Alabama’s New Congressional Map Fits the Justices’ Ruling

The legal left recently took a break from assailing the Supreme Court’s integrity to defend its honor. After the high court invalidated Alabama’s congressional map, lawmakers responded by drawing a new one that doesn’t include two majority-black districts, but instead reduces the black majority in one district a few points and expands the minority in another to about 40%. The media talking point is that the state is “defying” the justices.

This charge is a case of gaslighting. It is also a remarkable act of projection, because the challengers to Alabama’s new map are asking a federal district court to defy the justices by ordering racially proportionate redistricting, which the Supreme Court rejected.

Allen v. Milligan, which the high court decided June 8, wasn’t a complete triumph for bright-line rules in redistricting, but it did bring clarity to a notoriously muddled area of law. A key problem here is that the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause frowns on treating people differently based on race—see Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—while Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act sometimes requires consideration of race, specifically to enable minority voters the ability to elect “candidates of their choice.” These competing requirements often put states in a position where they risk being sued for using race both too much and not enough, often at the same time.

Importantly, everyone agrees that there is no Section 2 violation merely because a districting map doesn’t reflect the state’s racial demographics. Section 2 would violate the Constitution if applied that way, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh reinforced in his concurring opinion. The majority, in an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, agreed with Alabama that Section 2 “never require[s] adoption of districts that violate traditional redistricting principles.”

The chief justice further explained that this “exacting” principle requires Section 2 plaintiffs to show that the map they are challenging has produced discriminatory effects “on account of race” rather than on account of legitimate principles like drawing compact districts and keeping together “communities of interest.” To do this, they must produce an alternative map that includes an additional majority-minority district while also following the traditional principles at least as well as the challenged map does.

As the court explained, “deviation from” such a map “shows it is possible that the State’s map has a disparate effect on account of race” (emphasis in original). But a state doesn’t have to split more county lines or racially gerrymander cities, for instance, even if declining to do so makes it harder for candidates favored by minorities to win.

The plaintiffs in Allen convinced the justices that their challenge to Alabama’s previous map was likely to succeed because they produced an alternative map that the court found to match that map on traditional principles while increasing black representation. When the state argued that the alternative map broke up the Gulf Coast region, the plaintiffs responded that they instead kept together a different community, known as the Black Belt. The “heart of their case” was that the Legislature’s original map discriminated by prioritizing majority-white Gulf counties while breaking up the majority-black counties in the Black Belt. The Supreme Court accepted that argument, finding that because both maps were equivalent on traditional principles, the challengers had met their burden in raising Section 2 suspicions.

The Legislature went back to the drawing board with that guidance. Its new map answers the plaintiffs’ call to unite the Black Belt but also keeps the Gulf region together. It is thus superior to both of the dueling maps the Supreme Court considered, each of which broke up one community of interest. By respecting neutral principles, the new map produces districts that are fairer, more sensible and more competitive than they’ve been in decades. That satisfies both the Voting Rights Act and Constitution, even if it doesn’t satisfy Democrats.

The challengers’ only retort, amplified by media commentary, is to demand racial spoils in redistricting. Unlike in 2021, and despite the Supreme Court’s guidance, they no longer try to show that there are alternatives to the 2023 map that match it on traditional principles while creating an additional majority-minority district. Instead, they demand precisely what the court made clear Section 2 “never requires”—“adoption of districts that violate redistricting principles.”

In short, contrary to the media’s prevailing narrative, it is those who oppose the Alabama Legislature’s new maps who are defying the Supreme Court.

Mr. Shapiro is director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and author of “Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court.” He writes the Shapiro’s Gavel Substack newsletter.