Republicans who dominate elective office in Alabama have been resistant to creating a second district with a Democratic-leaning Black majority that could send another Democrat to Congress. “You’re asking us essentially to cut back substantially on our 40 years of precedent and to make this, too, extremely difficult to prevail on, so what’s left?” Kagan said to LaCour. “Now, in recent years, the statute has fared not well in this court,” she said.

Justice Elena Kagan referred to the Voting Rights Act as not only “an important statute” but “one of the great achievements of American democracy” while acknowledging that recent Supreme Court cases have cut back on the law. The Voting Rights Act “by its plain text is doing that same thing.”

Jackson, the court’s first Black female justice who was hearing her second day of arguments, disagreed with arguments made by Alabama’s lawyer, Edmund LaCour Jr., that redistricting has to be done without regard to race.Ĭonstitutional amendments adopted after the Civil War were intended to give a “constitutional foundation for a piece of legislation that was designed to make people who had less opportunity and less rights equal to white citizens,” Jackson said. Their questions suggested they may be open to a more narrow win for Alabama than the broadest outcome the state is asking for, which might even allow states to dismantle existing districts where racial minorities make up more than half the voters.Įven the state's “least far-reaching argument,” as Alito put it, would result in many fewer districts drawn to give racial minorities the opportunity to elect their candidates of choice, the court's three liberal justices said. The outcome appears to rest with Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh. In practice, Alito said, “will not the plaintiffs always run the table?”

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