Supreme Court's Alabama redistricting decision could encourage more chaos, experts warn

The U.S. Supreme Court Kent Nishimura/Getty Images hide caption

The Supreme Court was in the news Wednesday after delivering a second blow to the Voting Rights Act in just over a month.

The latest ruling , issued late Tuesday, cleared the way for Alabama to use a congressional redistricting map that favors Republicans by eliminating one of the two existing districts where voters had elected a Black Democrat to Congress.

In late April, the Supreme Court's conservative supermajority all but gutted what remained of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. The ruling set off a mad scramble, particularly in some Southern states, to undo previous redistricting maps in an effort to gain greater partisan advantage and in the process to eliminate districts where Black voters had a fair chance of electing their candidate of choice.

Leading the pack was Alabama, a state with its own distinct history of racial discrimination. Indeed, just three years ago the Supreme Court required the state to create a second district where African American voters could prevail. On Tuesday night, however, the court effectively reversed its three-year-old ruling. In doing so, it also chastised the three-judge federal court in charge of the case for failing to follow the high court's orders.

That three-judge panel—including two Trump appointees—ruled unanimously that in light of the evidence it had extensively reviewed just weeks ago , the map that Alabama was pushing was illegal on different grounds. Specifically, the lower court said that whatever the rules were for the Voting Rights Act, the Alabama legislature's map was "tainted by intentional race-based discrimination" and thus violated the Constitutional guarantee to equal protection of the law.

The Supreme Court's repudiation of the lower court decision last night was only the latest case in which it has played a role in changing the congressional maps for Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, and California. The decisions in those cases mostly benefitted the Republican party.

The four-page unsigned opinion Tuesday seemed to many election law experts to encourage more, not less chaos, as did the court's handling of its late April decision.