Consider the following to be a public service.
I am offering it because over the past two weeks, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, there has been an unprecedented amount of absolute, unfiltered, unabashed bull guano spread around about what the decision meant and what is and isn’t racial gerrymandering. And a whole bunch of racists are trying to take advantage of what is a confusing and unique situation.
Let’s start with this stone cold fact: Alabama’s current congressional voting maps – the ones drawn by a special master appointed by a federal court in 2023 – are NOT racial gerrymanders. And no, having two minority opportunity districts does not qualify.
Look, I get that a whole bunch of white dudes have been on your timeline screaming about how the liberal courts harmed white people by forcing a second minority opportunity district on Alabama in 2023, but it’s just more whining by the snowflake brigade that wants desperately to never pay any penalty for having policies that negatively affect all minority voters.
But don’t take my word for it. Take the word of a federal court with two Trump appointees, the current U.S. Supreme Court and the state of Alabama.
That’s right, all of those people, including the state of Alabama, which was arguing against the maps, agreed that Alabama’s 2023 maps, with two minority opportunity districts, did not constitute a racial gerrymander, because race was not the primary factor used when drawing those maps.
Do you know why those maps were drawn in 2023?
Because the maps Alabama Republicans drew up and rammed through the legislature in 2020 – the ones our Republican legislators were praising all last week – were deemed illegal racial gerrymanders by both the federal courts and the Supreme Court. Those maps packed Black voters into a single district – Terri Sewell’s CD7 – and eliminated the opportunity for Black voters in the central part of the state to meaningfully impact other congressional districts.
This is not my opinion. These court rulings exist. You can look them up. Literally hundreds of news stories were written about these decisions and Alabama’s illegal maps.
In fact, they were so illegal, and the Republicans in the legislature so defiant about them, the courts threatened to subject the state to preclearance once again – meaning it would be forced to submit all voting map changes to the Department of Justice for prior approval. To put that another way: Alabama was so racist in drawing up those 2020 maps that a federal court with TWO Trump appointees wanted to revive the full Voting Rights Act only for Alabama.
It’s not hard to understand why. Just look at that old map, with a tiny little sliver of Black voters in west Montgomery carved out and the weird finger that extends into Jefferson County that pulled thousands of Black voters into CD7. Those curious little map drawing tricks divvied up counties – against standard reapportionment procedure – and moved voters into a single district, leaving white Republicans with safe districts.
The 2023 maps corrected one of those carve outs and turned CD2, which is now represented by Shomari Figures, into a second opportunity district. That district, despite what you hear white Republicans screaming right now, was not artificially turned into a “minority district.” It corrected the carve out, adhered to basic reapportionment standards and provided Black voters with an opportunity to elect a candidate of their choosing in a district that is still a majority-white district.
Imagine that. A bunch of white people in Alabama helped elect a Black congressman. And Republicans want to change that district because … white people were racist against white people?
No, actually, the Republicans want to change it because they want to win more seats and they want to cheat to do it. And they think the Callais decision is the Supreme Court blessing partisan cheating.
But it’s not. In fact, in the opinion, Justice Samuel Alito goes to some effort to explicitly say that partisan gerrymandering is also wrong, but that it should be dealt with at the state level and not adjudicated by federal courts. Florida, for example, has a state law banning partisan gerrymandering, and the court praised that law.
Somehow, Alabama Republicans saw a ruling that said racial gerrymandering is wrong, even if it’s used to correct more egregious racial gerrymandering, and started telling everyone their original racial gerrymandering was OK. Or even the right thing, because Alabama is a “red state.”
And I guess that’s all true, if you don’t care what words mean. But if words still mean something, then even the Supreme Court – in one of the most problematic opinions in the history of the court – says that the maps Alabama Republicans drew in 2020 were illegal racist gerrymanders and the maps drawn in 2023 by a federal court are not.
It seemed like a whole bunch of people really needed to see that said plainly.
