Supreme Court Focus: Unequal Justice
Allowing unfair Alabama redistricting further erodes voting rights
Even if we pretend the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6–3 conservative majority operates in a nonpartisan way, the decision on the Alabama redistricting map makes little common sense.
It also highlights how much damage the court has already done to voting rights. And it reinforces an image of a court with little regard to legal precedence or how its actions impact citizens’ daily lives. That’s leading into dropping approval ratings, regardless of how many speeches justices give about not being political.
In the redistricting case, a federal district court on Jan. 24 ruled that the map violated the Voting Rights Act by packing most Black voters into one congressional district and scattering the rest — known as “packing and cracking.” Alabama’s Black congressional district was first drawn in 1992.
The panel of three judges — two of whom were appointed by President Donald Trump — ruled that the 27 percent Black population should be significantly represented in two of the state’s seven congressional districts. After a seven-day hearing with 17 witnesses and over 1,000 pages of briefing, the panel told the state to submit a new map.
Any state legislature — whether…
