Professors Murray and Vladeck make the point that the Allen v. Milligan Supreme Court decision is not progress, but avoided further regression.
However, they do point out that up to seven (7) Congressional Districts in four (4) states may have been Democratic but for Supreme Court procedural flummery:
Taking these rulings together (and others following them), as many as seven House seats across four states should have been majority-minority districts (and, thus, strong candidates for Democratic victories) and were safe Republican seats instead. Given that Republicans have a razor-thin 10-seat majority in the House, it’s not preposterous to suggest that the court’s unexplained interventions in 2022 were responsible for which party controls the House today. [Emphasis added.]
Now that the Court has ruled on the Voting Rights Act in the Alabama voting rights case, I look forward to civil rights litigation remedying these wrongs.
Once courts decide redistricting on remand, Democrats could re-take the House next year. Hopefully the New Democrats will include two from Florida. Our GQP Boy Governor, corporate lawyer House Speaker and assorted sordid Tallahassee characters robbed African Americans of two Congressional seats by gerrymandering, flummery, dupery and nincompoopery.
Thus, three cheers for the five justice majority in Allen v. Milligan.
Three cheers for the Rule of Law, despite other-directed Republican federal court appointees like corrupt Senior Justice CLARENCE THOMAS, secret recipient of millions of dollars of HARLAN CROW's hospitality, money and other things of value for two decades.
And three cheers for judicial independence!
From The Washington Post:
Opinion The Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act ruling is no victory for democracy
The Supreme Court’s unexpected decision on Thursday to keep Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act intact was greeted with relief — even giddiness — among many in the media. Some even hailed it as a “victory” for the act.
They are right, up to a point. Yes, the court’s conservative supermajority failed to undermine voting rights. But this is not an unalloyed victory.
As an initial matter, the decision does not strengthen the act, as some pundits claimed. It merely preserves the status quo. And the status quo is that this court, over the past 10 years, has severely hobbled the law and its protections for minority voters.
First, in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, the court eviscerated the law’s preclearance regime, which required states with a history of voting discrimination to first “pre-clear” any changes to their voting rules with the Justice Department or a three-judge federal court panel. The decision led to an uptick in laws that appear to seek to suppress the vote among certain constituencies, such as Texas’s effort to remove local control over elections in heavily Democratic (and Latino) Harris County.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who wrote the 2013 majority opinion, waved away critics who predicted such developments by insisting that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which empowered individuals to challenge discriminatory voting laws, was sufficient to protect voting rights. Yet, in 2021’s Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the court’s conservative majority made it harder for plaintiffs to prevail in such challenges.
That the court didn’t raise the bar even higher on Thursday is a positive development; it’s just a modest one when placed in this broader context.
The court made its antipathy toward voting rights even more clear in how it handled the case. At the heart of the controversy was the congressional map that Alabama drew in 2021 in response to the 2020 Census. Though roughly 2 in 7 Alabamians are Black, the state’s legislature packed most of the state’s Black voters into one House district (out of seven). Civil rights groups cried foul, prompting Black voters represented by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union to sue using Section 2, arguing the map was an unlawful racial gerrymander.
Two lower federal courts agreed, instructing Alabama to redraw its map before the 2022 midterm elections. The state appealed those rulings and asked the Supreme Court for an emergency stay of the district court ruling that instructed the state to redraw the map. The “emergency” Alabama relied upon was the dubious (if not entirely specious) claim that it was too close to the election to force the state to redraw its congressional districts.
n an unsigned, unexplained February 2022 order, the court acquiesced by a 5-4 vote. That ruling cleared the way for Alabama’s unlawful map — which a different 5-4 majority blocked on Thursday — to be used in November’s elections.
This intervention in Alabama produced direct and indirect effects in other states, as well. In June, the justices likewise put back into effect the congressional maps drawn by the Louisiana legislature even though a district court invalidated them for the same reasons as the Alabama courts — a ruling the ultraconservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit declined to disturb. And in Georgia, a district judge who also believed that the state had drawn congressional maps in violation of Section 2 nevertheless refused to block the maps — entirely because the Supreme Court had put the Alabama maps back into effect.
Taking these rulings together (and others following them), as many as seven House seats across four states should have been majority-minority districts (and, thus, strong candidates for Democratic victories) and were safe Republican seats instead. Given that Republicans have a razor-thin 10-seat majority in the House, it’s not preposterous to suggest that the court’s unexplained interventions in 2022 were responsible for which party controls the House today. [Emphasis added.]
That would be problematic enough in the abstract. It’s utterly indefensible now that a majority of justices have concluded the lower courts were right all along and that these maps were indeed unlawful.
So while Thursday’s ruling is a victory in the sense that it preserves what little is left of the Voting Rights Act, it’s also a sobering reminder of just how far the court has gone not just to water down voting rights but also to affect electoral outcomes. These developments have made representative government much more elusive.
No comments:
Post a Comment