Alabama is again within the Supreme Court docket — to hunt the justices’ permission to overtly defy one of many Court docket’s latest orders.

In June, the Supreme Court docket ordered Alabama to redraw its racially gerrymandered congressional map to incorporate a second district the place Black voters might elect their consultant of selection. This case is named Allen v. Milligan.

The choice was not significantly ambiguous. 5 justices voted to affirm a decrease court docket choice, which itself held that “the suitable treatment is a congressional redistricting plan that features both a further majority-Black congressional district, or a further district through which Black voters in any other case have a chance to elect a consultant of their selection.”

Nonetheless, Alabama responded to this choice with overt defiance — drawing a brand new map which, by the state’s personal admission, contains just one district, of seven whole, the place Black voters are prone to elect their chosen consultant. That’s identical to the previous maps that have been struck down by the Supreme Court docket.

Underneath the brand new map, only one district has a Black majority. The district with the second-largest Black inhabitants is greater than 50 % white and lower than 40 % Black.

There’s some danger that one key justice, Brett Kavanaugh, might flip his vote on this case. In June, when the Court docket handed down its choice ordering Alabama to redraw its maps, the vote was solely 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Kavanaugh becoming a member of the Court docket’s three liberal justices to type a majority. Kavanaugh, nonetheless, wrote a separate opinion the place he urged that he is likely to be open to declaring a part of the Voting Rights Act, the federal regulation that prohibits race discrimination in elections, unconstitutional.

The oddest factor about Alabama’s newest temporary to the justices, the place the state’s attorneys ask the Court docket to bless Alabama’s defiance of the earlier Milligan choice, is that it barely discusses this constitutional argument. As an alternative, Alabama’s authorized staff spends a merely astonishing period of time fixating on a particularly minor facet of the case — how voters in Alabama’s “Black Belt” needs to be allotted among the many state’s congressional districts.

So Alabama’s newest request to the Supreme Court docket ought to go nowhere — if for no different cause than as a result of the Court docket would destroy its credibility if it reversed course only a few months after its June choice in Milligan.

Nonetheless, given this Supreme Court docket’s file of hostility towards the Voting Rights Act, there’s a non-zero likelihood that Alabama will prevail in its request to slide free from the Court docket’s June choice.

Alabama’s main argument in its new temporary to the justices is laughably weak

In its newest Supreme Court docket submitting, Alabama’s authorized staff spends a bewildering array of pages discussing the state’s “Black Belt,” a area named for the darkish coloration of its unusually fertile soil, however which additionally has a excessive Black inhabitants.

The Black Belt is talked about a number of instances within the Court docket’s June Milligan opinion, however solely within the context of ancillary arguments that performed a really minor position within the Court docket’s method to this case. But, should you learn Alabama’s newest temporary and nothing else, you’d suppose that this whole case activates the truth that the maps struck down in Milligan divided the Black Belt into 4 completely different congressional districts, whereas the brand new map solely divides it into two.

Underneath the Supreme Court docket’s choice in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), a plaintiff alleging that racially gerrymandered maps violate the Voting Rights Act should clear three hurdles or their case is tossed out at an early stage within the litigation. Of those three hurdles, one is related to the present state of the case: Somebody alleging {that a} state ought to have a further Black district should present that the Black inhabitants of the state is “sufficiently giant and [geographically] compact to represent a majority in a fairly configured district.”

The aim of this hurdle is to make the plaintiff exhibit that it’s really potential to attract a further Black district earlier than the lawsuit proceeds. If it’s not potential to take action, then there isn’t a level in making a court docket analyze the big selection of different components that it should think about earlier than figuring out if a legislative map is an unlawful racial gerrymander.

In any occasion, Gingles requires this hypothetical district to be “fairly configured,” that means that it’s compact, contiguous, and in any other case comports with the standard standards that courts have appeared to previously when evaluating such maps. Certainly one of these conventional standards is that courts take a look at maps extra skeptically in the event that they cut up up too many “communities of curiosity,” that are inhabitants teams that will share a typical historical past, ethnicity, social identification, or approach of creating a dwelling.

The primary time Milligan went as much as the Supreme Court docket, Alabama argued that the plaintiffs’ proposed maps — once more, maps whose sole goal was to show that it’s potential to attract a further Black congressional district in Alabama — weren’t fairly configured as a result of they didn’t preserve collectively the state’s Gulf Coast area, which the state’s attorneys argued was a neighborhood of curiosity.

The Supreme Court docket rejected this argument, nonetheless, as a result of “even when the Gulf Coast did represent a neighborhood of curiosity,” the plaintiffs’ proposed maps “would nonetheless be fairly configured as a result of they joined collectively a special neighborhood of curiosity known as the Black Belt.”

None of those particulars are particularly essential. In any given state, there will likely be many communities of curiosity. And any legitimate map is prone to cut up up a minimum of a few of them. The Court docket’s level in its June opinion was that holding the Gulf Coast area collectively was not a purpose of such transcendent significance that it might justify drawing racially gerrymandered districts — particularly when the state’s authentic maps cut up up different communities of curiosity, such because the Black Belt.

Within the wake of the June Milligan choice, the state drew a brand new map that does divide the Black Belt into fewer districts, however that additionally dilutes Black voters’ energy by gerrymandering the state in different methods. And now it claims that its new maps have to be upheld as a result of they “unif[y] the Black Belt higher than any of Plaintiffs’ proffered options.”

Maybe they do. However who cares? The Supreme Court docket didn’t rule in its June choice that Alabama should draw new maps that divide the Black Belt into fewer districts. It dominated that the state should draw new maps that embody a second district the place Black voters might elect their consultant of selection.

Alabama barely even mentions its strongest potential argument

One other difficult-to-explain function of Alabama’s newest Court docket submitting is that it’s 40 pages lengthy, but it devotes simply a kind of pages to an argument that Kavanaugh particularly stated he would think about if a state raised it in protection of a legislative map that violates the Voting Rights Act.

Kavanaugh stated on the finish of his Milligan concurring opinion that the particular provision of the Voting Rights Act that invalidates Alabama’s gerrymandered maps “can’t lengthen indefinitely into the longer term.” This argument seems to trace 5 Republican justices’ reasoning in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), which neutralized a special provision of the Voting Rights Act as a result of they claimed that “the circumstances that initially justified” that provision “now not characterize voting within the lined jurisdictions.”

There are myriad variations, nonetheless, between Part 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the availability at difficulty in Milligan, and Part 5 of the regulation, which was at difficulty in Shelby County.

Part 5 required states with a historical past of racist election practices to “preclear” any new election-related legal guidelines with federal officers. The bulk opinion in Shelby County characterised this provision as “extraordinary measures to deal with a rare downside,” and it pointed to two components that marked it as extraordinary: 1) It handled some states otherwise than others, and a couple of) it prevented many state legal guidelines from ever going into impact till they have been screened by federal officers.

Neither of those components exist in Milligan — or in another lawsuit introduced below Part 2, which applies in all 50 states, and which permits voting rights plaintiffs to sue to dam state election legal guidelines after they’ve gone into impact.

In any occasion, Alabama’s temporary dialogue of Kavanaugh’s suggestion that Part 2 has a sundown date doesn’t deal with any of those discrepancies between Milligan and Shelby County. Nor does it suggest a selected sundown date or clarify why “the circumstances that initially justified” a federal ban on racial gerrymandering now not exist — all arguments that may give Kavanaugh room to stroll away from his earlier vote, if Alabama bothered to make them.

Certainly, Alabama devotes so little time to this argument that it barely makes an argument in any respect. To the extent that it tries, it principally likens requiring the state to attract a second Black district to “affirmative motion,” after which concludes that “simply as this Court docket held that ‘race-based’ affirmative motion in schooling ‘in some unspecified time in the future’ needed to ‘finish,’ the identical precept applies to affirmative motion in districting.”

Will that be sufficient to influence Kavanaugh? Who is aware of? Justice Kavanaugh is a staunch conservative who sometimes votes along with his fellow Republicans in voting rights instances, so perhaps Alabama’s bare-bones argument will likely be sufficient for him.

However Alabama provides him valuable little to work with, particularly in a case the place the Court docket already dominated in opposition to the state as soon as.