https://www.npr.org/2023/08/14/1193420289/alabama-congressional-districts-redistricting-map
In short, Alabama's district map was found to be illegal because it disenfranchised black voters. The ruling was upheld by the Supreme Court. They released a new map that doesn't abide by the guidelines the court set out and they want it to go to the Supreme Court again hoping they'll change their ruling.
Bringing an issue to the court over and over until you get the result you want is not how this is supposed to work and I don't know how far they'll even get with it.
I wonder if their plan isn't just to run out the clock, to drag the process out long enough that the old district map has to be used in 2024 because the new map isn't ready.
The state of Alabama is taking an unusual legal position as it heads into a closely watched court hearing this week about its congressional voting districts.
In June, Alabama lost at the U.S. Supreme Court. A majority of justices upheld a lower court's ruling that found the congressional map the state used in last year's midterm elections likely violated the landmark Voting Rights Act by diluting the power of Black voters.
The remedy the three-judge panel ordered was a new map with two districts where Black voters have a realistic opportunity of electing their preferred candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives. Because of how racially polarized voting is in Alabama, the panel said in each of those two districts, Black Alabamians will need to make up the majority of the voting-age population or "something quite close to it."
But there is only one majority-Black district in the new redistricting plan passed by the state's Republican-controlled legislature last month. In another district, Black Alabamians make up 39.9% of the voting-age population a share that, the map's challengers say, does not meet the court's requirements.
And for this week's court hearing before the panel, Alabama says it's not planning to put up a fight on those specific points.
After signing the contested map into law in July, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey issued a statement saying, "The Legislature knows our state, our people and our districts better than the federal courts or activist groups."
The moves are raising questions about whether the state intends to follow federal court orders and how much longer this redistricting lawsuit will be dragged out with next year's elections looming. The ultimate map used by Alabama where majority-Black districts are likely to elect Democrats and majority-white districts are likely to elect Republicans could help determine which major party wins the U.S. House.
Alabama has raised the possibility of appealing to the Supreme Court again
Ahead of this week's hearing, the state has been trying to get the three-judge panel to allow its attorneys to argue that the panel's earlier ruling that requires two opportunity districts for Black voters no longer applies.
But in court orders, the judges have repeatedly reminded Alabama: "We are not at square one in these cases."
Still, the state has signaled it's preparing to appeal to the Supreme Court any new ruling by the panel that does not allow it to use a congressional map with only one majority-Black voting district for the 2024 elections.
Republican state lawmakers in Alabama seem to think their new map can flip at least one Supreme Court justice's vote to get a different ruling from the high court, says Kareem Crayton, senior director for voting and representation at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's law school.