The Supreme Court handed Alabama a major victory on Monday in its redistricting fight, according to a new report.
The Washington Post reported that the Supreme Court released an unsigned opinion allowing Alabama’sRepublican-controlled legislature to redraw its election maps and eliminate two Democratic-held seats. The opinion follows the court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais that allows states to gerrymander their maps for partisan purposes.
“The ruling is the latest to help Republicans redraw congressional maps in the wake of the high court’s landmark decision, which set new standards for considering race under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act,” the report reads in part. “It is an apparent reversal from prior instances in which the court found Alabama’s maps to be unlawful.”
Alabama had previously been under an uncommon injunction that prevented the state from redrawing its maps until 2030. The map was drawn by a special master after two Trump-appointed judges in a lower court found that the map was racially discriminatory to Black voters.
The map also paved the way for two Black representatives to be elected to Congress for the first time in the state’s history.
The three liberal justices on the Supreme Court dissented from the ruling, according to the report.
“The Court today unceremoniously discards the District Court’s meticulously documented and supported discriminatory-intent finding and careful remedial order without any sound basis for doing so and without regard for the confusion that will surely ensue,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
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