Supreme Court sides with GOP in Alabama election map case

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court put on hold a lower court ruling that Alabama must draw new congressional districts before the 2022 elections to increase black voting power. The high court order boosts Republican chances to hold six of the state's seven seats in the House of Representatives.

The court's action, by a 5-4 vote announced Monday, means the upcoming elections will be conducted under a map drawn by Alabama's Republican-controlled legislature that contains one majority-black district, represented by a black Democrat, in a state in which more than a quarter of the population is black.

A three-judge lower court, including two judges appointed by former President Donald Trump, had ruled that the state had likely violated the federal Voting Rights Act by diluting the political power of black voters by not creating a second district in which they made up a majority, or close to it.

Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito, part of the conservative majority, said the lower court's order for a new map came too close to the 2022 election cycle.

Chief Justice John Roberts joined his three more liberal colleagues in dissent.

The justices will at some later date decide whether the map produced by the state violates the landmark voting rights law, a case that could call into question "decades of this Court's precedent about Section 2 of the VRA," Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent.

That decision presumably will govern elections in 2024 through the end of the decade in Alabama and could affect minority political representation elsewhere in the country, too.

Alabama lawmakers redrew the state's congressional districts following the results of the 2020 census. Several groups of voters sued, arguing that the new maps diluted the voting power of black residents.

In a unanimous ruling in late January, the three judges said that the groups were likely to succeed in showing that the state had violated the Voting Rights Act. As a result, the panel ordered lawmakers to redraw the districts so black voters would be a majority, or close to it, in two districts, not one. The ruling ran more than 200 pages.

The panel wrote that "we do not regard the question ... as a close one."

Alabama asked the Supreme Court to put the ruling on hold while it appeals and the justices agreed.