Alabama Republicans have put themselves in a box.
Last week, when U.S. District Court Judge Anna Manasco dropped a ruling that essentially deemed two state senate districts to be racially gerrymandered and in need of correction prior to the 2026 elections, the box became inescapable.
There is no way out now for the Republicans who make up a supermajority in the state Legislature. No matter what lawmakers decide to do from this point forward to satisfy Manasco, it is unlikely to work.
Now, there is no sympathy warranted here. They did this to themselves. And their counterparts at the national level and on the U.S. Supreme Court have aided in this situation.
It’s what happens when you use racism to create voting maps while simultaneously issuing court rulings that make believe institutional racism is a thing of years gone by. When you stir that soup together, you get a concoction that is both hard to swallow and even more difficult to understand.
In a nutshell, here is the situation: ALGOP lawmakers drew up racist voting maps in 2020 that packed Black voters in certain districts in an effort to make sure those voters didn’t impact races in other districts. There’s no denying this fact, no matter how many times a Republican tries the “who me” routine when called out on it.
To fix it, though, Alabama lawmakers will have to draw new maps that divvy up Senate Districts 25 and 26 in such a way that Black voters make up a majority in one of those districts, or something close to it.
Except, other court rulings have deemed such use of race in determining voting districts to be unconstitutional.
So, fix your racist districts by drawing new maps that aren’t racist, but don’t use race to do it. Got it.
Oh, and did I mention that there’s a court case from Louisiana that’s before the U.S. Supreme Court that could make all of this moot? Because it seeks to essentially end the 1965 Voting Rights Act altogether, which is the reason the people who control Alabama have to at least act like they give a damn about fairness, equality and minority voting rights.
Yeah, it’s a bit of a mess.
But it gets messier, because this is Alabama. And it’s not exactly our first time in this whole racial gerrymandering fight. Basically, however many times we’ve drawn voting maps in this state, that’s how many times we’ve had a problem with racial gerrymandering. At this point, I don’t know why we don’t just save money and let a federal judge appoint a special master to just draw the things for us in the first place. (Someone at a high priced law firm in the state just passed out over that idea.)
Anyway, the last time we were before federal judges over such a matter was last year, when state lawmakers were taken to task over their congressional maps. And then taken to task again over their refusal to follow the court’s order to create a second majority-Black voting district.
Cited multiple times among the 500-plus pages of three Republican-appointed judges calling state Republicans racists over and over was the fact that Sen. Steve Livingston, one of the most prominent figures in the legislature and a co-chair of the redistricting committee, had used the slur “monkey town” in a text message with a consultant. Livingston is, of course, leading the way on this redistricting effort as well.
Given that Manasco was one of the three judges who deemed those congressional maps to be racist—and their opinions seemed particularly pointed in that regard—it seems unlikely that Livingston’s presence at the top would make her feel comfortable. Nor should it.
Because that’s how any sane, fair person would feel—suspicious.
Suspicious of anything that happens with this process. Alabama Republicans have failed numerous times now at the fairness test, even when graded by Trump-appointed judges (which Manasco is). They failed to draw the original maps fairly. They failed to act fairly and correct those maps when Black voters pointed out the problems and threatened to sue. They failed to act fairly and correct those maps when ordered by the federal court. They failed to act fairly and correct the maps when ordered by the Supreme Court.
Why would anyone expect fairness at this point?
And not just in Alabama. Why would anyone expect it anywhere in this process?
Think about the lunacy of what’s taking place here. Here we have a state supermajority outright refusing to correct obviously racist maps, even when ordered to do so by a federal court … a federal court that’s part of a federal system that has deemed race an inappropriate tool in determining voting districts and a Supreme Court that has determined that systemic racism in voting is a thing of the past … as it rules on cases in which numerous other federal judges have found clear cases of racial gerrymandering that have diluted and diminished the rights of Black voters.
Quite the knot they’ve tied themselves into.
And quite the box they’ve helped Alabama Republicans build for themselves.
