New York Times

Justices Enter Into Dispute Over Districts Alabama Set

By ADAM LIPTAK JUNE 2, 2014

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to consider challenges
from Democratic lawmakers who say the Alabama Legislature packed minority
voters into a few districts, diluting their voting power.

In another case from Alabama last year, the Supreme Court effectively struck
down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which has required permission from the
federal authorities before states may change their voting procedures. In a
supporting brief, Alabama had urged the court to rule that way.

In the new case, the state argues that Section 5 partly justified the legislative
maps, which were drawn using data from the 2010 census at a time when Section
5 still stood.

The maps were challenged by the Alabama Legislative Black Caucus, the
Alabama Democratic Conference and other plaintiffs. They said Republican state
legislators had engaged in “racial gerrymandering” by paying too much attention
to making districts almost identical in population and by making sure that
substantial black majorities in existing districts were not even slightly diminished.

A divided three-judge Federal District Court panel last year ruled that the
redistricting plan was lawful. Judge William H. Pryor Jr., writing for the
majority, said the plan did not deny black voters the right to participate in the
political process.

He noted that black voters in Alabama were politically active and had been
successful in electing their favored candidates in districts where they made up a
majority. “Majority-black districts,” he added, “are roughly proportional to the
black voting-age population in Alabama.”

In dissent, Judge Myron H. Thompson said “there is a cruel irony to these
cases” in light of the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in the Shelby County case.

“Even as it was asking the Supreme Court to strike down” Section 5 “for
failure to speak to current conditions,” Judge Thompson wrote, “the State of
Alabama was relying on racial quotas with absolutely no evidence that they had
anything to do with current conditions, and seeking to justify those quotas with
the very provision it was helping to render inert.”

The Supreme Court agreed to decide two cases challenging the plan,
Alabama Legislative Black Caucus v. Alabama, No. 13-895, and Alabama
Democratic Conference v. Alabama, No. 13-1138. They will be heard together in a
consolidated argument in the Supreme Court term that starts in October.

In urging the justices to hear the case, the black legislative caucus argued
that “packing of the majority black districts necessarily increases the political
segregation of African-Americans and reduces their ability to influence the
outcome of legislative elections in the rest of the state.”

In its brief, the Democratic conference said the plan reflected “an
unconstitutional racial gerrymander, in the sense that those who drew the map
did so based on race to an unconstitutional and unjustified degree.”
Luther Strange, Alabama’s attorney general, responded that the plan took
account of all of the relevant legal requirements that existed at the time it was
completed.

A version of this article appears in print on June 3, 2014, on page A12 of the New York edition with the
headline: Justices Enter Into Dispute Over Districts Alabama Set.