Alabama makes a further mess of congressional districting
Quin Hillyer
Video Embed
MOBILE, AL — Mulish Alabama Republican legislators last week took a bad situation with congressional redistricting and made it worse, not just for their own party and their own people but for constitutional law and race relations nationwide.
The Supreme Court already had made a mess of the state’s districts in a decision columnist George Will aptly described as “being consistent with incoherence.” Emphasizing skin color above other considerations such as economics, culture, and geography, the court essentially ordered the state to create either a second black-majority district among its seven or at least a second one in which black voters have a significant “opportunity” to elect a “candidate of [their] choice.”
THE HIGH COST OF VACATIONING AT WALT DISNEY WORLD
The only way to create a second black-majority district would be to separate the obvious “community of interest” formed by the two coastal counties, Mobile and Baldwin, largely by carving out all the heavily black neighborhoods of Mobile and putting them in a district with heavily black areas clear across the state.
There also is a way entirely consistent with traditional districting principles — I figured it out in just three hours of arithmetic — of creating a second district with at least a bare plurality of black voters while still keeping Mobile County whole but putting Baldwin in a different district. At least that way, Mobile County, which hasn’t been bifurcated in recent memory, and which has a demonstrably better record on racial affairs than the rest of the state, would not have its black voters excised from the district as if they weren’t part of the same community.
Instead, faced with the Supreme Court’s order, the legislature, in effect, extended a middle finger to the justices in the majority.
The Republican-dominated legislature on July 21 adopted a map with only one majority-black district and a second district only 38% black. By no reasonable interpretation of Supreme Court precedent could this new map be thought acceptable. Instead, the lawmakers bowed to the apparent desire of state Attorney General Steve Marshall to somehow convince the court its jurisprudence had been wrong all along.
Marshall’s argument may be logical in theory, but it has zero chance of success immediately after this same court already ruled otherwise just last month.
The new map now will be in the hands of the same panel of three federal lower-court judges that, like the Supreme Court, already ruled that a second black-friendly district is necessary. This panel is sure to reject the legislature’s map in about no time flat. Its next step would be to appoint what’s known as a “special master” to draw a map of his own.
Faced with the utter defiance of the legislature, the special master will feel no compulsion to pay the slightest heed to the lawmakers’ desires. The result likely will be a map that gerrymanders the state in ways guaranteed to create two districts entirely safe for black Democrats, at the expense of the very Republicans for whom the legislators were trying to save a chance of victory.
Worse, Mobile County’s unity will be utterly trampled, and all across the state, the message will be sent that skin color, not other community interests, is expected to be the main determinant of voting behavior.
The extreme race-consciousness of the likely result is one reason the legislature’s bullheadedness is bad for the state. It will be pernicious nationally as well. The court’s approval of such racial gerrymandering also likely will create a further precedent, effectively applicable nationwide, whose effect will be to promote racial balkanization and more of what columnist Will called “incoherence” in constitutional law.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Alabama GOP legislators were advised repeatedly, by expert sources, both state and federal, that the plan pushed by state Senate Republicans, the one that ultimately prevailed, would amount to thumbing their noses at the courts. Rather than try to salvage something workable for all sides, they engaged in performance art, feigning ideological virtue while engaging in a form of ritual political suicide.
When movie characters Thelma and Louise drove off a cliff, at least they had style. The Alabama legislators just look like teenage girls in a temper tantrum. There’s no honor in this tantrum. There’s only self-harm.