A divided Supreme Court said on Wednesday that Alabama’s legislative map, drawn by a Republican-controlled legislature after the 2010 census, needs to be reconsidered.
In the 5-4 decision, Justice Stephen Breyer said that the case of Alabama Legislative Black Caucus v. Alabama was remanded back to a District Court because a panel of judges who considered the plan took the wrong approach.
“We find that the District Court applied incorrect legal standards in evaluating the claims. We consequently vacate its decision and remand the cases for further proceedings,” Breyer said. Justice Anthony Kennedy sided with the Court’s four liberals in the decision.
Link: Read the opinion
Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the dissent. “The consequences of this unprincipled decision will reverberate far beyond the narrow circumstances presented in this case,” he said.
Breyer said the Supreme Court looked at four different determinations considered by the lower District Court: the geographical nature of racial gerrymandering; standing; racial predominance; and narrow tailoring/compelling state interest.
“In our view, each of these determinations reflects an error about relevant law. And each error likely affected the District Court’s conclusion,” Breyer said.
Central to the Alabama case is the concept of Gerrymandering, the act of dividing up an election area to give one political party a majority of voters in as many districts as possible. (It derives from tactics developed by Elbridge Gerry, a delegate to the Constitutional
The petitioners in the consolidated cases, Alabama Democratic Conference v. Alabama and Alabama Legislative Black Caucus v. Alabama, argued the legislature intentionally packed greater numbers of minority voters into fewer districts, thereby increasing their margin of victory in those districts but diluting their overall strength in the state.
Luther Strange, Alabama’s attorney general, claimed the new map passed constitutional muster. After all, the 2010 map maintained minority-majority populations in eight Senate districts and 28 House districts—the same map previously approved by Democratic-controlled legislatures and pre-cleared by the Department of Justice under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. (That pre-clearance requirement was struck down last year by the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder.)
Also last year, the three-judge panel on the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama ruled 2-1 in favor of the state’s redistricting plan. Under procedures outlined by the Voting Rights Act, the decision was appealed directly to the Supreme Court.
Now the same District Court will need to rule on a new plan in the case.
