By Joan Biskupic, CNN Chief Supreme Court Analyst
(CNN) — Alabama has repeatedly come to the US Supreme Court to defend a racially discriminatory congressional map, asserting dubious claims and employing questionable tactics.
In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled against Alabama. Late Tuesday night, the emboldened conservative majority did the opposite, endorsing a state plan that eliminates a seat held by a Black Democrat that a special US district court has declared intentionally discriminatory.
The high court’s action demonstrated the truth that the nation’s protections for voting rights have not merely been “updated,” as Justice Samuel Alito insisted in late April.
They have been jettisoned.
The message in the Supreme Court’s unsigned opinion, posted after 9 pm ET, is that states now have vast latitude to draw maps that dilute the voting power of Blacks, Latinos and other racial minorities. Even if all indications are otherwise, judges must assume legislators acted in good faith when they devised their voting maps.
Tuesday’s decision, hastily made without full briefing or oral arguments, culminates decades of retrenchment on voting rights by the contemporary court.
The majority reversed the three-judge lower court’s detailed, 78-page opinion from May 26 that reinforced earlier trial findings of Alabama’s racial discrimination in redistricting. The state has continued to defend a map with only one district among the state’s seven in which Blacks would have a fair chance to elect a candidate of choice.
The state is about 27% Black. The special federal court had ordered a second Black district drawn. Over years of litigation, including in 2023 when the lower court panel’s determination was affirmed by the Supreme Court, the Alabama legislature went to lengths to dodge the mandate for a second Black district.
Yet, on Tuesday night, the Supreme Court majority faulted the US district court panel for failing to presume the state was acting with “legislative good faith.”
The lower court, in fact, said it had tried to give legislators the benefit of the doubt before finding Alabama had engaged in racially discriminatory vote dilution. Such dilution can occur when legislators draw maps concentrating Black voters in a single district, or alternatively dispersing them, to weaken their overall voting power.
“We reach this conclusion with great reluctance and dismay and even greater restraint — only after another exhaustive analysis of an extensive record, as the Supreme Court’s remand order and its precedent instructs us,” the panel wrote.
“The Legislature well knew that a plan without an additional Black-opportunity district would dilute Black Alabamians’ opportunity to participate in the political process, and it intentionally enacted that very plan,” the panel added.
On the panel was two judges appointed by President Donald Trump and one appointed by former President Bill Clinton.
Ruling in the middle of election season
Tuesday night’s Supreme Court decision was equally jarring in its assertion that the lower court was attempting to “alter the election rules on the eve of an election.”