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      Alabama Republicans refuse to create second majority-Black district

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      Alabama Republicans on Monday defended their decision not to create a second majority-Black district in a hearing before a panel of federal judges over the state’s redrawn congressional maps.State Republicans continue to resist court orders, including from the supreme court in June, to amend the congressional maps to give Black voters increased political power and representation.Lawyers for voters called Alabama’s plan, which maintains one majority-Black district, discriminatory. Abha Khanna, an attorney representing one group of plaintiffs in the case, said Alabama chose “defiance over compliance”.“Alabama has chosen instead to thumb its nose at this court and to thumb its nose at the nation’s highest court and to thumb its nose at its own Black citizens,” Khanna said.The three-judge panel, which blocked the use of the state’s old map last year, will decide whether to let Alabama’s new districts go forward or step in and draw new congressional districts for the state. The results of the extended court battle could also determine whether Democrats pick up another seat in Congress, where Republicans currently hold a slim majority.In a surprise June decision, the supreme court upheld the panel’s earlier finding that the state’s then map – which had one Black-majority district out of seven in a state where more than one in four residents is Black – likely violated the federal Voting Rights Act.In response to the ruling, Alabama Republicans boosted the percentage of Black voters in the majority-white second congressional district, now represented by Republican representative Barry Moore, from about 30% to 39.9%, failing to give Black voters a majority which would allow them to elect their candidate of choice.A lawyer for the state accused plaintiffs of seeking a “racial gerrymander” over traditional guidelines for drawing districts, such as keeping districts compact and keeping communities of interest together.“It’s unlawful to enforce proportionality over traditional redistricting principles,” Edmund LaCour, Alabama’s solicitor general, told the three-judge panel.Alabama claims the new plan complies with the Voting Rights Act. State leaders are hoping the panel will accept their proposal or that the state will prevail in a second round of appeals to the supreme court.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe judges did not indicate how quickly they will rule.The high-stakes hearing drew a large number of spectators to the federal courthouse in Birmingham where an overflow room was opened to accommodate the large crowd. Plaintiffs in the supreme court case attended with many wearing T-shirts printed with their proposed map which would have two majority-Black districts.“Alabama’s latest congressional map is a continuation of the state’s sordid history of defying court orders intended to protect the rights of Black voters,” former US attorney general Eric Holder, chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said in a statement. More

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      in Elections

      Federal jury reconvenes to consider charging Trump over January 6 insurrection – live

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      From 2h agoDonald Trump’s multiplying legal troubles are taking a toll on his campaign finances as he spends more and more on lawyers, the New York Times reports.Trump’s Pac, Save America, has less than $4m in its account, down from the $105m it began last year with, the Times reports, citing federal records. So bad have its finances become that it has requested back $60m that it sent to a pro-Trump Super Pac, Make America Great Again Inc, which was supposed to spend the money on television ads.Since the start of the year, Trump has been indicted by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg on state charges of falsifying business records, and by special counsel Jack Smith for breaking federal law by allegedly keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort, and by conspiring to keep them out of the hands of government archivists.Trump has been told Smith may bring new charges against him related to his involvement in the January 6 insurrection, while, in Georgia, Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis said she will announce indictments in her investigation of Trump and his allies’ attempt to overturn the 2020 election sometime before September. The stage is set for Trump to continue paying huge legal fees for months, but he has one good thing going for him: his massive lead among Republican presidential candidates, which potentially could alleviate some of the damage done if he has to pullback on campaign spending.Here’s more on his dire finances, from the Times:
      The super PAC, which is called Make America Great Again Inc., has already sent back $12.25 million to the group paying Mr. Trump’s legal bills, according to federal records — a sum nearly as large as the $13.1 million the super PAC raised from donors in the first half of 2023. Those donations included $1 million from the father of his son-in-law, Charles Kushner, whom Mr. Trump pardoned for federal crimes in his final days as president, and $100,000 from a candidate seeking Mr. Trump’s endorsement.
      The extraordinary shift of money from the super PAC to Mr. Trump’s political committee, described in federal campaign filings as a refund, is believed to be larger than any other refund on record in the history of federal campaigns.
      It comes as Mr. Trump’s political and legal fate appear increasingly intertwined. The return of money from the super PAC, which Mr. Trump does not control, to his political action committee, which he does, demonstrates how his operation is balancing dueling priorities: paying lawyers and supporting his political candidacy through television ads.
      Save America, Mr. Trump’s political action committee, is prohibited by law from directly spending money on his candidacy. When Save America donated $60 million last year to Mr. Trump’s super PAC — which is permitted to spend on his campaign — it effectively evaded that prohibition.
      It is not clear from the filing exactly when the refund was requested, but the super PAC did not return the money all at once. It gave back $1 million on May 1; $5 million more on May 9; another $5 million on June 1; and $1.25 million on June 30. These returns followed Mr. Trump’s two indictments this year: one in Manhattan in March, and one last month in federal court.
      The White House is currently a much quieter place than usual, since Joe Biden is on vacation in Delaware. But someone is manning its Twitter account, and has opted this morning to troll Republican senator Tommy Tuberville.You may remember him for his ongoing blockade of military promotions over the Pentagon’s moves to assist service members in obtaining abortions. Yesterday, he insisted his campaign was not hurting military readiness:To which the White House has responded:The 2024 election will also decide control of the Senate, where Republicans are currently viewed as having a good shot at retaking the majority.Joe Biden’s allies can afford to lose only one seat in the chamber, but three Democrats representing red states will be up for re-election: Joe Manchin of West Virginia (who has not said if he will run again), Jon Tester of Montana and Sherrod Brown of Ohio (both of whom say they will run again). All face tough roads to keeping their seats.Then there’s the possibility that the GOP could oust a Democrat representing a swing state, such as Wisconsin. Democratic senator Tammy Baldwin is up for re-election there, but in something of a setback for Republicans, Tom Tiffany announced today that he has decided to run for re-election in the House of Representatives rather than challenge Baldwin, as some in the GOP hoped he would do:Joe Biden and Donald Trump are tied in a New York Times/Siena College poll released today, while the president has consolidated his support among Democrats.A caveat before we get into the numbers: the November 2024 election is more than a year away, and will likely be decided by a handful of swing states, particularly Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona. So for all the headlines this poll might generate, keep in mind that things can change dramatically between then and now.Back to the Times/Siena data, it finds Biden and Trump tied with 43% support if the presidential election were held today. But it also indicates many Democrats have gotten over their hesitancy towards Biden. Last year, two-thirds wanted a different candidate, but now, that number has dropped to about half.Here’s more on the numbers, from the Times:
      Still, warning signs abound for the president: Despite his improved standing and a friendlier national environment, Mr. Biden remains broadly unpopular among a voting public that is pessimistic about the country’s future, and his approval rating is a mere 39 percent.
      Perhaps most worryingly for Democrats, the poll found Mr. Biden in a neck-and-neck race with former President Donald J. Trump, who held a commanding lead among likely Republican primary voters even as he faces two criminal indictments and more potential charges on the horizon. Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump were tied at 43 percent apiece in a hypothetical rematch in 2024, according to the poll.
      Mr. Biden has been buoyed by voters’ feelings of fear and distaste toward Mr. Trump. Well over a year before the election, 16 percent of those polled had unfavorable views of both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, a segment with which Mr. Biden had a narrow lead.
      “Donald Trump is not a Republican, he’s a criminal,” said John Wittman, 42, a heating and air conditioning contractor from Phoenix. A Republican, he said that even though he believed Mr. Biden’s economic stewardship had hurt the country, “I will vote for anyone on the planet that seems halfway capable of doing the job, including Joe Biden, over Donald Trump.”
      To borrow an old political cliché, the poll shows that Mr. Biden’s support among Democrats is a mile wide and an inch deep. About 30 percent of voters who said they planned to vote for Mr. Biden in November 2024 said they hoped Democrats would nominate someone else. Just 20 percent of Democrats said they would be enthusiastic if Mr. Biden were the party’s 2024 presidential nominee; another 51 percent said they would be satisfied but not enthusiastic.
      A higher share of Democrats, 26 percent, expressed enthusiasm for the notion of Vice President Kamala Harris as the nominee in 2024.
      Joe Biden is taking a summer vacation after several months in which things seemed to increasingly come together for the American president. Over the weekend, the Guardian’s David Smith looked at this administration’s recent hot streak – as well as the challenges he faces in the year to come:It was the word that the far right of the Republican party most wanted to hear. Kevin McCarthy, speaker of the House of Representatives, said this week his colleagues’ investigations of Joe Biden are rising to the level of an “impeachment” inquiry.Republicans in Congress admit that they do not yet have any direct evidence of wrongdoing by the US president. But, critics say, there is a simple explanation why they would float the ultimate sanction: they need to put Biden’s character on trial because their case against his policies is falling apart.Heading into next year’s presidential election, Republicans have been readying a three-pronged attack: crime soaring in cities, chaos raging at the southern border and prices spiralling out of control everywhere. But each of these narratives is being disrupted by facts on the ground: crime is falling in most parts of the country, there is relative calm at the border and inflation is at a two-year low.Donald Trump’s legal problems may be formidable, but as the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports, so, too, is his popularity among Republicans:Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton county, Georgia, is “ready to go” with indictments in her investigation of Donald Trump’s election subversion. In Washington, the special counsel Jack Smith is expected to add charges regarding election subversion to 40 counts already filed over the former president’s retention of classified records.Trump already faces 34 criminal charges in New York over hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels. Referring to Trump being ordered to pay $5m after being found liable for sexual abuse and defamation against the writer E Jean Carroll, a judge recently said Carroll proved Trump raped her. Lawsuits over Trump’s business affairs continue.Yet a month out from the first debate of the Republican presidential primary, Trump’s domination of the field increases with each poll.Donald Trump’s multiplying legal troubles are taking a toll on his campaign finances as he spends more and more on lawyers, the New York Times reports.Trump’s Pac, Save America, has less than $4m in its account, down from the $105m it began last year with, the Times reports, citing federal records. So bad have its finances become that it has requested back $60m that it sent to a pro-Trump Super Pac, Make America Great Again Inc, which was supposed to spend the money on television ads.Since the start of the year, Trump has been indicted by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg on state charges of falsifying business records, and by special counsel Jack Smith for breaking federal law by allegedly keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort, and by conspiring to keep them out of the hands of government archivists.Trump has been told Smith may bring new charges against him related to his involvement in the January 6 insurrection, while, in Georgia, Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis said she will announce indictments in her investigation of Trump and his allies’ attempt to overturn the 2020 election sometime before September. The stage is set for Trump to continue paying huge legal fees for months, but he has one good thing going for him: his massive lead among Republican presidential candidates, which potentially could alleviate some of the damage done if he has to pullback on campaign spending.Here’s more on his dire finances, from the Times:
      The super PAC, which is called Make America Great Again Inc., has already sent back $12.25 million to the group paying Mr. Trump’s legal bills, according to federal records — a sum nearly as large as the $13.1 million the super PAC raised from donors in the first half of 2023. Those donations included $1 million from the father of his son-in-law, Charles Kushner, whom Mr. Trump pardoned for federal crimes in his final days as president, and $100,000 from a candidate seeking Mr. Trump’s endorsement.
      The extraordinary shift of money from the super PAC to Mr. Trump’s political committee, described in federal campaign filings as a refund, is believed to be larger than any other refund on record in the history of federal campaigns.
      It comes as Mr. Trump’s political and legal fate appear increasingly intertwined. The return of money from the super PAC, which Mr. Trump does not control, to his political action committee, which he does, demonstrates how his operation is balancing dueling priorities: paying lawyers and supporting his political candidacy through television ads.
      Save America, Mr. Trump’s political action committee, is prohibited by law from directly spending money on his candidacy. When Save America donated $60 million last year to Mr. Trump’s super PAC — which is permitted to spend on his campaign — it effectively evaded that prohibition.
      It is not clear from the filing exactly when the refund was requested, but the super PAC did not return the money all at once. It gave back $1 million on May 1; $5 million more on May 9; another $5 million on June 1; and $1.25 million on June 30. These returns followed Mr. Trump’s two indictments this year: one in Manhattan in March, and one last month in federal court.
      Good morning, US politics blog readers. The wait continues to find out whether special counsel Jack Smith will indict Donald Trump over his involvement in the January 6 insurrection, and there are signs this morning a decision could come soon. CNN spotted grand jurors arriving at a federal courthouse in Washington DC where they’re considering evidence in the case, but there’s no telling when a decision could come.Signs that Trump could be charged have been mounting. Last week, the former president said he had received a target letter from Smith, a step typically taken before someone is indicted. And yesterday, Trump said he expected charges to be filed “any day now”. But the winding legal saga has yet to dent his standing in the GOP, or even in the presidential race at large. New polling from the New York Times shows him crushing every other Republican candidate in the presidential nomination race, and tied with Joe Biden in the general election.Here’s what else is happening today:
      Kamala Harris is heading to Orlando to address the 20th Women’s Missionary Society of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Quadrennial Convention at 2.15pm eastern time. We’ll keep an eye open if she reiterates her criticism of Florida’s new Ron DeSantis-backed school curriculum, which implies that slavery wasn’t so bad.
      Biden, meanwhile, continues his beach vacation in Delaware. He has no public events scheduled.
      Alabama lawmakers are raging over Biden’s decision to cancel US Space Command’s planned move to the state, Punchbowl News reports. The decision came amid Republican senator Tommy Tuberville’s ongoing blockade of military promotions in protest of the Pentagon’s abortion policy. More

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      in US Politics

      States’ rights make a comeback as Republicans rush to defy Washington

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      The message was blunt: “Texas will see you in court, Mr President.”The words of defiance came from Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, making clear that he would not comply with a justice department request to remove floating barriers in the Rio Grande. And Abbott is not the only Republican governor in open revolt against Washington.In May Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a bill allowing the death penalty in child rape convictions despite the supreme court banning capital punishment in such cases. Earlier this month, Kay Ivey of Alabama signed into law a redistricting map that ignored a supreme court ruling ordering the state to draw two Black-majority congressional districts.The disobedience is sure to score points with the Republican base. It reflects a trend that has seen state parties embrace extreme positions in the era of Donald Trump and Maga (Make America great again). And while there has always been tension between states and the federal government, it now comes with the accelerant of political partisanship and blue (Democratic) v red (Republican) state polarisation.“This is an onslaught against the federal government’s reach, power, effectiveness,” said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “We’re seeing it across the board in immigration, healthcare, education – it is defiance. If you think about America breaking into red and blue states, this is like the culmination. It’s literally the red states separating from the federal government and the rule of national law.”With Democrat Joe Biden in the White House, Republican governors are seeking to assert their independence, with red states such as Florida and Texas styling themselves as bulwarks of resistance even if that means rattling America’s increasingly fragile democracy.In Texas, Abbott has been testing the legal limits of states’ ability to act on immigration for more than two years, erecting razor-wire fencing, arresting migrants on trespassing charges and sending busloads of asylum seekers to Democratic-led cities in other states. The governor recently introduced a roughly 1,000ft line of bright orange, wrecking ball-sized buoys on the Rio Grande to stop migrants from entering the US.This week the justice department sued Abbott over the floating barrier, claiming that Texas unlawfully installed it without permission between the border cities of Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras, Mexico. The White House has also raised humanitarian and environmental concerns. Abbott sent Biden a letter that defended Texas’s right to install the barrier and tweeted: “Texas has the sovereign authority to defend our border, under the US Constitution and the Texas Constitution.”The lawsuit is not the first time the Biden administration has sued Texas over its actions on the border. In 2021 the attorney general, Merrick Garland, accused the state of usurping and even interfering with the federal government’s responsibility to enforce immigration laws after Abbott empowered state troopers to stop vehicles carrying migrants on the basis that they could increase the spread of Covid-19.But it is not just a Democratic president feeling the backlash. Even the supreme court, now heavily tilted to the right by Trump’s appointment, is facing defiance from states over rulings that they do not like.The court made a surprise decision that upheld a lower court ruling that a map in Alabama – with one Black-majority district out of seven in a state that is 27% Black – probably violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting the voting power of Black residents. But six weeks later the Alabama state legislature approved a new map that failed to create a second majority-Black congressional district.A group of voters who won the supreme court decision say that they will challenge the new plan. A three-judge panel has set a 14 August hearing and could eventually order a special master to draw new lines for the state. The outcome is likely to have consequences across the country as the case again weighs the requirements of the Voting Rights Act in redistricting.Chris England, a state representative and Black Democrat, noted that change in Alabama has often happened only through federal court order. “Alabama does what Alabama does,” he said in a speech. “Ultimately, what we are hoping for, I guess, at some point, is that the federal court does what it always does to Alabama: forces us to do the right thing. Courts always have to come in and save us from ourselves.”In Florida, meanwhile, DeSantis declared that the supreme court had been “wrong” when its 2008 ruling found it unconstitutional to use capital punishment in child sexual battery cases. He signed a law – authorising the state to pursue the death penalty when an adult is convicted of sexually battering a child under 12 – intended to get the court, now under conservative control, to reconsider that decision.The posturing comes within the context of years of anti-Washington rhetoric from politicians led by Trump, who has long railed against the “deep state” and vowed to “drain the swamp”. Other Republicans have used Washington as a punchbag, a symbol of political elites out of touch with ordinary people.Jacobs added: “This has been a battle that’s been going on for hundreds of years. At this moment you’ve got this toxic mixing of state resentment of the national government when in the hands of the other party along with this really virulent populism. What’s unique about this period is pushing back against and defying Washington is now good politics. Ron DeSantis’s main campaign theme is: I said no to Washington.”Trump has also spent years sowing distrust in institutions and fanning online conspiracy theories. Loss of faith in elections led a violent crowd to storm the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. The supreme court has compounded the problem with a series of extremist rulings and ethics scandals. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that the court has a 30% approval rating among registered voters – the lowest since Quinnipiac first asked the question in 2004.Edward Fallone, an associate professor at Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, said: “The integrity of the court has definitely been eroded. Both liberals and conservatives have less faith and feel less obligated to follow its rulings. It’s entirely a situation of the supreme court’s own making.“The justices have been acting politically, the shadow docket [where the court rules on procedural matters], the refusal to be transparent about ethics and gifts, and some of the comments that Justice [Samuel] Alito for example has made in public forums that sound more like a politician’s comments.“When the court acts politically then people see it as a political institution. It just follows as night follows day. It’s going to be difficult to have state governors and legislatures follow supreme court rulings when they have less faith in the integrity of the body and the general public has less faith.”Yet until recently, talk of rebellion against the government had seemed to belong only in the history books. The supremacy clause in the US constitution says the federal government, when acting in pursuance of the constitution, trumps states’ rights.In the mid-19th century, southern states believed that they had the right to nullify federal laws or even secede from the Union if their interests, including the exploitation of enslaved labour, were threatened. With the north increasingly turning against slavery, 11 southern states seceded in 1860-61, forming the Confederate States of America. It took four years of civil war to reunite the nation and abolish slavery.A century later, the landmark supreme court case of Brown v Board of Education declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, but many southern states resisted integration and refused to comply with the decision. President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce the desegregation of Little Rock Central high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, in a case known as the “Little Rock Nine”.In 1963, the Alabama governor, George Wallace, declared “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” and stood in a doorway at the University of Alabama to express resistance to the court-ordered integration. In response, President John F Kennedy federalised national guard troops and deployed them to the university, forcing Wallace to yield.Daniel Ziblatt, co-author of How Democracies Die, said: “Sometimes we have the idea that the local level is where grassroots democracy thrives but actually, in the history of American democracy, federal power has been used for ill but it’s also been used as a democratising force. We haven’t seen this confrontation reach this same level since the 1950s, 1960s.”Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard University, added: “The major breakthroughs in American democracy have come when the federal government has either passed national legislation – think of the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act – or had to intervene.“Major moments of backsliding have happened when the federal government turns a blind eye to what’s happening in the states. The 1890s are replete with examples of the supreme court essentially turning a blind eye to abuses at the state level. So in a way the confrontation between the states and the federal government is a confrontation over democracy.” More

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      Today’s Top News: A New Voting Map in Alabama, and More

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      The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists who are covering them, all in about 10 minutes. Hosted by Annie Correal, the new morning show features three top stories from reporters across the newsroom and around the world, so you always have a sense of what’s happening, even if you only have a few minutes to spare.Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that Alabama’s current map violated the Voting Rights Act. Now, the state must redraw it.Mickey Welsh/The Montgomery Advertiser, via Associated PressOn Today’s Episode:Alabama Scrambles to Redraw Its Voting Map After a Supreme Court Surprise, with Emily CochraneThe Gilgo Beach Serial Killings: What We KnowHow a Vast Demographic Shift Will Reshape the World, with Lauren LeatherbyTo Ease Global Warming, the Whitest of Paints, with Cara BuckleyEli Cohen More

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      Alabama Scrambles to Redraw Its Voting Map After a Supreme Court Surprise

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      State lawmakers have until Friday to come up with new congressional districts that do not illegally dilute the power of Black voters.Under orders from the Supreme Court to produce a voting map that no longer illegally dilutes the power of Black voters in Alabama, the state’s lawmakers are now facing a high-stakes scramble to come up with an acceptable replacement by the end of this week.A little over a month after the court’s surprise ruling, the Alabama legislature will convene for a special five-day session on Monday, with the Republican supermajority having given little public indication of how it plans to fulfill a mandate to craft a second district that allows Black voters to elect a representative of their choice — one who could well be a Democrat.The effects of the revised map, which must be passed by Friday and approved by a federal court, could reverberate across the country, with other states in the South confronting similar voting rights challenges and Republicans looking to hold onto a razor-thin majority in the U.S. House of Representatives next year.The session also comes at a pivotal moment in the debate over the constitutionality of factoring race into government decisions, as conservatives have increasingly chipped away at the 1965 Voting Rights Act and other longstanding judicial protections centered on equality and race.“The eyes of the nation are looking at you,” Evan Milligan, one of several Alabama residents who had challenged the legality of the map, told lawmakers during a committee hearing in Montgomery on Thursday. “If you can cut out the noise, look within — you can look to history, you can make a mark in history that will set a standard for this country.”Alabama has a long list of bitter disputes over the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark law born out of the civil rights movement whose key provisions were gutted by a 2013 Supreme Court decision. Litigation forced the creation of Alabama’s first majority-Black congressional district in 1992, and the seat has been represented by a Black Democrat ever since then.But the current fight stems from lawsuits filed to oppose the map drawn after the 2020 census. In a state where 27 percent of the population is Black, the Republican-controlled legislature packed nearly a third of the Black population into that one district. The state’s remaining six districts each elected a white Republican.There is little disagreement that voting in Alabama is highly polarized, but lawyers for the state legislature attributed the situation to politics rather than race. (The Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that a gerrymander that discriminates against one party’s voters is a political problem, not a legal one.)Evan Milligan, an Alabama resident who sued over the state’s voting map, speaking with reporters outside the Supreme Court in Washington last year.Patrick Semansky/Associated Press“Black Alabamians’ ‘candidates of choice’ tend to lose elections in Alabama not because they are Black or because they receive Black support, but because they are Democrats,” the state’s lawyers wrote.And with about 80 percent of Black voters in Alabama identifying as Democrats or leaning toward Democratic candidates, according to the Pew Research Center, “that just makes them easy prey in terms of redistricting,” said Seth C. McKee, a University of Oklahoma professor who has written about political realignment in the South. “And once Republicans get control, it’s just difficult for them not to dominate.”But a federal panel of three judges unanimously said the map had most likely violated the Voting Rights Act and ordered it redrawn, four months before the 2022 primary elections. The Supreme Court, while agreeing to consider the challenge, allowed the map to go into effect ahead of the November elections.Many experts expected the Supreme Court to say in the Alabama case what it essentially said in its decision outlawing affirmative action in education: Making allowances to remedy discrimination against one group inevitably ends up discriminating against other groups.However, in June, the court narrowly upheld Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the principal remaining clause of the law, which outlaws any election law or rule that discriminates based on race, color or language. That decision has already had ramifications elsewhere: a similar lawsuit is now moving forward in Louisiana, while voting rights advocates in Georgia have begun sparring with the state over whether the ruling affects similar lawsuits there.“We’re already showing how this opinion is going to have ripple effects,” said Abha Khanna, who represented some of the Alabama plaintiffs as the head of the Elias Law Group’s redistricting practice. She added, “You are sending a message to states and jurisdictions.”The Alabama legislature now has until Friday to create another map that gains approval from a federal court, and has solicited public proposals. Should the legislature fall short, the map could again be challenged, leaving open the possibility that the court would draw its own map and cut out the legislature altogether.“It is critical that Alabama be fairly and accurately represented in Washington,” said Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, as she formally summoned the legislature back for the special session. “Our legislature knows our state better than the federal courts do.”But it leaves Republicans with a task that could jeopardize the electoral security of one of their own in Congress. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report now marks the once solidly Republican First and Second Congressional Districts as toss-ups, citing “the presumption that one of their seats will ultimately become a Montgomery and Mobile-based Black majority seat that comfortably elects a Democrat.”On Thursday, multiple Black Republicans spoke during the committee hearing, including Belinda Thomas, a Dale County councilwoman and Republican Party official who later described herself as “living proof” that the current map made it possible for Black candidates to succeed. Some residents and officials also raised concerns about diminishing the representation of rural communities and economic opportunity under some of the proposed maps.State Senator Rodger Smitherman comparing congressional maps during a special session on redistricting at the Alabama Statehouse in Montgomery in 2021.Mickey Welsh/The Montgomery Advertiser, via Associated PressDemocrats appeared divided over which plan to back, with some lawmakers supporting one that relies on a combination of traditionally Democratic voting blocs to create a new district in order to avoid drawing on racial lines. At least one of the plaintiffs wore a T-shirt emblazoned with their preferred map, which would enshrine the 18 counties of Alabama’s Black Belt, the stretch of historically rich soil that fueled cotton plantations worked by slave labor, into two districts with at least 50 percent of the Black voting population.“I want myself and my community to have a seat at the table, rather than be on the menu,” said Shalela Dowdy, a Mobile resident and one of the plaintiffs.But notably absent from the public discussion on Thursday was any plan backed by the Republican supermajority. State Representative Chris Pringle, a Republican from Mobile, said that a final map would be shared before a committee meeting on Monday, although Democrats balked at being left out of the process and at the public getting little time to review a final plan.“This is a really tortured process,” said State Representative Chris England, a Democrat from Tuscaloosa. He added that “everybody else has been presenting the maps that they believe best represent the state of Alabama, give everybody an opportunity to be represented, but the supermajority has not.”Mr. Pringle said that the committee tasked with overseeing the creation of the new map had been overwhelmed with a number of submissions, including from as far away as France and New Zealand. A little over a dozen had been made public online or in a hearing, with Mr. England sharing a few more maps circulated among the committee on Twitter on Friday evening.“We have been pretty much overwhelmed,” Mr. Pringle said.Adam Liptak More

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      The Supreme Court Finally Strikes the Right Balance on Voting Rights

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      One of the most important realities of American life is this: No nation can fully undo the effects of 345 years of state-sanctioned bigotry — from slavery to Jim Crow — in 59 years. The time period between the arrival of the first slaves on colonial shores in 1619 and the abolition of legalized discrimination with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 is simply too long, the discrimination too ingrained and the distortion of society too great to wave the wand of legal and cultural reform and quickly realize the dream of American equality.At the same time, there’s another vital American reality: Through grit, determination and immense courage, Black Americans and other marginalized communities have made immense gains, the hearts of countless white Americans have indeed changed and America is a far better and fairer place than it was in even the recent past.And now, at last, in the vital area of voting rights, Supreme Court authority reflects both these truths.Earlier this month, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in a case called Allen v. Milligan that surprised many legal observers by striking down an Alabama redistricting map that would have preserved the state’s recent tradition of maintaining only one majority Black district out of seven in a state with a 27 percent Black population.Voting in Alabama is extremely racially polarized. For example, in the 2020 presidential election, 91 percent of Black voters in the state voted for Joe Biden, while only 20 percent of white voters did so. In practice, this persistent polarization, combined with GOP-drawn district maps, has meant that Black voters were able to elect only one of Alabama’s seven congressional representatives.Voting rights jurisprudence is extremely complicated, but I’ll do my best to be succinct and accurate in describing both the issues and one key reason for the surprise: The author of the majority opinion in Allen — which, again, generally cheered liberals and disappointed conservatives — was Chief Justice John Roberts. Ten years ago, he had written one of the most contentious Supreme Court opinions of the 21st century, Shelby County v. Holder.In Shelby County, a sharply divided 5-to-4 court gutted key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by striking down elements of Section 4 that required the federal government to “preclear” or preapprove changes to the voting laws of a limited number of American states, counties and townships, essentially placing these jurisdictions under federal supervision to prevent them from enacting (or, more precisely, re-enacting) discriminatory voting laws. Each of the jurisdictions had an especially pernicious history of racial discrimination in voting.The states included seven of the old Confederacy, plus Alaska and Arizona, as well as a handful of counties and towns in other states (including the counties of New York, Bronx and Kings, or Brooklyn, in New York City, each of which had extraordinarily low Hispanic voter registration rates as well as a legacy of English literacy tests). In 1966, the Supreme Court had upheld the Voting Rights Act in an 8-to-1 decision, holding that “exceptional conditions can justify legislative measures not otherwise appropriate.”In 2013, however, the Roberts court decided that some of those “exceptional conditions” no longer pertained. As Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “Census Bureau data indicate that African American voter turnout has come to exceed white voter turnout in five of the six States originally covered by §5, with a gap in the sixth State of less than one half of one percent.”The decision didn’t gut the entire act. Section 2, which prohibits “denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote” on the basis of race, remained in force. But the meaning of Section 2 has been a subject of intense debate. Gerrymandering has been at the heart of that debate.If a state “cracks” a Black community (i.e., splits it apart into multiple districts) or “packs” one (i.e., concentrates its voters into supermajority districts) in a manner that leaves Black voters with diminished voting power, does that violate the act? It certainly does if it’s done with an explicit racial motive.But what if the state claims that the motive isn’t racial, but partisan? The Supreme Court has long granted states greater leeway to tilt the partisan playing field, and in a 2019 case, Rucho v. Common Cause, it seemed to throw up its hands entirely, holding that complaints against partisan gerrymandering weren’t “justiciable.” In other words, the solution to partisan gerrymandering abuses should be located in the political branches of government, not the courts.This ruling potentially created an immense opening for disguised racial gerrymanders, especially in heavily racially polarized states. Even worse, Alabama wanted the Supreme Court to modify existing precedent to give states even greater leeway in the face of claims of race discrimination. If Alabama prevailed, a Republican-dominated state could crack or pack Black communities and say that it was done not because the communities were Black, but because they were Democratic. Though the result — less Black representation in Congress — would be the same, the motive would be legal.Or would it? In Allen, Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the three Democratic-appointed justices said no, not always. Under highly racially polarized voting conditions, Supreme Court authority will require the creation of majority-minority districts when, to quote Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence, “(i) a State’s redistricting map cracks or packs a large and ‘geographically compact’ minority population and (ii) a plaintiff’s proposed alternative map and proposed majority-minority district are ‘reasonably configured.’”To translate the legalese: States and regions that are highly racially polarized can’t fracture or compress minority voting districts when reasonably drawn alternative maps would more closely maintain the relative power of minority voters. If anything, by reaffirming and clarifying existing precedents in the face of substantial legal doubt, the Court strengthened Section 2.I know that’s a lot to take in, but here’s where things get interesting. If you peruse recent exit polls, you’ll quickly observe that many of the old preclearance states retain exactly the kind of racially polarized voting patterns that, thanks to the Allen ruling, can trigger judicial skepticism. I quoted Alabama’s voting stats above. But what about other old preclearance states? In 2020, 77 percent of white Louisiana voters voted for Donald Trump, and 88 percent of Black voters voted for Joe Biden. In Mississippi, 81 percent of white voters voted for Trump and 94 percent of Black voters voted for Biden. In South Carolina, 69 percent of white voters voted for Trump and 92 percent of Black voters voted for Biden.While I certainly won’t argue that most white voters in those states are racist (indeed, a supermajority of voters in South Carolina supported Tim Scott, a Black Republican, for Senate), those numbers are not the American norm. Racial polarization exists more broadly, but not to the same extent. Nationally, for example, 55 percent of white voters voted for Trump, while 92 percent of Black voters voted for Biden. In some states, such as California and New York, Joe Biden received a majority of white and Black votes.Racially polarized voting isn’t proof of racism in any given voter’s heart. But it is part of the legacy of American bigotry and racial divisions. By preserving and clarifying the core of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — especially when voting is highly racially polarized — and by rejecting Alabama’s effort to limit Section 2, Chief Justice Roberts has subtly limited the reach of his own precedent. Now, thanks to Allen, many preclearance states will face greater scrutiny — unless and until their own cultural and political changes bring them closer to broader American partisan norms.That’s the legal impact, but there’s a cultural impact as well. In a tangible way, Chief Justice Roberts, along with Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson brought the court’s precedent closer in line with the nation’s reality. Our country has made real progress in addressing racist violations of voting rights. The ruling in Shelby County reflected that encouraging truth. At the same time, our nation still hasn’t cleansed itself of racism or fully addressed the legacy of bigotry. The court’s holding in Allen acknowledged that sad fact.The law does not always align with the facts of American life, but in this case, the Supreme Court has brought it closer to proper balance. The Court is an embattled institution, yet it still retains some bipartisan wisdom. America has come so very far, so we must not despair as if all is lost. America still has so far to go, so we must not celebrate as if all is won.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Alabama discriminated against Black voters, US supreme court rules

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      Alabama discriminated against Black voters when it drew its seven congressional districts last year, the supreme court has ruled, a decision that is a major victory for the Voting Rights Act (VRA).The decision was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joining the court’s three liberal justices in the opinion. Writing for the majority of the court, Roberts noted the court was rejecting Alabama’s effort to get it to rewrite its longstanding interpretation of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which outlaws voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race. The decision means that section 2 of the law, one of its last remaining powerful provisions, will remain intact.“The heart of these cases is not about the law as it exists. It is about Alabama’s attempt to remake our §2 jurisprudence anew,” Roberts wrote. “We find Alabama’s new approach to §2 compelling neither in theory nor in practice. We accordingly decline to recast our §2 case law as Alabama requests.”The decision was an unexpected outcome from Roberts and the court, both of whom have significantly hollowed out the Voting Rights Act in recent years. As a young lawyer in the justice department in the 1980s, Roberts argued for narrowing the interpretation of section 2. The court has rarely sided with voting rights litigants who allege voting discrimination.The decision in the case, Allen v Milligan, means that Alabama will have to draw its congressional map to include a second majority-Black district. Black voters currently comprise a majority of the voting age population in just one district, despite making up a quarter of the state’s population.“This decision is a crucial win against the continued onslaught of attacks on voting rights,” Deuel Ross, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund who argued on behalf of the plaintiffs, said in a statement. “Alabama attempted to rewrite federal law by saying race had no place in redistricting. But because of the state’s sordid and well-documented history of racial discrimination, race must be used to remedy that past and ensure communities of color are not boxed out of the electoral process.”The ruling also is a boon to similar cases in Louisiana, Texas and Georgia, where litigants currently are suing to require the drawing of additional majority-minority districts. “This precedent also lays a foundation for fair map decisions in our other Section 2 cases,” said Marina Jenkins, the executive director of the National Redistricting Foundation, a Democratic-aligned group that is involved in those cases.Alabama could have easily drawn a second majority-Black district, the challengers in the case argued. They offered several sample maps with possible configurations of how to do so. Last year, a three-judge panel unanimously agreed with that argument and ordered the state to do so. The panel, which included two judges appointed by Donald Trump, said the question of whether the state had violated the law was “not a close one”.Notably, the majority rejected an argument from Alabama that it should only be required to draw an additional majority-Black district if the plaintiffs could prove it was required without considering race. That theory would have made it extremely difficult for plaintiffs to show discrimination had occurred in redistricting against minority voters.“This court has long recognized – and as all members of this court today agree – the text of §2 establishes an effects test, not an intent test,” Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion. “The effects test, as applied by Gingles to redistricting, requires in certain circumstances that courts account for the race of voters so as to prevent the cracking or packing – whether intentional or not – of large and geographically compact minority populations.”Joe Biden praised the court’s decision and said he and Vice-President Kamala Harris would continue to push Congress to restore the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. The US supreme court, in a 5-4 opinion authored by Roberts in 2013, gutted a key provision of the law that required states with a history of voting discrimination to get voting changes pre-cleared by the federal government before they went into effect.“The right to vote and have that vote counted is sacred and fundamental – it is the right from which all of our other rights spring. Key to that right is ensuring that voters pick their elected officials – not the other way around,” the president said in a statement. “Today’s decision confirms the basic principle that voting practices should not discriminate on account of race, but our work is not done.”Merrick Garland, the US attorney general, praised the decision in a statement.“Today’s decision rejects efforts to further erode fundamental voting rights protections, and preserves the principle that in the United States, all eligible voters must be able to exercise their constitutional right to vote free from discrimination based on their race,” he said. “The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, the right from which all other rights ultimately flow.”Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a dissenting opinion that was joined at various parts by fellow conservative justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. The supreme court has long misinterpreted section 2, he wrote, restating his prior view that it does not even apply to redistricting cases. He also wrote that the majority opinion required too much consideration of race in drawing district lines and urged a more race-neutral approach.“As applied here, the amended §2 thus falls on the wrong side of ‘the line between measures that remedy or prevent unconstitutional actions and measures that make a substantive change in the governing law’,” Thomas wrote. “It replaces the constitutional right against intentionally discriminatory districting with an amorphous race-based right to a ‘fair’ distribution of political power, a ‘right’ that cannot be implemented without requiring the very evils the constitution forbids.”Alito, writing separately in dissent, also said that the plaintiffs advocating for an additional majority-minority district “must show at the outset that such a district can be created without making race the predominant factor in its creation”.“Today’s decision unnecessarily sets the VRA on a perilous and unfortunate path,” he wrote.The supreme court intervened in February 2022 on an emergency request and allowed Alabama’s maps to go into effect for the 2022 elections. Even though Alabama’s election was not until the end of May, the court said it was too close to the election to upend the map.Alabama had argued that the lower court had wrongly decided the case by taking race too much into account. The challengers in the case should have been required to show that they could draw a second majority-Black district without considering race at all, Edmund LaCour, the state’s solicitor general, said during oral argument last year.The case was seen as a “textbook” example of the kind of discrimination in redistricting that section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was designed to prevent. The provision outlaws any voting practice that discriminates on the basis of race and litigants have frequently used it to challenge electoral maps that make it harder for minorities to elect the candidate of their choice. It was widely understood to be the most powerful remaining provision in the landmark civil rights law after the US supreme court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v Holder. That decision blocked another part of the landmark civil rights law requiring states with a history of voting discrimination to get their changes approved by the federal government. More

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      Schumer decries Republican senator’s ‘revolting’ remarks on white nationalists

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      The Democratic US Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, condemned as “utterly revolting” remarks in which the Alabama Republican Tommy Tuberville appeared to defend white nationalists in the US military.In an interview with the Alabama station WBHM, published on Monday, Tuberville was asked: “Do you believe they should allow white nationalists in the military?”He answered: “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans.”The Senate armed forces committee member added: “We are losing in the military so fast. And why? I can tell you why. Because the Democrats are attacking our military, saying we need to get out the white extremists, the white nationalists, people that don’t believe in our agenda, as Joe Biden’s agenda.”Tuberville is currently attempting to impose his own agenda on the US military, by blocking promotions and appointments in protest of Pentagon rules about abortion access.On Thursday, Schumer said: “Does Senator Tuberville honestly believe that our military is stronger with white nationalists in its ranks? I cannot believe this needs to be said, but white nationalism has no place in our armed forces and no place in any corner of American society, period, full stop, end of story.”Previously, Sherrilyn Ifill, a former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) legal defense fund, said: “I hope we are not getting so numb that we refrain from demanding that Mr Tuberville’s colleagues in the Senate condemn his remarks.”Schumer added: “I urge Senator Tuberville to think about the destructive spectacle he is creating in the Senate. His actions are dangerous.”On Wednesday, a spokesperson for Tuberville said he was “being skeptical of the notion that there are white nationalists in the military, not that he believes they should be in the military”.A Tuberville spokesperson told the Washington Post the senator “resents the implication that the people in our military are anything but patriots and heroes”.The same spokesperson told NBC Tuberville “has kind of a sarcastic sense of humor” and “was expressing doubt about this being a problem in the military”.Reports have shown the US military has a problem with white nationalism and white supremacy, despite the Pentagon having prohibited “active participation” in extremist groups since 1996.In October 2020, a Pentagon report warning of a problem with white supremacists in the military was sent to Congress. It was released in 2021.In February 2022, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremism, co-published documents showing one in five applicants to one white supremacist group claimed ties to the US military.On Thursday, Adam Hodge, spokesperson for the White House national security council, said it was “abhorrent that Senator Tuberville would argue that white nationalists should be allowed to serve in the military, while he also threatens our national security by holding all pending DoD military and civilian nominations.“Extremist behavior has no place in our military. None.”Fact-checking Tuberville, WBHM, an NPR station, noted Pentagon efforts “to keep extremists, particularly fascists, out of the military”.The station also fact-checked a remark about “what [Joe Biden’s] done to our military with the woke ideas, with the [critical race theory] that we’re teaching in our military”.Critical race theory is an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society. Republicans have turned it into an electoral wedge issue.WBHM said: “The US military is not requiring that CRT be taught and there is little evidence that it’s being discussed much at all in the ranks. According to Military Times, the one instance in which it is being used in an educational setting is at the US Military Academy at West Point.” More