Earlier this month, a Supreme Court ruling in an Alabama redistricting case touched off a brief flurry of speculation that maybe the court which overturned Roe v. Wade hasn’t swung as far to the right as some thought.
On closer inspection, much of that speculation seems premature.
What the court did in the Alabama case, Allen v. Milligan, could force Georgia legislators to return to Atlanta this year for a special redistricting session, although there has been barely a peep about this. There is some chance the ruling could shift the balance of power in the U.S. House of Representatives over the middle of this decade. And it will definitely change the congressional map in Alabama.
But there’s no reason to think the impact of this case will be lasting. There is reason for Democrats to worry that it won’t.
The court ruled that Alabama violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by drawing one majority Black congressional district and six with White majorities when it could reasonably have drawn two. It did this by concentrating — “packing” Black voters in the west-central part of the state and “cracking” what might have been another majority-Black district in the east by dividing Black voters between two White-majority districts.
The court preserved what’s left of the Voting Rights Act, but it was a messy decision with lots of side opinions. No one on the court appears to have agreed entirely with anyone else. Justice Brett Kavanaugh sided in the majority with Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three liberal judges. But in his opinion he sided with Justice Clarence Thomas that “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.”
Alabama didn’t raise this issue in its arguments before the court, he wrote, and so he would not consider it “at this time.” That doesn’t sound like the Voting Rights Act has been left on firm ground, even though it survives.
What’s more, the Voting Rights Act isn’t going to be tested on a congressional map where the issues can be illustrated as plainly as the one Alabama defended in this case. It’s a map on which the contours of the old Cotton South are still clearly visible to the Black majorities in rural counties. It’s easy to see how the district lines drawn by the state legislature work to limit the opportunities of Black voters.
Compare this with the Georgia congressional map challenged by several groups. That case has been on hold since last year, essentially awaiting the outcome of the Alabama case. U.S. District Court Judge Steve C. Jones has ordered the litigants to submit new briefings in light of the Supreme Court ruling, and a decision in the Georgia case shouldn’t be long in coming.
If the Alabama map is about history written in centuries, the Georgia map is about history written in decades or less. The challengers claim that the legislature unfairly diluted Black votes when it redrew the boundaries of the 6th District in Atlanta’s northern suburbs to make it harder for incumbent Democrat Lucy McBath to win there.
This is a district that only a few years before had been solidly Republican. It changed demographically, but it was still majority White when McBath was elected in 2018. McBath elected to move on and defeated Carolyn Bordeaux in the next-door 7th District Democratic primary.
In a Congress as closely divided as this one, any shift in the odds could have a huge political impact. The court’s ruling could allow Democrats to pick up seats in Alabama and Louisiana, which has a similar imbalance in the percentage of Black voters to seats in Congress.
But the future for Democrats is in areas more like the Atlanta suburbs, with explosive growth and demographic swings which make it harder to sort out voters by race or to predict whether any certain area will be red or blue a few years from now. In places like this, the Voting Rights Act is a less certain guidepost.
Georgia already has some unfinished mapmaking to do. Elections for two Public Service Commission seats have been delayed due to the legislature’s failure to draw a new map in response to a court challenge to the current PSC election process. It remains to be seen how eager Gov. Brian Kemp or the state’s Republican legislative leadership are for any of that.
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