On Friday, Governor Kay Ivey announced she would not call a special session in order for the legislature to redraw state Senate districts recently found to violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Deuel Ross, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s director of litigation, told the Associated Press that plaintiffs in the redistricting case are “disappointed that the governor has declined to take this opportunity to correct the illegal State Senate map.”
Federal District Judge Anna Manasco, nominated by President Trump during his first term, ruled in August that current state Senate maps around Montgomery violate Section 2 of the VRA.
“The appropriate remedy,” Manasco wrote, “is a redistricting plan that includes either an additional majority-Black Senate district in the Montgomery area, or an additional district there in which Black voters otherwise have an opportunity to elect a Senator of their choice.”
Manasco’s decision followed earlier rulings by federal courts that the Congressional district maps drawn by Alabama’s state legislature violated the VRA. The state legislature did submit new maps in that case, but those redrawn maps were called an “intentional effort to dilute Black Alabamians’ voting strength and evade the unambiguous requirements of court orders standing in the way” by a three-judge panel Manasco sat on.
Manasco also explained in the August ruling that “if—and only if—the state legislature cannot or will not adopt a remedial map that complies with federal law in time for use in an upcoming election does the job of drawing an interim map fall to the courts,” and quoted a past Supreme Court majority opinion that called courts deciding on redistricting plans an “unwelcome obligation.”
But despite the judge’s expressed preference for the state legislature to design new maps that wouldn’t violate the VRA, Ivey characterized the requirements of the redistricting process as essentially labyrinthine on Friday.
“As the law currently stands, states like Alabama are put to the virtually impossible task of protecting some voters based on race without discriminating against any other voters based on race. I remain hopeful that we will somehow find the ‘magic map’ that will both satisfy the federal court and also be fair to all Alabamians,” Ivey wrote. “But as of today, I cannot justify the time and expense of calling a special session.”
Ivey’s statement also said she “[calls] on the U.S. Supreme Court to clarify the law in this area as soon as possible and relieve states like Alabama from this no-win situation.”
The governor may have been referring to Louisiana v. Callais, the voting rights case the Supreme Court decided not to rule on last session. Earlier this year, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said the decision in the case could reshape how the state addresses questions of redistricting.
More recently, on August 1, the Supreme Court told the parties to Louisiana v. Callais that they needed to submit briefs on “whether the State’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution.” At the time, legal expert Rick Hasen said the request for briefs represented “a big, and dangerous, step toward knocking down the second pillar [of the Voting Rights Act].”
Were the Supreme Court to rule that courts mandating majority-minority districts is unconstitutional, it would have major implications for the ongoing appeal of Allen v. Milligan, as well as the state Senate redistricting cases.
