Surprise SCOTUS Ruling Hands Victory to State's Black Voters

The Supreme Court on Thursday issued a surprising 5-4 ruling in favor of Black voters in a congressional redistricting case, ordering the creation of a second district with a large Black population, per the AP. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined with the court's liberals in affirming a lower-court ruling that found a likely violation of the Voting Rights Act in an Alabama congressional map with one majority Black seat out of seven congressional districts in a state where more than one in four residents is Black. The case had been closely watched for its potential to weaken the landmark voting rights law.

The court had allowed the challenged map to be used for the 2022 elections, and at arguments in October, the justices appeared willing to make it harder to use the voting rights law to challenge redistricting plans as racially discriminatory. The chief justice himself suggested last year that he was open to changes in the way courts weigh discrimination claims under the part of the law known as Section 2. But on Thursday, Roberts wrote that the court was declining "to recast our section 2 case law as Alabama requests." Roberts was part of conservative high-court majorities in earlier cases that made it harder for racial minorities to use the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in ideologically divided rulings in 2013 and 2021.

The other four conservative justices dissented Thursday. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the decision forces "Alabama to intentionally redraw its longstanding congressional districts so that black voters can control a number of seats roughly proportional to the black share of the State's population. Section 2 demands no such thing, and, if it did, the Constitution would not permit it." Alabama insisted it's taking a "race neutral" approach to redistricting. But at arguments in October, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson scoffed at the idea that race couldn't be part of the equation, saying constitutional amendments passed after the Civil War and the Voting Rights Act a century later were intended to do the same thing—make Black Americans "equal to white citizens." (More US Supreme Court stories.)