act in ideologically divided rulings in 2013 and 2021. A ruling for Alabama in the new case could weaken a powerful tool that civil rights groups and minority voters have used to challenge racial discrimination in redistricting.
Some conservative justices seemed sympathetic to Alabama’s arguments. “Where can the state win?” Justice Samuel Alito asked Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, the Biden administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer who was arguing against Alabama.
The court’s three liberal justices pushed back strongly against Alabama’s arguments. Justice Elena Kagan referred to the Voting Rights Act as not only “an important statute” but “one of the great achievements of American democracy” while acknowledging that recent Supreme Court cases have cut back on the law. “Now, in recent years, the statute has fared not well in this court,” she said.
Kagan told Alabama’s lawyer, Edmund LaCour Jr.: “You’re asking us essentially to cut back substantially on our 40 years of precedent and to make this, too, extremely difficult to prevail on, so what’s left?”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s first Hispanic justice, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court’s first Black female justice who was hearing her second day of arguments, were similarly unsympathetic to Alabama’s arguments. Jackson said “what we all want” is for people to “spread out and live among one another and vote based on their own … views as opposed to along racial lines” but that is not what is happening in Alabama.
Alito suggested that polarized voting has more to do with ideology and is “not based on race.”
Partisan politics underlies the case. Republicans who dominate elective office in Alabama have been resistant to creating a second district with a Democratic-leaning Black majority that could send another Democrat to Congress.
Two appointees of President Donald Trump were on the three-judge panel that unanimously held that Alabama likely violated the landmark 1965 law by diluting Black voting strength.
The judges found that Alabama has concentrated Black voters in one district, while spreading them out among the others to make it impossible for them to elect a candidate of their choice.