🚨BREAKING: 3-judge panel finds that congressional map that Alabama wants to use for this year's midterms is intentionally discriminatory and issues a preliminary injunction.

drive.google.com/file/d/1K2Zfob… The map that Alabama wanted to use had been originally adopted by the state in 2023, after the Supreme Court's decision in Milligan. But the panel struck down the map at the time on both Section 2 and constitutional grounds and put in place a court-approved alternative.

Meanwhile, in the Louisiana redistricting case, a bit of a dispute over whether Black plaintiffs will be allowed to submit an updated proposal for creating a second Black congressional district. (They submitted the one below in June 2022 before SCOTUS put the case on hold.)

https://twitter.com/mcpli/status/1539829351285489671

The plaintiffs say that allowing them to submit a new proposal for a remedial map would the map to reflect data from recent elections and also give them a chance to try to address concerns raised by the state to the earlier proposed map.

In my time, I’ve seen some really brazen redistricting moves, but never something as breathtaking as what just happened in Alabama. Open defiance by a legislature of a federal court ruling that could not have been more clear about what it required. To recap: SCOTUS ruled in June that the current Alabama congressional map (below) violates the Voting Rights Act because it divides heavily Black parts of the state up in a way that ensures Black voters can elect their preferred candidates in only 1 of 7 districts (District 7).

There’s a little bit of confusion about what the map process of redrawing Alabama’s congressional map requires and how various laws interact. A thread 🧵 to break it down a bit. 1/ First, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act does *not* require that Alabama necessarily draw a second majority-Black congressional district. Instead, what Alabama is required to do is remedy the vote dilution that court found in Black Belt region of the state. 2/

🚨BREAKING: The North Carolina Supreme Court has reversed its earlier rulings finding that partisan gerrymandering violates the state constitution. appellate.nccourts.org/opinions/?c=1&… Decision is 5-2 with Justices Earls and Morgan dissenting.

Well, the Harper v. Hall argument is over - and I have so many thoughts. But I’ll start with a couple of quotes from Justice Earls & Justice Morgan encapsulate how crazy the legislature’s pro-gerrymandering position is. 1/ First, from Justice Morgan in response to NC lawmakers’ contention that the NC Constitution doesn’t speak to fair maps: “Well, it does say elections shall be free - and free elections inherently contemplate fair elections.” 2/

Redistricting & the fight for fair maps return to the fore Tuesday when the North Carolina Supreme Court takes up a request by GOP lawmakers to have the court throw out precedents holding that partisan gerrymandering violates the NC Constitution. A thread 🧵 1/ First, to set the table, North Carolina is one of eight states where since 2018 state courts have enforced limits on partisan gerrymandering in state law - striking down both Democratic-drawn & Republican-drawn maps. 2/

This map of electricity usage in 1921 vividly illuminates how much poorer & less developed the South was for the first half of 20th century. At the time, the South had almost exactly the same pop as the NE & just under the pop of the Midwest, but it is a minnow. Even as late as the start of World War II, per capita income in the South was only about half that of the rest of the United States.

With new Census Bureau population estimates out today, if reapportionment were happening this year (which it is not), the following states would gain or lose congressional seats:

AZ +1 (10 seats)
FL +1 (29)
ID +1 (3)
TX +1 (39)

CA -1 (51)
IL -1 (16)
MN -1 (7)
NY -1 (25) If the population trends of the past two years remain constant for the rest of the decade (*big if* this early in the decade), reappointment in 2030 would look like:

GAINERS

DE +1 (2 seats)
FL +3 (31)
GA +1 (15)
ID +1 (3)
NC +1 (15)
TN +1 (10)
TX +4 (42)
UT +1 (5)

People often quote LBJ about Democrats losing the South for a generation as a result of the Civil Rights Act. But the reality is more complex, because in the intervening years there were multiple points at which it looked like a multiracial politics might emerge. The article in the previous tweet is from the May 31, 1971 edition of Time, which heralded the election of a new generation of more more progressive southern governors.

Assuming uncalled races go to the party leading, here’s how Republicans built to a House majority in 2022 by region-

*South: 110 seats
*Midwest: 54
*NE: 23
*Mountain: 19
*West: 16 And in terms of the % of each region’s congressional seats won by GOP in this year’s midterms (again assuming uncalled races go to the party leading)-

*South: 71%
*Midwest: 59%
*Mountain: 56%
*NE: 28%
*West: 23%

Perhaps a sign of where things are headed - or not - 30 Rock (home to NBC & MSNBC) is unlit on Election Eve, but down the street, Fox News is all ready for tomorrow night. The outdoor election night stages at the Fox News headquarters in midtown Manhattan.

I’ve told this story before, but when my father came to the United States from Taiwan as a grad student, he thought democracy was mostly an artifice - window dressing used by those with power. What changed his mind was the resignation of Richard Nixon for, as he put it, lying. As he often said, “Mao killed millions of people and died in his bed. Nixon lied about a political matter and was forced out.” After that, he though maybe there is something to this America.

An Election Eve tradition for me is to come to St. Paul’s Chapel in lower Manhattan - which predates the Revolution & is where Washington worshipped on his Inauguration Day - to reflect in the quiet about where we are as a country. At times, that reflection has been full of wonderment at country’s journey against all odds and hope about what we might yet become in the future.

At other times, like this year, it has been trepidatious and full of worry that what began here might be coming to an end.

One lens this election can be viewed through is a regional one because if Rs are in the game, a big part of it has to do with the southern firewall they built for themselves. All told, after redistricting, 108 of the region’s 155 districts would have been Trump districts in 2020. Moreover, 99 of those southern districts are ones that Trump carried by 8 or more points - a large percentage by substantially more. brennancenter.org/our-work/analy…

I want to take a moment to circle back to just how weak the “race neutral” redistricting criteria that Alabama tries to hang its hat on are.

It has basically two arguments: Mobile & Baldwin Co. have to be kept together and you have to preserve the cores of existing districts. In the case of Mobile and Baldwin Co. , Alabama argues that the two have to be kept together in part because they share a “French and Spanish colonial history.” But as the district court, Alabama splits Mobile & Baldwin Co. in other maps. 2/

If I had to guess, we will get an opinion that professes great love for the Voting Rights Act but that effectively makes Section 2 - and, in particular, Gingles I harder to use by tweaking what “reasonably configured” district means. Alito will concur in the outcome but indicate he would go further.

And here we go with oral arguments in Merrill v. Milligan, the Alabama redistricting case. First up, Ed LaCour up for Alabama. LaCour’s arguments focus on the fact that plaintiffs’ alternative maps divide the Black majority city of Mobile & next door Baldwin Co which is overwhelmingly white. The state argues that the Gulf Coast has a shared heritage rooted in their “French and Spanish colonial history.”

Oral argument in the Alabama redistricting case at SCOTUS starts at 10 a.m. ET. You can listen here: supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments… The Alabama case, which is actually two consolidated cases, is set for 70 minutes of oral argument. As the appealing party, Alabama will start and get 35 minutes, some of which it will reserve for rebuttal.

So the title of this otherwise excellent SCOTUSBlog preview is a bit misleading. The district court held that Alabama needed to create a second Black *opportunity* district. That district did not hold that it needed to be a *majority* Black district. scotusblog.com/2022/10/when-a… This point often trips people up. Yes, to win a Section 2 case, plaintiffs have to prove at the liability phase that you could draw a majority-minority district. But the **remedy** need not be majority-minority if a less than majority district fixes the vote dilution.

Merrill v. Milligan, the Alabama redistricting case that SCOTUS will hear tomorrow, gets described as a Voting Rights Act case - which, of course, it is. But it also is as much a case about the constitutional limits of the VRA - and that makes it more dangerous. If it were just a case about what the VRA requires - that is to say a case about statutory construction - the court could get it wrong and Congress could come back and fix the misinterpretation, as it did with the 1982 amendments.