Thu. Mar 28th, 2024

From today’s ABC News Online:

The U.S. Supreme Court has reinstated Alabama’s new GOP-drawn congressional map over the objection of civil rights groups and decisions of two lower courts finding that it dilutes the influence of Black voters in violation of the Voting Rights Act.

The vote to temporarily stay a lower court order blocking the map was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining the court’s three liberals in dissent.

At the same time, the Supreme Court’s majority said it would take up the Alabama redistricting case on the merits later this year.MORE: Michigan’s ‘fairer’ election maps challenged for ‘diluting’ Black vote

The court’s liberals, however, weren’t buying it.

Justice Elena Kagan, in a pointed dissent, accused her colleagues of going “badly wrong” and forcing “Black Alabamians to suffer what under that law is clear vote dilution.”

“That decision does a disservice to our own appellate processes, which serve both to constrain and to legitimate the Court’s authority. It does a disservice to the District Court, which meticulously applied this Court’s longstanding voting-rights precedent,” Kagan wrote. “And most of all, it does a disservice to Black Alabamians who under that precedent have had their electoral power diminished—in violation of a law this Court once knew to buttress all of American democracy.”

Read the complete story here.

By Editor