Republicans in Alabama on Friday pushed through a new congressional map that will test the limits of a judicial mandate to create a second-majority black district in the state or something “close to it,” infuriating the plaintiffs in the lawsuit and the Democrats who predicted the plan.
A month after a surprise Supreme Court ruling that found the state’s existing map violated a landmark civil rights law by weakening the power of black voters, the Republican overwhelming majority in the Alabama legislature backed a plan that would raise the share of black voters in one of the state’s six mostly white congressional districts from about 30 percent to about 40 percent.
The map also reduced the percentage of black voters in the existing majority-black district from about 55 percent to about 51 percent. In Alabama, more than one in four residents is black.
Notably, the redraw ensures that none of the state’s six white Republican incumbents have to face each other in a primary to retain their seats. The proposal must be approved by a federal court, which is holding a hearing next month.
Whichever map the court ultimately approves will have electoral and political implications outside of Alabama, where control of the U.S. House of Representatives depends on a razor-thin Republican majority and other states facing similar lawsuits under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Because most black voters in Alabama support Democratic candidates, a black district with a second majority would likely elect a Democrat.
The plaintiffs in the case pledged to challenge the legislature’s map. But even before it passed the legislature, Democrats and multi-suffrage advocates said it fell far short of what the court had asked for and predicted that the federal court would eventually appoint a special master to oversee yet another redraw.
“This is the ultimate definition of noncompliance,” State Representative Chris England, a Democrat representing Tuscaloosa, told Republicans Friday, in the closing hours of a special session that began Monday with the sole purpose of creating a new map.
In a later conversation with reporters, Mr. England added that “ultimately, I think the federal court will do what they’ve done for Alabama for decades and hopefully save us from ourselves and make us comply with their order to create a fair opportunity for African Americans.”
Republicans defended their map as a satisfactory adjustment, arguing that it held together areas and counties that share similar economic and geographic priorities and that candidates favored by black voters could win in any of the districts whose boundaries they adjusted. They focused on a line in a lower court ruling that suggested the possibility of creating “an additional district in which black voters would otherwise have the option of electing a representative of their choice,” insisting they had done so.
Under pressure from Democrats during the debate, State Representative Chris Pringle, a Republican from Mobile and the speaker pro tempore, called it “the best card we could negotiate” with Senate Republicans.
The legal challenge that forced the special session was yet another example in Alabama’s fraught history of a court stepping in to force the state to follow laws related to voting or civil rights. An earlier legal challenge forced the creation in 1992 of the Seventh Congressional District as the state’s only majority-black district—a Southwest Alabama seat that has since been held by a black Democrat, including current Representative, Terri Sewell.
“Once again, the vast majority of the state has decided that black people’s right to vote is nothing this state is obligated to respect, and it’s offensive, it’s wrong,” State Representative Prince Chestnut, a Democrat from Selma, said Wednesday after a House vote. The series of party-line votes, he added, “shows that Alabama still has the same unruly and unruly mentality it had 100 years ago.”
The three-member panel that last year unanimously ordered the existing map redrawn will hold a hearing on Aug. 14, when it could decide to wiretap a special master.
The Supreme Court in June stunned many across the country by narrowly upholding the most important remaining tenet of the Voting Rights Act, after a decade in which the conservative majority effectively undermined that law. The clause it upheld prohibits any rule or law that discriminates on the basis of language or race.
Before the Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling, Alabama state attorneys said a new map should likely be ready by early October to prepare for the 2024 primary.
Ahead of the five-day special session, Democrats rallied behind several plans, including a map that would have created two districts in which at least 50 percent of the voting population was black.
But the only cards seriously considered by the entire legislature came from the Republicans.
Senator Steve Livingston, a Republican from Scottsboro, said he spoke to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California before Friday’s vote and that Mr. McCarthy “said, ‘I’m interested in keeping my majority.'” (A spokesman for Mr. McCarthy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
On Wednesday, the Alabama House passed a party-line map that increased the number of black voters in the Second Congressional District to 42.45 percent, while the Senate approved an increase to 38.31 percent of black voters in that district. (A Senate Republican voted against that proposal, as some conservatives complained about the decision to split individual counties between districts or move them to a new one.)
Two days later, a Republican-dominated committee convened and within half an hour had come up with a compromise proposal that raised the number of black voters to 39.9 percent. Within hours, the entire legislature had approved the bill and sent it to Governor Kay Ivey, a Republican, who signed it.
“I’m confident we’ve done a good job — it’s for the courts to decide if they agree,” said Senator Greg Reed, the Senate President pro tempore and a Republican from Jasper.
Outnumbered Democrats, powerless and largely cut off from the entire process, instead spent hours this week contrasting the Republican-backed maps with their own preferred proposals.
They warned against rebuking the Supreme Court, saying the court order was an opportunity to embrace fair voting representation in the state, arguing that a larger black voter margin was needed for their preferred candidates to prevail in a racially polarized state.
A few Democrats accused Republicans of deliberately ignoring the court order to pave the way for a new lawsuit that could further undermine the Voting Rights Act, a decade after an Alabama county successfully challenged a key provision of the law as unconstitutional.
“All we ask is fairness, just to be equal, to add some equality, to be respected and to have a voice,” said Sen. Bobby Singleton, the minority leader and a Democrat from Greensboro. “I don’t think that’s too much, but of course other people think it’s too much.”