State lawmakers arrived in Montgomery on Monday afternoon, greeted by a throng of protesters, as they got set to waste everyone’s time and money.
Democrats arrived, rightfully, angry. Republicans strolled into town with dreams of racism dancing in their heads.
The special legislative session, called by Governor Kay Ivey, is Alabama Republicans’ gleeful response to the Supreme Court’s recent opinion in a voting rights case in Louisiana—an opinion that further limited the power of the now tattered and torn Voting Rights Act.
That decision, though, didn’t say what so many Alabama lawmakers and Republican voters seem to think it did. As much as I disagreed with the premise behind the opinion—that racism is on death’s door and essentially a non-factor in today’s South—that opinion was not an open invitation for Alabama’s Republican lawmakers to do their worst and disenfranchise at will. In fact, the opinion said exactly the opposite—it expressly forbids the use of race as a dominant factor in drawing voting districts.
And that’s why the Alabama Republicans who control our legislature are going to waste your time and your money on this special session.
Allow me to explain.
The problem in the Louisiana case was that the remedy to a racist gerrymander overwhelmingly used race when drawing a replacement map. The Supreme Court, in that opinion, said that states can’t simply use race to draw proper maps, even if the drawing is being done to correct maps that were drawn specifically to disenfranchise minority voters. The primary objective of the maps must be politically motivated, not racial bias.
It’s a thoroughly stupid opinion dreamed up by the dumbest Supreme Court in modern history that is seeking some way to allow Republicans to disenfranchise to their hearts’ delight without seeming overtly racist.
Regardless, though, the opinion requires that states governed by racists, like Alabama, at least try to mask their racism when drawing up voting maps and not so obviously use race as the dominant factor. Disenfranchise Democrats all you want, obviously, but at least pretend that you’re surprised to learn so many of them are Black.
And that’s where Alabama has a problem.
Because it listened to Steve Marshall.
Remember back three years ago when this exact same Supreme Court dropped a redistricting ruling on Alabama that surprised the hell out of everyone? The case was Allen v. Milligan, and it, like the Louisiana case, dealt with racially gerrymandered voting districts. Specifically, it dealt with the fact that Alabama has a 27-percent Black population, yet it had managed to draw ridiculously gerrymandered voting maps that left the state with only one district in which minority voters even had an opportunity to affect the outcome of a congressional election.
The court ruled the state had to draw a second one. It gave the state legislature an opportunity to do so.
The state legislature, instead, listened to Steve Marshall and his solicitor general Edmund Lacour Jr.
They were certain that the high court would reward them for … not doing what the high court told them to do. Not only did they not draw a new map, the only one even discussed was actually a worse racial gerrymander than the ones deemed unconstitutional.
Even though multiple people wearing long, black robes told these doofuses that their maps were “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders,” Alabama Republicans flatly refused. Instead, they allowed the federal court to appoint a special master to redraw the map.
Ah, the costs of electing incompetent panderers to positions of importance.
In the Louisiana ruling last week, Justice Samuel Alito mentioned specifically the Allen opinion. Except, much to the chagrin of Marshall and LaCour, who’s now a federal judge (because why not?), that reference was to reemphasize the fact that Allen was still a guiding opinion in the law.
“We have not overruled Allen,” Alito wrote. “… in (Allen), the state did not defend its map on the ground that it was drawn to achieve a political objective.”
So, they screwed up the original defense. Then they compounded the error by stupidly believing that the Supreme Court would reward defiance of the Supreme Court.
Unlike Louisiana, Alabama’s new voting maps—the ones drawn for both the congressional districts and state senate districts—do not rely exclusively on race. The court-appointed special masters, in both instances, drew maps that unpacked some of the identified packing of minority voters and created opportunity districts in which Black voters are not artificially made the majority, but instead merely have an opportunity to band together with white voters to elect a candidate of their choice. That’s wholly different from what occurred in Louisiana.
So, after wasting millions of dollars on court cases that got us the current maps, Alabama Republicans are hellbent on wasting millions more trying to get back to those original 2020 maps. Which seems like a bit of a longshot, considering the court that just ruled that racial gerrymandering is unconstitutional also called Alabama’s 2020 maps unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.
Some might call it poetic justice for Alabama to be tripped up by its past racism on its way to do future racism.
