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      US supreme court hears case that could gut voting rights for minority groups

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      US supreme court hears case that could gut voting rights for minority groupsIn Merrill v Milligan, the court will decide whether Alabama’s new congressional map violates the Voting Rights Act The supreme court’s conservative majority appeared unsettled on Tuesday on whether it would gut one of the most powerful remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act in a case that has profound implications for the representation of Black Americans and other minority groups.The case, Merrill v Milligan, centers on how much those who draw electoral districts should be required to consider race. It involves a dispute over the seven congressional districts Alabama drew last year. Only one of those districts has a majority-Black population, even though Black people make up a quarter of Alabama’s population. Earlier this year, a three-judge panel unanimously ruled that the configuration was illegal under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which guarantees minority groups equal opportunity to participate in the electoral process. It ordered Alabama to draw a second district with a minority population. The supreme court stepped in earlier this year and halted that order while the case proceeded.A court caught Republicans discriminating against Black voters – here’s howRead moreThe state’s solicitor general, Edmund LaCour, argued on Tuesday that the lower court’s ruling was incorrect because it required Alabama to consider race above traditional, race-neutral criteria. In order to require Alabama draw a second majority-minority district, he said, the plaintiffs should have first had to prove that such a map could exist without taking race into account at all. He argued that computer simulations programmed with race-neutral criteria never produced a map with a second majority-Black district.Justice Samuel Alito, one of the court’s most conservative jurists, seized on that point repeatedly in support of Alabama’s argument. “How can it be reasonably configured if you can’t get that map with a computer simulation that takes into account all of the traditional race-neutral factors?” he said.But even Alito acknowledged that some of the arguments Alabama made were “far-reaching”. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, another conservative justice, said at one point she would be “struggling in the same way others have about narrowing down exactly what your argument is”.Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson all seemed deeply skeptical about all of Alabama’s arguments. Embracing the state’s approach would upend how the court has long approached section 2 redistricting cases. Kagan said the case was a “slam dunk” case under the court’s existing precedent before laying out how she believed the lower court had correctly evaluated the facts. “It seems to me you’re coming here … and saying change the way we look at section 2 and its application,” she said.The supreme court has long allowed for the use of race and required those who challenge maps to meet a difficult three-part test to challenge the map. The first part of that test requires plaintiffs to show that the minority population is sufficiently large and compact enough to comprise a majority in a reasonably configured single-member district.Democracy, poisoned: America’s elections are being attacked at every levelRead moreAlabama’s congressional map easily meets the conditions needed to bring a section 2 challenge, experts have said. There is clear evidence Black and white voters prefer different candidates and mapmakers were easily able to draw a second majority-Black congressional district that comported with the traditional criteria Alabama uses.“There is nothing race-neutral about Alabama’s map,” Deuel Ross, a lawyer who represented some of the plaintiffs, told the justices. “Section 2 is not an intent test or about putting on racial blinders.”Requiring plaintiffs to draw that map without considering race at all would have profound consequences for Black representation across the US. It would make it much harder for plaintiffs to bring challenges to maps, essentially requiring them to show that discrimination is occurring without looking at race.“Alabama isn’t asking the court to apply section 2 as it’s been applied for the last 40 years,” said Elizabeth Prelogar, the United States solicitor general, which backed the plaintiffs in the case. “Instead, Alabama is asking the court to radically change the law by inserting this concept of race neutrality and effectively limiting section 2 to intentional discrimination.”A ruling in favor of Alabama could also produce a “broad upheaval” in the law and clear a pathway for Alabama and other states to get rid of existing majority-minority districts. “Make no mistake, every majority-minority district would become a litigation target,” said Abha Khanna, a lawyer for one of the groups of plaintiffs.The case marks the latest occasion in which the court has considered the Voting Rights Act, a crowning achievement of the civil rights era. In 2013, the court gutted a provision in the law that required states and other jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to get federal approval before enacting changes. In 2020, the justices made it harder to use section 2 to bring challenges to voting laws outside of redistricting.Kagan acknowledged that history of chipping away at the law on Tuesday. After calling the Voting Rights Act “one of the great achievements of American democracy”, she said: “In recent years, this statute has fared not well in this court.”“You’re asking us, essentially, to cut back substantially on our 40 years of precedent and to make this too extremely difficult to prevail on. So what’s left?” she said in a comment that appeared to be directed more at her colleagues on the bench than any of the lawyers.US supreme court to decide cases with ‘monumental’ impact on democracyRead moreSome of the most pointed and extensive questioning on Tuesday came from Jackson, the newest member of the court, who was participating in just her second day of oral arguments. She directly challenged LaCour’s argument that the prohibition against racial discrimination in the constitution’s 14th amendment does not allow mapmakers to consider race in redistricting.But Jackson questioned how that could be the case when history shows that the 14th amendment was adopted as part of a race-conscious effort to guarantee equal rights for Black Americans in the 19th century. “I don’t think that the historical record establishes that the founders believed race neutrality or race blindness was required,” she said, in what seemed to be an appeal to conservative originalists on the court. “It was drafted to give a foundational, a constitutional foundation for a piece of legislation that was designed to make people who had less opportunity and less rights equal to white citizens.“I’m trying to understand why that violates the 14th amendment given the history and background of the 14th amendment.”TopicsAlabamaThe fight for democracyUS politicsUS supreme courtLaw (US)US voting rightsnewsReuse this content More

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      He challenged his all-white city council in Alabama. Now he’s on it

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      He challenged his all-white city council in Alabama. Now he’s on itEric Calhoun, a Black resident who sued Pleasant Grove’s discriminatory voting system in 2018, was sworn in as council member on Monday A few years ago, Eric Calhoun felt out of touch with his city council in Pleasant Grove, a small Alabama city of just under 10,000 people outside of Birmingham.Calhoun, who is 71 and has lived in the city for nearly three decades, couldn’t find contact information for any of the five council members online. During the 2016 election, none of the white candidates running asked him for his vote. Voters in the city had never elected a Black person to the city council. Calhoun, like 61% of the city, is Black.In 2018, Calhoun became a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit that argued the racial makeup of the city council in Pleasant Grove was not an accident. The way the city was choosing its city council candidates made nearly impossible for a Black candidate to get elected. Essentially, the city allowed city council candidates to run citywide, instead of in districts, allowing blocs of white voters in the city to come together and defeat candidates preferred by Black voters.The city eventually agreed to settle the lawsuit and change the way it held city council elections.The results were immediate – in the first election under the new system last fall, the city elected three Black candidates to the five-member council. And on Monday, Calhoun became part of that majority. He was sworn in to fill a vacancy on the council after one of the council members resigned.“Color is not the issue,” Calhoun said in an interview. “The issue is representation and to make sure that we have a diverse city.”Calhoun’s appointment cements a Black majority on the council, said Yolanda Lawson, another councilmember who was elected last year. The city’s white mayor has the option of voting with the council and had regularly been doing so, resulting in a 3-3 split. Calhoun is replacing a white council member.“Not knowing what it was like prior to us being on the council, but I do notice more constiuents will begin with ‘I just never said anything because I didn’t think it would make a difference,’” Lawson said. “I personally feel that it is helping us to accomplish one of the things that I said myself I wanted to see, which is someone to represent me as a citizen. Not necessarily because I’m Black, but because it’s someone that’s willing to listen to my issues and my concerns.”In his new role on the council, Calhoun wants to promote neighborhood associations, local businesses and local parks. And he wants to make sure that anyone who calls him up with a concern feels heard.Pleasant Grove has long not been welcoming to Black citizens – in 1985 a court observed it had “an astonishing hostility to the presence and the rights of black Americans”. But in recent years, the Black population has surged.After decades of being locked out from political power, the majority-Black city council showed the importance of having Black representation at the local level, said Deuel Ross, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which helped represent Calhoun in the suit.“The city council has a lot of power over the police force. Over distribution of municipal resources. All things that the Black community has felt like it was being ignored in the past. So it’s wonderful to see the Black community has not only representation but the majority of the board at this point,” he said.This fall, the US supreme court will hear a hugely consequential redistricting case involving Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act – the part of the law that Calhoun sued Pleasant Grove under. The provision prohibits racial discrimination in voting practices, but the 6-3 conservative majority on the court has signaled deep skepticism of the provision and appears poised to narrow it.Such a ruling could make it harder to bring future cases that challenge election systems, like the one that existed in Pleasant Grove, that prevent minority voters from exercising their full political power.“[What] Alabama is arguing in the supreme court, is that any consideration of race in redistricting raises constitutional concerns. And I think that is an extreme position that the supreme court has never taken,” said Ross, who is also involved in that case. “If it did take that position, it would make it difficult not just in Pleasant Grove not just to have Black representation, but in Congress and county commissions and state legislatures all over the country.”TopicsUS voting rightsFight to voteUS politicsAlabamanewsReuse this content More

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      Female journalist told skirt too short when reporting on Alabama execution

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      Female journalist told skirt too short when reporting on Alabama executionOne journalist reporting on the lethal injection was told her skirt was too short and another said she had a full-body inspection Last Thursday night, the state of Alabama took three hours to find a vein in Joe Nathan James Jr through which officials could pump lethal injection drugs and execute him, a process that the department of corrections insisted was “nothing out of the ordinary”.Alabama appears to specialize in its extraordinary sense of the ordinary, particularly when it comes to the death penalty. It has now emerged that, during that execution, prison officials subjected female reporters who came as witnesses to the proceeding to a clothing inspection, attempting to bar one woman from the death chamber on grounds that her skirt was too short.Ivana Hrynkiw, a journalist for Alabama’s pre-eminent news outlet AL.com, recounted how she was pulled aside by a prison official and told that her skirt was too diminutive to meet regulations. “I tried to pull my skirt to my hips to make the skirt longer, but was told it was still not appropriate,” she recounted on Twitter.The paradox that the state went to such lengths to uphold what it regards as propriety in clothing even as it prepared to kill a man appears to have been lost on the department of corrections. Officials also subjected an Associated Press reporter, Kim Chandler, to a full-body inspection, making her stand to have the length of her clothing checked. Chandler said that such an indignity had never happened to her before in the many times she had covered executions since 2002.Hrynkiw was eventually allowed to enter the death chamber after she borrowed a pair of waterproof fisher’s waders from a photographer, attaching their suspenders under her shirt to keep them up. That was deemed appropriate attire when watching a judicial killing.But even then it didn’t stop. The reporter was informed that her open toe heels were a breach of regulation and she was forced to change into tennis shoes retrieved from her car.“I felt embarrassed to have my body and my clothes questioned in front of a room of people I mostly never met,” Hrynkiw said. “I sat down, tried to stop blushing, and did my work.”After all that, the reporter did her job, and so did Alabama. After three hours digging around for a vein, it found one, and went ahead with the execution.James Jr was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in the 1994 killing of 26-year-old Faith Hall. James Jr and Hall had briefly dated before she rejected him, authorities have said.Hall’s daughters wanted James Jr to spend the rest of his life in prison but pleaded for him to not be executed.TopicsUS newsAlabamaUS politicsWomenWomen in journalismnewsReuse this content More

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      Abandoned by Trump, Mo Brooks Is Now Open to Testifying About Jan. 6

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      Stinging from his resounding defeat in Alabama’s Republican runoff for the Senate on Tuesday and a snub from former President Donald J. Trump, Representative Mo Brooks now appears to be willing to testify as part of the Jan. 6 investigation.Mr. Brooks signaled on Wednesday that he would comply with an impending subpoena from the bipartisan House committee that is leading the inquiry into the attack on the Capitol — but only under certain conditions.His comments to the media, reported by CNN on Wednesday, came one day after he lost a bitter primary runoff to Katie Britt. Mr. Trump withdrew his endorsement of Mr. Brooks in March when he began slipping in the polls, and gave his support to Ms. Britt in the final weeks of the campaign.Mr. Brooks bemoaned his loss, telling a Politico reporter that the “bad guys won.”He hinged his willingness to testify before the House committee on being able to do so “in public so the public can see it — so they don’t get bits and pieces dribbled out,” Mr. Brooks said, according to CNN.The congressman added that he would only testify about matters related to Jan. 6, 2021, and that he wanted to see copies of documents that he might be asked about beforehand, the network reported.Mr. Brooks was not available for an interview on Thursday, and his office declined to elaborate on his comments.Mr. Brooks, a hard-right Republican and a once-fierce ally of Mr. Trump’s whom the former president has accused of becoming “woke,” has drawn intense scrutiny for his actions preceding the violence on Jan. 6.Outfitted in body armor at a rally before the siege, Mr. Brooks exhorted Mr. Trump’s election-denying supporters to start “kicking ass.”Investigators have also sought to question Mr. Brooks about his interactions with Mr. Trump in the aftermath of the attack. They zeroed in on Mr. Brooks’s comments in March, when he said that Mr. Trump had, since leaving office, repeatedly asked him to illegally “rescind” the 2020 election, remove President Biden and force a new special election.But as of Wednesday, Representative Bennie G. Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the head of the Jan. 6 committee, acknowledged that Mr. Brooks still had not been served with a subpoena. Mr. Thompson said that process servers in Washington had been unable to track down Mr. Brooks because he had been campaigning in Alabama.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 6Making a case against Trump. More

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      How Katie Britt Used Political Savvy to Trounce Mo Brooks in Alabama

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      At a gathering of Alabama Republicans last year, Katie Britt and her husband strategically positioned themselves at the end of a receiving line to shake hands with former President Donald J. Trump.Ms. Britt, a lawyer and former chief of staff for Senator Richard Shelby, had recently announced her campaign to fill the seat being vacated by her former boss, who is retiring. Mr. Trump had already endorsed her opponent, Representative Mo Brooks — but the couple hoped to sow some doubt in Mr. Trump’s mind, according to four people familiar with the encounter.As the couple greeted Mr. Trump, Ms. Britt’s husband, Wesley Britt — a burly retired N.F.L. lineman — mentioned to the former president that he had once played for the New England Patriots. “The only time you’ve met me, I think I was wrapped in a towel in the Patriots locker room,” Mr. Britt was said to have told Mr. Trump, who found it hilarious and replied that Robert K. Kraft, the team’s billionaire owner, “likes me very much.”From then on, Ms. Britt positioned herself as a formidable competitor with savvy political skills who persistently tried to convince Mr. Trump that she deserved his endorsement instead.In March, Mr. Trump gave Ms. Britt half of what she wanted, withdrawing his endorsement of Mr. Brooks — at that point far behind in the polls — because, he said, the far-right congressman had gone “woke.” Then, this month, with Ms. Britt clearly on track to prevail, the former president backed her, seemingly in an attempt to pad his endorsement record.Ten months after her brief exchange with Mr. Trump last August, Ms. Britt claimed victory in the Republican primary runoff for Alabama’s open Senate seat on Tuesday, capping a hard-fought campaign for her party’s nomination against Mr. Brooks. In a state with a deep-seated conservative bent, she is all but assured of winning in the general election in November.Ms. Britt is also one step closer to making history as the first woman in Alabama to be elected to the Senate. Her Democratic opponent is a pastor, Will Boyd, who has made unsuccessful runs for Senate, House and lieutenant governor.Shortly after the polls closed Tuesday, Mr. Shelby, who has known Ms. Britt since the days when she was an intern in his office, said he was overjoyed for her.“She is an outstanding person — she has got the brains, the drive and the compassion,” he said.Ms. Britt, 40, is seen as part of a younger generation of pro-Trump Republicans, and her husband’s banter with Mr. Trump was viewed by those familiar with the encounter as an astute move that proved essential to her nomination.Ms. Britt entered the primary with little name recognition and long odds against Mr. Brooks, who boasted more than a decade of experience in the House and gained Mr. Trump’s backing after he riled up the crowd at the former president’s rally before the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.But Mr. Trump rescinded his support for Mr. Brooks in March as Mr. Brooks struggled to gain traction under an avalanche of attack ads and criticism of his decision to urge an audience at a Trump rally to leave the 2020 election behind. “Katie Britt, on the other hand, is a fearless America First Warrior,” Mr. Trump said in a statement this month as he endorsed Ms. Britt.That move did not completely wipe out Mr. Brooks, who still managed to clinch a second-place finish in Alabama’s May 24 primary, garnering 29 percent of the vote. Ms. Britt pulled in 45 percent, short of the majority that would have avoided a runoff between the two top vote-getters.Ms. Britt fashioned herself as an “Alabama First” candidate, playing off Mr. Trump’s “America First” presidential campaign slogan, and centered her run on her Christian faith, hard-line border enforcement policies and ties to the business community.As an aide for Mr. Shelby, one of the Senate’s most senior members, she worked on some of his signature issues, including a sweeping Republican package of tax cuts in 2017, confirmation of conservative judges and a push for a border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.She most recently served as the head of the Business Council of Alabama, a powerful lobbying group, and led a “Keep Alabama Open” campaign in November 2020 against coronavirus pandemic restrictions that required nonessential businesses to close or limit services. She also opened the council’s resources, typically reserved to paying members, to all small businesses amid the health crisis.On policy, Ms. Britt and Mr. Brooks had ideological differences: He represented a more aggressive brand of arch conservatism as a founding member of the Freedom Caucus while Ms. Britt, like Mr. Shelby, was seen as more focused on economic development. But in oratorical style, she echoed the hard-right talking points that have become commonplace messaging in the Republican Party.“When I look at what’s happening in Washington, I don’t recognize our country,” Ms. Britt said in a video introducing herself to voters. “The leftists are attacking our religious freedoms and advancing a socialist agenda. In Joe Biden’s America, people can collect more money staying at home than they can earn on the job.”The campaigns and supporters of Ms. Britt, Mr. Brooks and a third top competitor in the race, Mike Durant, a former Army pilot, spent millions of dollars on negative ads.Mr. Brooks and his supporters tried to paint Ms. Britt as a lobbyist and a RINO — a favored insult used by Trump supporters for politicians they believe are Republicans in name only.She shot back with attacks portraying Mr. Brooks as a career politician. It also helped that Mr. Brooks had a poor showing at Mr. Trump’s Alabama rally last August, just after Ms. Britt began her quiet campaign to sway the former president to her cause. What started as an enthusiastic response for Mr. Brooks that night turned to boos when he urged those in the audience to put the 2020 presidential election behind them and focus on 2022 and 2024.Mr. Trump called him back onstage for a second appearance, calling him “a fearless warrior for your sacred right to vote.”Later, when the former president took back his endorsement of Mr. Brooks, he said the congressman had made a “horrible mistake” with his comments at that fateful rally. More