1 year ago
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The Supreme Court just handed Democrats a huge favor: a ruling that likely widens their path back to the House majority in 2024.
Democrats are poised to net a congressional seat in Alabama next November after Chief Justice John Roberts’ surprising opinion affirming a lower court’s findings that Republican mapmakers had likely illegally diluted the power of Black voters in the state.
But the ruling could very well have implications beyond Alabama. In declining to further weaken the Voting Rights Act, the high court opened the door for Democrats to make other claims of racial gerrymandering in states across the South. That decision could possibly cause a domino effect in Louisiana, South Carolina, Georgia and Texas, which may be forced to add new districts where Black and Latino voters would hold greater sway.
It may also leave other Republicans on defense in states they control across the South, though it’s not clear whether that litigation will be complete in time for the 2024 elections in states other than Alabama. New maps could help deliver the House back to Democrats, particularly if the party also performs strongly in the 2024 elections from the presidential race and down the ballot.
The next year was already set to include a ferocious series of remapping fights in states across the country. Republicans are plotting to redraw congressional districts in North Carolina and Ohio, a process that could more than double the GOP’s five-seat House majority, and New York and Wisconsin Democrats hope to tilt maps back to their favor.
“It won't just affect Alabamians, it'll affect what's going on in Ohio and North Carolina,” said Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.). “And I do believe it will embolden litigation in other southern states where there is a substantial African American population. So this is such a good day.”
Not all Democrats were optimistic that the ruling would extend farther than Alabama or that the effort to gut the Voting Rights Act is over. In an interview, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) said he found it “ominous” that Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion that “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.”
Republicans were sharply critical of the decision and vowed to keep pursuing other legal avenues to defang the Voting Rights Act.
“Continuing this current framework will only lead to more exploratory litigation in search of a clear standard,” said Adam Kincaid, the president of the National Republican Redistricting Trust. “The Supreme Court will have ample opportunities to reconcile or abandon its precedents in the coming term and should not miss another opportunity to do so.”
A win in Alabama
Alabama’s population is about 27 percent Black, but just one of its seven congressional districts gives Black voters the opportunity to elect their candidate of choice. That seat, which snakes from Montgomery to Tuscaloosa to Birmingham, is represented by Sewell.
Democrats challenged that map in court after the 2021 redistricting. In response, Alabama advanced a particularly aggressive theory of the Voting Rights Act in front of the Supreme Court, making the case that it must be interpreted in a “race neutral” manner — an argument that the court’s majority soundly rejected. But just as crucially, the court preserved a decades-old test on what constituted voter dilution, leaving a lane for other redistricting challenges to proceed.
And Republicans acknowledged that Thursday’s ruling would likely lead to more litigation challenging congressional lines under similar arguments that prevailed in Alabama.
Strategists at the National Redistricting Foundation, a Democratic group that backed the challenge to Alabama’s map, said they felt hopeful the ruling could result in additional Black opportunity districts in Alabama, Louisiana and Georgia before the 2024 elections. The group has supported ongoing litigation in each state under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
In a best-case scenario that could mean three more seats for Democrats in the Deep South, most imminently in Alabama.
Splitting up the state’s Black Belt region, a nickname for a swath of land with rich topsoil, and uniting part of it with Mobile could easily yield a second district where Black voters could elect their candidate of choice. It could also endanger Republican incumbents, such as Reps. Jerry Carl or Barry Moore, depending on how the GOP-controlled state legislature chooses to proceed.
Democrats involved in the case were elated to discover Thursday morning the court had ruled in their favor. Sewell said her office phone was ringing nonstop with people calling to celebrate. National Redistricting Foundation staffers were on a video call when the decision came down. Cheers, screams and tears interrupted the meeting.
“This was one of the very first cases that we brought as an organization. This fight is so deep in our blood and everyone cares so deeply about it,” said Marina Jenkins, the group’s executive director.
The ripple effect
Many Democrats expect the Supreme Court’s ruling to work in their favor in several other states.
In Louisiana, Democrats and civil rights groups had made a similar request for a second primarily Black district, which could span from Baton Rouge to the rural areas in northern Louisiana. The Supreme Court put that case on ice last summer pending the outcome of the Alabama case, after a lower court had ruled that the congressional maps drawn by the GOP legislature likely discriminated against Black voters. (The state has one majority-Black district out of six, despite the state’s population being approximately a third Black.)
"I think Alabama and all of the Southern states that might likewise be impacted by this ruling have something to rejoice about,” said Rep. Troy Carter (D-La.). “The battle's not over, but it's definitely a step in the right direction and better than we were yesterday.”
In Georgia, Democratic groups are suing to expand the number of districts where Black voters would make up a greater share of voters. A lower court judge indicated that their challenge had a strong likelihood to succeed, even while allowing the current maps to go into effect for the 2022 midterms.
And in Texas, the Justice Department sued in 2021, alleging that the GOP-drawn map — and particularly a West Texas seat now held by GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales — was drawn to weaken the voting powers of Latinos.
Beyond that, the Supreme Court is already set to hear a case in the fall on the legality of South Carolina’s congressional map after a lower court ruled Rep. Nancy Mace’s (R-S.C.) seat was an impermissible racial gerrymander. However, the challengers there are arguing the district is in violation of the Equal Protection Clause, not the Voting Rights Act.
“I just want to know what the district's going to look like and who I'm going to be serving,” Mace said when asked about her state’s legal limbo. “I don't know if it'll be in time for ‘24, or if it'll be for ‘26.”
Nicholas Wu contributed.
