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U.S. Supreme Court overrules panel of judges who blocked U.S House map over 2nd majority-black district
High court’s decision will leave map in place for 2022 election but allows challenge to map to continue
♦By Rich Shumate, ChickenFriedPolitics.com editor
WASHINGTON (CFP) — The U.S. Supreme Court has overruled a panel of Alabama federal judges who ordered state legislators to redraw the state’s U.S. House map to create a second majority-black district.
The decision is a victory for Republican members of Alabama’s U.S. House delegation, who can now proceed with their re-election plans without the daunting prospect of running in unfamiliar territory.
Alabama U.S. House map blocked by federal court
In a 5-to-4 decision issued February 8, the high court did not rule on the underlying legal dispute over whether Alabama’s map violated the Voting Rights Act. But the majority said forcing legislators to redraw it before May’s primary, with candidate qualifying underway, would be too disruptive to the process.
“When an election is close at hand, the rules of the road must be clear and settled,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote explaining the majority’s reasoning. “Late judicial tinkering with election laws can lead to disruption and to unanticipated and unfair consequences for candidates, political parties, and voters.”
However, Chief Justice John Roberts — who voted with the court’s four liberal members against giving the state a stay of the lower court ruling — said the lower court had “properly applied” the standard for evaluating voting rights challenges “with no apparent errors for our correction.”
The Supreme Court’s order did not invalidate the determination of the lower court that the map was illegally drawn but stayed the order striking down the map until the case can be fully adjudicated — likely with another trip up to the Supreme Court.
On January 24, a panel of three federal judges — which included two judges appointed by Donald Trump — tossed out the map drawn by state legislators that contained six heavily Republican districts and one majority black district, following the general contours of the map in place since 2011.
The judges noted that the black voting age population in Alabama is 27%, while having one black Congress member out of seven results in 14% representation. With two black members, participation and the voting age population would match, and the judges told legislators that “any remedial plan will need to include two districts in which Black voters either comprise a voting-age majority or something quite close to it.”
The decision would almost certainly have meant another Democrat joining the state’s seven-member House delegation, forcing one of the five sitting Republicans seeking re-election to either run in unfamiliar territory in North Alabama or launch a primary challenge to one of their GOP colleagues to stay in office.
Attorney General Steve Merrill immediately appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court, saying he “strongly disagreed” with the judges’ conclusion that the map ran afoul of the federal Voting Rights Act.
The ruling also had implications in neighboring Louisiana, which has an even higher black voting age population but just one black member of Congress in a six-member delegation. (Adding a second black-majority district in Louisiana would slightly overrepresent the state’s black voting age population because of its lower number of seats.)
With the ruling in the Alabama case, it would appear that the high court would be unlikely to sustain a similar challenge in Louisiana.
If the courts eventually order creation of second majority-black district, the change would likely have the biggest effect in South Alabama. The current majority-black 7th District, represented by Democrat Terri Sewell, includes black voters in Birmingham and Montgomery but not in Mobile, which has a black majority that could be the core of a new district.
Another possibility would be creating a seat similar to a district in southwest Georgia, which includes enough of the area’s rural black population to elect black Democrat Sanford Bishop, who has held the seat since it was created in 1992.
Prior to 2013, the Biden Justice Department would have needed to clear Alabama’s U.S. House map before it could have gone into effect. But a U.S. Supreme Court ruling struck down the pre-clearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act, which pushed map challenges into federal courts.
The judges who struck down Alabama’s map were Trump-appointed U.S. District Judges Terry Moorer, from the Southern District of Alabama, and Anna Manasco, from the Northern District, and 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stanley Marcus, who was appointed to the Atlanta-based appeals court by President Bill Clinton.
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Is demography destiny? Census data shows challenges ahead for Southern GOP
2020 figures show increases among voting groups that have been swinging to Democrats
By Rich Shumate, ChickenFriedPolitics.com editor
(CFP) — Take a map showing population shifts across the South over the last 10 years and put it over a map of where Joe Biden performed best in 2020, and the connection will appear obvious.
The counties in the South that have gained population — large cities and surrounding suburbs — are the same places where Biden did well; the counties that shrank — rural areas and small towns — were places where Donald Trump rolled.
New, detailed, local-level data released August 12 by the U.S. Census Bureau show that when Republicans across the South redraw lines for congressional and legislative districts to equalize population, maximizing their partisan advantage will be much trickier than it was a decade ago.
True, Republicans will still control the entire process in every Southern state except Louisiana and Virginia, which will give them ample opportunity to draw favorable maps. But this slicing and dicing will still have to account for the fact that the sheer number of hostile voters is growing at such a pace that gerrymandering will become ever more difficult.
The geographic partisan divide reflects another shift that has negative implications for the GOP — the Southern electorate is becoming less white.
In every Southern state except for South Carolina and Tennessee, the percentage of the population that self-classifies as white dropped — in some cases, dramatically. In Texas, it dropped 17.5%; in Florida, 12%. There are now five Southern states — Texas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana — where the white population is less than 60%, giving Democrats a base on which to build.
While the black population nationwide has been relatively stable since 2010, it grew faster than the national average in every Southern state except Kentucky, West Virginia and Oklahoma, as the reverse migration of African Americans back to the region continues.
The most notable population change in the 2020 census was among Hispanic residents, who grew nationwide by 23% and now make up nearly 19% of the total population. But every Southern state except Texas saw the Hispanic population grow even faster than the national average, making them a much more visible presence in areas where they have previous had little political impact.
For decades, the bedrock of Republican strength in the South has been white voters in rural areas, small towns and suburbs, offsetting Democrat strength among African American voters and inner-city urban voters. Maps featuring suburban-rural districts have thus been used to maximum effect.
However, the population shifts in the new census numbers will dictate that rural districts with shrinking populations will have to expand to include more suburban territory, at the same time that Southern suburbs are becoming less reliably Republican.
In Georgia, for example, three counties in the Atlanta urban-suburban core — Fulton, Gwinnett and Cobb — added 376,000 people over the last decade. Joe Biden carried all three, and Democrats have flipped two U.S. House seats here and gained a dozen state legislative seats. So can new lines be drawn to account for both the population boost and the political shift?
In Texas, eight counties added more than 200,000 each during the decade, a total of 2.5 million people combined, and all were in major metro areas — Dallas-Ft. Worth, Houston, San Antonio and Austin. By contrast, 144 counties lost population. So when legislators draw two new U.S. House districts, they will almost certainly have to be rooted in metro areas where Democrats have made gains.
This is not to suggest, of course, that Republican hegemony in the South is threatened in the short-term by these population shifts. Hispanic voters remain a relatively small part of the electorate outside of Florida and Texas, white voters are more monolithically Republican than in much of the rest of the country, and the suburbs remain competitive.
But amid unprecedented scrutiny of the map-making process — with activist groups ready to pounce on maps they feel are unfair — drawing new political lines that maximize Republican gains will be a fraught process.
The legal fight over Texas’s 2010 maps didn’t end until 2018. We can expect the same this time around, and probably in more places.
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New Census figures show 5-seat shift in Southern U.S. House districts
Texas, Florida and North Carolina gain seats; West Virginia loses a seat
♦By Rich Shumate, ChickenFriedPolitics.com editor
WASHINGTON (CFP) — The U.S. Census Bureau released population totals for reapportionment of U.S. House seats Monday that will alter the size of delegations in four Southern states.
Fast-growing Texas will be the biggest winner, gaining two seats to take its delegation to 38 members. Florida will get one new seat to go to 28, and North Carolina will gain one seat to go to 14.
However, West Virginia will lose one of its three seats, which could force Republican incumbents to run against each other in newly configured, larger districts.
West Virginia’s new delegation will be its smallest in history. The Mountaineer State has had at least three members of Congress since it entered the Union in 1863 and had as many as six in the 1950s.
Alabama dodged a bullet, keeping all of its seven seats. Some projections prior to release of the final numbers had shown the Yellowhammer State losing a seat.
Georgia will also not gain a seat for the first time in 40 years.
The new numbers will set off a legislative scramble in all four states, as new lines will have to be drawn.
Republicans will be in total control of redrawing lines in all four states. While North Carolina has a Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, state law doesn’t give him authority to veto reapportionment bills.
However, Texas and North Carolina are covered by the Voting Rights Act, which requires them to preserve electoral opportunities for minority candidates. In addition, a constitutional amendment passed in Florida in 2010 outlaws gerrymandering lines based on political considerations.
Legislators in West Virginia will have to decide which of the state’s three GOP House members — David McKinley, Carol Miller and Alex Mooney — to draw into the same district. As there are no statewide or Senate races in 2022, House members may be left with the option of competing in a primary or bowing out of Congress.
In Texas, due to demographic trends, Republican legislators may have to draw at least one majority Latino district, likely to be Democratic, in order to comply with the Voting Rights Act. But they could try to maximize Republican chances across the rest of the map, including helping out incumbents who survived Democratic challenges in 2018 and 2020.
No matter now the lines are drawn, litigation is likely in Texas, Florida and North Carolina, states where maps drawn after the 2010 Census were subject to lengthy court fights that resulted in court-ordered map redraws in all three states.
While Virginia is not gaining or losing a seat, its lines could also be substantially redrawn by a new independent commission. The maps after 2010 were drawn by Republicans, who have since lost control of the legislature and governorship, and then later redrawn by a federal court after a legal fight.
The Democrat-controlled Virginia legislature implemented an independent redistricting commission earlier this year.
Also, in Georgia, Republicans may redraw the map in metro Atlanta to target two Democratic incumbents — Lucy McBath and Carolyn Bourdeaux — by combining Democratic areas currently in both of their districts into a single district, which could force one of them out of Congress.
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