The Alabama Republican Party released the following statement after the oral argument in Merrill v. Milligan at the Supreme Court of the United States today. That case seeks review of a lower court decision finding against Alabama’s seven Congressional districts. Six have Republican representatives, and one has a Democratic representative. The districts were drawn by the legislature in November 2021, and were said by the challengers to be configured in a way likely to violate the Voting Rights Act by “diluting” the voting strength of blacks. The challengers say that two of the seven districts should be controlled by blacks, as they comprise 27% of the State population, and blacks were subject to racial discrimination in voting. The lower court decision has been put on hold pending completion of Supreme Court review.
ALGOP attorney Bert Jordan commented, “Oral argument today showed a familiar split on the Supreme Court. One group, led by Justice Alito, seemed to believe that the district challengers focused on race too much, at the expense of non-racial factors, in trying to prove that alternative districts would avoid injury to minority voting strength. The challengers want an alternative set of districts that will result in blacks controlling Congressional district in proportion to their numbers in the population.
“Justice Alito focused on fine-tuning argument made by Alabama’s Solicitor General Eddie LeCour who urged the Court that the challengers seek too much focus on race in trying to measure the voting strength of racial groups. LeCour said that their reading of the Voting Rights Act puts Alabama in an unfair position in drawing districts – caught between always due to show extra attention to race to overcome its past racial history, and not being racial in its governance going forward.”
Jordan also noted, “Another group of the judges, perhaps led by Justice Kagan, urged that racial considerations are necessary, and have been used for decades, to correct past injustice and show that blacks are injured by not having control of a proportionate number of reasonably configured districts. Yet another group, Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, spoke little but have said they view the effort to measure racial voting strength as an unmanageable reading of the Voting Rights Act.”
The ALGOP has written in an amicus brief, authored by Jordan and Joel Blankenship, to the Supreme Court that, in this day, the effort to calibrate the voting strength of racial groups is too fraught with partisan implications in Alabama to be proper for courts, especially when voter registration, and voter turnout, are basically equal. The success of six GOP congressmen does not reflect racial politics, but the common views of most of the State’s citizens. ALGOP has always been, and remains, open to all like-minded adult citizens, regardless of race, unlike the Alabama Democratic Party that dominated the State’s politics during its troubled racial history.
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