Alabama all out of tries to rig the district map

The Supreme Court refused to reinstate Alabama’s Republican-drawn congressional map, enabling a court-appointed official to draw the lines for the 2024 election instead.

The justices in June struck down Alabama’s previous map for likely diluting the power of Black voters, and the current dispute concerned a new version that still did not add a second majority-Black district.

[...]

Rather than using the Republican-drawn lines for the 2024 election cycle, the order paves the way for an independent expert appointed by a panel of federal judges to design the boundaries instead.

That court-appointed expert is set to submit the final map in the coming days.

  The Hill

Let us hear no more of this bullshit. The court already allowed a rigged map for the 2022 elections.

When Alabama brought its redistricting fight to the high court the first time, the justices ruled 5-4 in February 2022 to temporarily revive the state’s map, allowing it to be used for that year’s midterms.

Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who voted to revive the map, at the time cited a legal doctrine that federal courts should not intervene to alter state election rules in the lead-up to an election.

But in the final decision months later, Kavanaugh went the other way, giving Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three liberals a majority to toss Alabama’s map for likely violating the Voting Rights Act.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 10:41 am:

APR has now identified connections between Alabama officials who led the 2023 redistricting process — which disregarded the U.S. Supreme Court’s order — with far-right power broker Leonard Leo’s dark money network, described this past week by Politico as “a billion-dollar force that has helped remake the judiciary and overturn longstanding legal precedents on abortion, affirmative action and many other issues.”

APR’s reporting shows the extent to which Alabama’s calculation to defy the Supreme Court was made not simply by state legislators in Alabama but has been driven by nationally connected political operatives at the center of the well-documented right-wing effort to reshape the composition and jurisprudence of the Supreme Court and to overturn the remaining key protections established by the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

[...]

[F]ormer President Donald Trump famously stated that Leo’s Federalist Society had “picked” his judges, and all six Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices “were seated with major help from Leonard Leo,” who has come to be known as the “hidden architect of the Supreme Court.” With few exceptions, the justices Leo has ushered to the bench have reliably voted to permit the partisan gerrymanders and strict restrictions on voting access that have proliferated in recent years from red-state legislatures, which themselves work in tandem with — and sometimes under the direction of — Leo’s dark money groups.

  Alabama Political Reporter