Supreme Court weighs Alabama voting rights clash
The conservative-majority Supreme Court hears a major new case that could further weaken the landmark Voting Rights Act.
The conservative-majority Supreme Court on Tuesday will hear a major new case that could further weaken the landmark Voting Rights Act, enacted to protect minority voters, as the justices consider a dispute over Alabama's congressional district map.
Alabama’s Republican attorney general, Steve Marshall, is asking the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, to unravel decades of precedent on how to remedy concerns that the power of Black voters is being diluted by dividing voters into districts where white voters dominate.
It is one of two significant election cases the court is hearing in its new term that started Monday, with the court set to consider later this fall a Republican effort to curb the ability of state courts to enforce state constitutional protections in federal elections. That could make it easier for Republican legislatures to restrict voting rights.
For the first time in the court's history, two Black justices — conservative Clarence Thomas and liberal Ketanji Brown Jackson — will be on the bench together for a case concerning race issues.
Supreme Court allows Alabama district map after lower court rules violation of Voting Rights ActFeb. 8, 202203:27The two consolidated cases being heard Tuesday arise from litigation over the new congressional district map that was drawn by the Republican-controlled Alabama Legislature after the 2020 census. The challengers, including individual voters and the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, say the map violated Section 2 of the 1965 voting rights law by discriminating against Black voters. The new map created one district out of seven in the state in which Black voters would likely be able to elect a candidate of their choosing. The challengers say that the state, which has a population that is more than a quarter Black, should have two such districts and provided evidence that such a district could be drawn.
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