By Andrew Chung
(Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday let Alabama use a Republican-backed map of the state’s U.S. congressional districts that a lower court found likely discriminates against Black voters, handing an important victory to Republicans as they seek to regain control of Congress in the Nov. 8 elections.
In a 5-4 decision, the court granted an emergency request by Alabama’s Republican Secretary of State John Merrill and two Republican legislators to put on hold the lower court’s injunctions ordering the state’s Republican-led legislature to redraw the map.
The court also said it would take up Alabama’s appeal to decide the case on the merits. Five of the six conservative justices were in the majority, with conservative Chief Justice John Roberts joining the court’s three liberal justices in dissent.
The state legislature previously approved the map delineating the borders of Alabama’s seven U.S. House of Representatives districts.
A panel of three federal judges on Jan. 24 ruled that the electoral map unlawfully deprived Black voters of an additional district in which they could be a majority or close to it, likely violating the Voting Rights Act, a landmark 1965 federal law that prohibited racial discrimination in voting.
Democrats control the House by a slim margin, making every seat vital in the Republican attempt to win back a majority.
The Alabama dispute reflects an ongoing issue of contention between Democrats and Republicans in a broader fight over voting rights. Democrats have accused Republicans in various states of exploiting their majorities in state legislatures to craft electoral maps that diminish the clout of Black and other racial minority voters while maximizing the power of White voters.
The case is among dozens https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-redistricting-legal-battles-that-could-affect-control-congress-2022-02-02 of legal challenges nationwide over the composition of electoral districts, which are redrawn each decade to reflect population changes as measured by a national census, last taken in 2020. The outcome of the challenges could impact who controls Congress after November’s elections.
In most states, such redistricting is done by the party in power, which can lead to map manipulation for partisan gain. In a major 2019 ruling https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-gerrymandering/in-major-elections-ruling-u-s-supreme-court-allows-partisan-map-drawing-idUSKCN1TS24Z, the Supreme Court barred federal judges from curbing the practice, known as partisan gerrymandering. That ruling did preclude court scrutiny of gerrymandering that is racially discriminatory.
Alabama’s legislature adopted the latest map of the state’s seven House districts last November. Several lawsuits were filed challenging the map, including by a group of Black voters and another group of voters who sued alongside the Alabama NAACP civil rights group.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)
