U.S. Supreme Court to Hear Lawsuit over Alabama’s Congressional District Lines

By KIM CHANDLER, MARK SHERMAN and GARY FIELDS Associated Press

Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a lawsuit over Alabama’s congressional district map, which sets up a new test of the Voting Rights Act.

Various groups argue the state violated the federal Voting Rights Act by diluting the political power of Black voters when it failed to create a second district in which they make up a majority, or close to it. African Americans account for about 27% of the state’s population but are the majority in just one of the state’s seven congressional districts.

The case the Supreme Court will take up Tuesday centers on whether congressional districts in Alabama were drawn to reduce the political influence of Black voters, but it’s also part of a much broader problem that undermines representative government in the U.S.

Both major political parties have practiced gerrymandering — drawing congressional and state legislative boundaries to cement their hold on power.

An Associated Press analysis from 2017 showed that Alabama had one of the most gerrymandered congressional maps in the country.

Republicans dominate elected office in Alabama and are in charge of redistricting after taking control of the Legislature after the 2010 elections. They have been resistant to creating a second district with a Democratic-leaning Black majority that could send another Democrat to Congress.

A three-judge panel that included two appointees of President Donald Trump ruled unanimously in January that the Alabama Legislature likely violated the Voting Rights Act with the map. “Black voters have less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice to Congress,” the panel said.

The judges ordered state lawmakers to draw new lines for this year’s election and create a second district where Black voters either made up a majority or near majority of the population. But on a 5-4 vote in February, the Supreme Court sided with Alabama to allow this year’s congressional elections to take place without adding a second predominantly Black district. Two justices suggested it was too close to spring primaries to make a change.

The lawsuit claims the Alabama congressional map dilutes the voting strength of Black residents by packing a large number of them into a single district — the 7th, where 55% of voters are Black — while fragmenting other communities. That includes the state’s Black Belt region and the city of Montgomery.

The current districts leave the vast majority of Black voters with no realistic chance to elect their preferred congressional candidates anywhere outside the 7th district, the lawsuit contends.

The groups contend that the state’s Black population is large enough and geographically compact enough to create a second district.

African Americans served in Alabama’s congressional delegation following the Civil War in the period known as Reconstruction. They did not return until 1993, a year after the courts ordered the state to reconfigure the 7th Congressional District into a majority-Black one, which has since been held by a succession of Black Democrats. That 1992 map remains the basis for the one in use today.

Alabama argued in court filings that the state’s Black population is too spread out to be able to create a second majority district without abandoning core redistricting principles such as keeping districts compact and keeping communities of interest together. Drawing such a district, the state argued, would require mapping acrobatics, such as connecting coastal areas in southwest Alabama to peanut farms in the east.

In a statement to The Associated Press, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said the map is “based on race-neutral redistricting principles that were approved by a bipartisan group of legislators.” He said it looks similar to three prior maps, including one cleared by the Justice Department and another enacted in the 2000s by “the Democrat-controlled Legislature.”

“The Voting Rights Act does not force states to sort voters based on race,” Marshall said in a statement. “The VRA is meant to prohibit racial gerrymanders, not require them.”

Alabama’s 7th Congressional District snakes a winding path from the western neighborhoods of Birmingham through the state’s Black Belt — a swath of land named for the rich soil that once gave rise to antebellum plantations — to sections of Montgomery.

Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell, who has represented the district, has been the lone Democrat among the state’s seven House members since she took office in 2011. The state’s other six districts have reliably elected white Republicans for the last decade.

Sewell was the only member of Alabama’s delegation to support restoring the most effective anti-discrimination provision of the Voting Rights Act, which was gutted in a 2013 Supreme Court decision that also arose from an Alabama case. The provision, referred to as preclearance, forced Alabama, other states and some counties with a history of voting discrimination to get Justice Department or federal court approval before making any election-related changes.

Some Black voters outside Sewell’s district say they feel their concerns are overlooked because there is no motivation for Republican officeholders in districts that favor the GOP to pay attention to their issues.

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